on loving zombies a personal essay on zombies, addiction, and pop culture when i was a freshman in high school, i joined the drama club. it was 2007. i had one friend, olivia, and she was a year older than me, and joined the drama club herself the year before, and dragged me in with her when i got to high school. now, in 2007 i was painfully shy, painfully awkward, and, most importantly, painfully lonely. drama was absolutely not the kind of thing i expected to get involved in, but she was my only friend, and also, i was in the closet and in denial about it and kind of in love with her, so when olivia said ‘jump, pookie!’ (that was her nickname for me) well, i jumped. plus, things at home were getting dicey, and let me tell you, high school theatre eats up a LOT of time. at 14, or at 27 for that matter, i would much rather have listened to our director scream about the pronunciation of newark than sit at home alone with my father. before i joined the drama club i had little to no interest in horror movies, monster movies, or anything like that. you would have been exceedingly hard-pressed to get 2007-2008 me to watch a movie about murder, or zombies, or monsters, or anything like that. as a kid, i was an exceedingly sensitive child, and considered the likes of ‘the lion king’ to be ‘too scary’ for me. newly immersed in the drama club, i got signed up to work my high school’s annual haunted house. if you ever walked into like, the nerd merch portion of a big bookstore between 2005 and 2010, chances are, you saw a LOT of zombies. and theatre kids, i discovered, were very into zombies. they did the makeup. they went to zombie runs. they held scary movie parties. i played along, and i got pretty into horror, as a genre, but while the make-up was fun, i wasn’t ever fussed about zombies. what was there to be afraid of, i thought. the zombie makes no biological sense, as it has no way to digest all the flesh and brains it eats. it would eat and eat and eat, until it either exploded or could no longer move, like a sitcom father at the thanksgiving dinner table. (i am much more fun at parties now than when i was 15, i promise.) so what was there to be afraid of? what was the terror of the zombie genre if we assume the zombie is a biological impossibility? the zombie, as americans know it today, was largely established by george romero’s two classic films, the night of the living dead, and the dawn of the living dead. coming out in the sixties and seventies, these films took zombies from appropriated haitian ritual figures to household names in the world of politically inspired american horror. (the night of the living dead is best known for having a black male protagonist who survives until the very end of the film. if you have ever seen a horror movie, you are probably aware of the trope where the black guy dies first. the dawn of the living dead shows a siege of mindless drone zombies on a shopping mall, and i don’t think you could come up with a more on the nose metaphor for capitalism if you tried.) it’s changed since then, of course, and it was a lot of things between its introduction to the american consciousness and its place today as the default apocalypse scenario. largely, i attribute this lack of interest in zombie media to my general lack of interest in apocalypse media, and ever since romero introduced the idea of hordes of zombies, those genres have been pretty much one in the same. say ‘zombie’ these days, and you think ‘zombie apocalypse’. you know the stories. world war z. the walking dead. even shawn of the dead, while an obvious parody, features a world ending zombie contagion. maybe now we’ve branched out a little, with genre pieces like warm bodies (a romance), or pride and prejudice and zombies (exactly what it sounds like), but for me, the idea of zombie media is still part and parcel of the apocalypse craze. apocalypse media has never really interested me, and i could never articulate why until i took a class on apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, and the teacher pointed something out. the appeal of apocalypse fiction, of dystopian fiction, of fiction about an outbreak bringing the world to its knees, is that the reader envisions themselves as the heart of the situation. we see ourselves as those sole survivors, the people who beat the odds to come up on top of monsters and mass destruction. so, if you can’t see yourself in that position, the whole genre kind of loses its appeal. and let’s be honest, in an apocalypse scenario, i’m screwed. i’m not saying that to be mean to myself, i’m saying it because it’s true. i have depression, anxiety, probably autism and/or adhd, i’m physically disabled, i’m dependent on numerous medications, i’m fat, and i don’t do well under pressure. i am not the rugged individualist daryl dixon rick grimes redneck that saves the day. i’m the collateral damage in the initial outbreak. i’m the dead body in an abandoned pharmacy. when i do enjoy zombie media, it tends to be the more tongue in cheek self referential kind, like the movies zombieland, or cabin in the woods, or the incredibly tasteful zombie strippers. these are all movies that are as much about how we as americans see zombies and “zombie culture” as they are about, well, flesh-eating monsters. however, this dislike has never stopped me from obsessively watching zombie media and other horror movies, the same way my medical trauma has never stopped me from having a strange preoccupation with medical mystery dramas. reasons like these are pretty much why i dropped out of watching the walking dead, too. i watched it for a little while, mostly because my mom did, and we were frequently in the living room together, but the only character i cared about was beth greene, whom my mother could not stand, and who goes missing in season 4 and is almost