Zombie apocalypse

For other uses, see Zombie apocalypse (disambiguation).

A zombie apocalypse is a particular hypothetical scenario of apocalyptic theory that customarily has a science fiction/horror rationale. In a zombie apocalypse, a widespread rise of zombies hostile to human life engages in a general assault on civilization. In some mythologies, victims of zombies may become zombies themselves if they are bitten by zombies; in others, everyone who dies, whatever the cause, becomes one of the undead. In either scenario, this causes the outbreak to become an exponentially growing crisis: the spreading "zombie plague" swamps normal military and law enforcement organizations, leading to the panicked collapse of civilian society until only isolated pockets of survivors remain, scavenging for food and supplies in a world reduced to a pre-industrial hostile wilderness. The day that the zombie apocalypse begins is sometimes known, by analogy with military operations such as D-Day, as Z-Day.

History

The founding work of the genre was Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (1954), which featured a lone survivor named Robert Neville waging a war against a human population transformed into vampires. George A. Romero borrowed the idea for his apocalyptic feature Night of the Living Dead (1968) but substituted vampires with shuffling zombies.

Genre tropes

There are several common story elements that create a zombie apocalypse:

1. Zombies, whatever form they take, are unprecedented in the setting of the story; the event that created them is unknown or has never happened before and it is not generally known how to effectively suppress them. The zombies cannot be controlled easily with available technologies.
2. Initial contacts with zombies are extremely traumatic, causing shock, panic, disbelief and possibly denial, hampering survivors' ability to deal with hostile encounters.
3. The response of authorities to the threat is slower than its rate of growth, giving the zombie plague time to expand beyond containment. This results in the collapse of the given society. Zombies take full control while small groups of the living must fight for their survival.

The stories usually follow a single group of survivors, caught up in the sudden rush of the crisis. The narrative generally progresses from the onset of the zombie plague, then initial attempts to seek the aid of authorities, the failure of those authorities, through to the sudden catastrophic collapse of all large-scale organization and the characters' subsequent attempts to survive on their own. Such stories are often squarely focused on the way their characters react to such an extreme catastrophe, and how their personalities are changed by the stress, often acting on more primal motivations (fear, self-preservation) than they would display in normal life.

Generally the zombies in these situations are the slow, lumbering and unintelligent kind first made popular in the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Recent films, however, have featured zombies that are more agile, vicious, intelligent, and stronger than the