immediately killed after she is found again. my mom hated beth greene because objectively she did not belong in this gritty zombie apocalypse story, and that is precisely why i liked her so much. she was the only character who made any sense to me. at the beginning of the show, beth is recovering from a suicide attempt after the loss of her mother. despite this, and despite her lack of traditional survival skills, she is important to the group because she helps care for judith (the protagonist's infant daughter), and because she is the emotional and optimistic core of the group. beth greene wanted to die and woke up anyway. beth greene saw her whole world fall to pieces, and found a way to keep a smile on her face and a song in her voice. but my mom, and large swaths of the fandom, hated her. we often hate female characters in violent situations who do not give up the traits we see as ‘soft’ and ‘feminine’, instead wishing they would ‘grow a pair’ and ‘stop whining’, or whatever it is the obnoxious lonely white men are saying on the internet these days. but beth green wore pastels and fell in love and played the piano and sang songs, even with the world crumbling around her and her home destroyed and her faith shattered. “i still sing,” beth greene says “i sing anyway” she tells us, staring at a piece of artwork in the hospital that will become her funeral pyre, after she’s killed for finally showing the nerve people have been begging for her to have since season 2. this is, not coincidentally, when i give up on the show as a whole and completely stop caring. (another way in which beth greene shows what i hate about zombie media is in how she died and someone else didn’t die. when beth green’s temple gets grazed by a bullet, she’s dead in an instant, but when carl grimes, son of the protagonist rick grimes, gets shot in the eye socket, he lives to kill zombies another day. apocolypse and horror media love few things as much as they love to kill women and minorities who do not suit their particular power fantasy) but i’m realizing now, in the heart of this pandemic, as we talk about apocalypse stories and zombie stories and contagion stories, that the other reason i don’t like zombie media is i don’t think any of it has ever truly tapped into what i see as the true existential terror of the living dead. the original myth gets closest to what unnerves me about the concept. the “zombie” originated as the zombi amongst the west african slave populations living in haiti. an aspect of the closed belief system of voodoo, a zombi was a person who died of unnatural or suspicious cause, causing them to linger in their graves and be vulnerable to witch doctors, who would use the reanimated dead for their own purposes. nowadays, this concept more closely resembles fantasy necromancy than anything in the actual genre of zombie films. but american zombies are largely just metaphors for other things. fear of the other, race relationships, capitalist greed, nuclear power, the red scare. the zombie is just a mask our greatest fear of the decade happens to be wearing because it is such an easy metaphor to use. the zombie is a mindless horde wearing a human face, representing whatever we currently think is going bump in the night. the ultimate terror of the zombie, present in its earliest incarnations and lost in the current pop cultural flood, is the fact that it looks human. not only does it look human, but it might even look like someone who loves you. this isn’t to say zombie media never deals with this aspect of zombies. every story with a zombie in it has a plotline where someone angsts over a zombie wearing the mother or father or child or lover’s face. but nothing ever focuses on it, nothing ever gets to the heart of the matter. technically speaking, the show supernatural does not contain any true zombies, but the series deals heavily with demonic possession in a way that, thematically, is pretty similar to zombies. a slavering beast wearing a human face. often, the demon wearing the human as a fancy suit knows their thoughts and memories, and can taunt their loved ones, who know that underneath the monster, their mom, or dad, or spouse, or child or friend is trapped and struggling. when i decided to write about zombies, a woman on supernatural was sobbing hysterically as a demon wearing her husband’s dead body called her name in his voice, over and over. she knows that he is dead, she watched him drink the drain cleaner that killed him. but the others still have to stop her from letting in the monster with her husband’s voice. when i was young, my dad and i were very close. my mom says when i was first born, all i wanted was my dad. i would nurse on his fingers, completely unaware this wasn’t accomplishing anything. i was, after all, mere hours old. as i grew into less of an infant and more of a human being, my dad and i remained close. he helped me practice for softball and taekwondo. he let me put barettes in his hair, and makeup on his face. (my mother, the construction worker and born and raised 60s/70s hippie had little patience for this sort of thing, and was grateful my father indulged me, for all three of our sakes.) we played doctor, and i would declare him with child, due to a condition i invented called ‘women’s pregnancy disease’. we went on long walks with the dog on our land lady’s property, looking for blackberries, and fossils, and native american arrowheads, and cool rocks. he built me popsicle stick houses, and played legos with me for hours. he would lay on the living room floor, shirt off, face in a pillow, and let me draw shape after shape and squiggle after squiggle on his back in washable marker. when i was little, i called fireworks booms. every fourth of july, i was excited to go see the booms with my mom and dad. while we were never an especially patriotic family, we did have extensive fourth of july traditions. blankets, popcorn, and hot chocolate. we would load everything up in one of the two family cars, usually my dad’s, unless something was busted. we’d drive down to the open field in our small town, and lay out on the blankets with our snacks and drinks, as close to the fireworks as we could safely be. one year, when i was very young, barely old enough to remember, a spark from the fireworks caught on the grass, starting a small fire. my dad went to help the local firefighters. he was like that, back then. he liked to help, even if it wasn’t the best idea, like the time he tried to catch a falling screwdriver with his bare hands. it took ages for him to come back. it was cold, and late, and loud, and i was scared, and i wanted my dad, and i wanted to go home. he had the keys to the car, so i stood with my mom, or maybe i was small enough she held me. when he finally got back, i clung to him. the next few years, i insisted we watch the booms with all three of us safe inside the car. so we did. he was a different person, eventually. in zombie media, when the character angsts over killing their living dead loved one, they always end up being able to do it. they always end up being able to separate the past from the present, to say ‘this monster is not the person i once loved’, and they take care of business. i have never thought i would be very good at taking care of business. i am too soft, too gentle, too empathetic. if my life were a rugged apocalypse show, i would be the beth greene character no one in the audience knows what to do with. i cry when my neighbors fight, even if they are perfect strangers. i used to wander the playground at school after the rain let up, and return stranded worms to the wet earth, because i felt bad for them. when i am on the phone with my father, and he is dying, i tell him i love him, even though i am not sure if i actually mean it. this is all to say that i don’t think i could bring myself to shoot a monster wearing the skin of a person i love. i could not behead a zombie with my best friend’s face. i could not shoot the beloved family dog if it caught rabies. it took me years of struggling to give up on my father, and i don’t know if i ever really did, in fact, give up. if i’d really given up, i don’t think it would have hurt when he died. a friend of mine wrote a poem once, about the walking dead. about how she could never give up on the show, because she could never give up on the idea of a second chance to say goodbye to a dead loved one. her mom died unexpectedly when she was 13. when my father died unexpectedly, i was 21, and we hadn’t spoken in nearly two years. and i guess that’s the difference between losing a parent loved and young, and losing a parent slowly to addiction. my father did not crawl from the grave a slavering monster. i watched him turn before my eyes. i watched him become a different person. or at least that’s what i told myself. i told myself he was a different person, because the person i had known and loved as a child would not do the things he did, and i had no other way to reconcile that. i did not lose my father, and then have him come back as a monster, as much as i told myself that was what had happened. i watched him change, every day, every week, every month, every year. i watched as his cheeks and eyes sunk in, and as his flesh began to grey and slide off his bones, and as he stopped speaking and started groaning. i watched my father turn into a monster, but i could not murder my dad, so i simply told myself that he was dead. that this zombie was not the corpse it had reanimated, but a different beast entirely. and that, to me, is the heart of the zombie. this is what we’re really afraid of. more than the unknown, more than our implicit racial biases, more than the evils of capitalism, more than the people we have sublimated for years. more than any of that, we fear the transformation of those we love into something awful, something inhuman, something more monster than man. this fear is everywhere in modern western fantasy. the zombie. the vampire. the werewolf. the shape shifter. the evil ghost. doppelgangers. evil twins. clones. demonic possession. we fear nothing more than we fear being turned on by our loved ones. the most interesting modern interpretation of the zombies is, in my opinion, the 2016 film pride and prejudice and zombies. i have no idea if the book the film is based on portrays zombies the same way, because i haven’t read it, but i did see the film in theatres with my partner on valentines day, and we liked it enough to buy it on dvd. in pride and prejudice and zombies, while being a zombie is a disease, being a monster is a choice. the dashing but secretly evil george wickham takes lizzie bennet to a church partway through the film, and the church is full of zombies. there is a service in progress, and every pew is lined with the undead, but they are speaking, and partaking in communion, and listening to the priest. all of them have been bitten, infected, but not one of them has become a true monster, because none of them has eaten a human brain. by subsisting on pig’s blood, the zombies could remain sentient. they could keep themselves from hurting others. (this was not wickham’s plan, but that isn’t exactly relevant here. besides, anyone who knows anything about pride and prejudice knows wickham is, always, a bastard.) the bite, an action they have no control over, did not make those people monsters. their actions did. addiction did not make my father a monster. his actions did. my father was not a monster because he drank, or because he smoked weed, or because he had a horrible childhood. my father was a monster because of what he did. my father was a monster because i handed him my heart, and he took a bite.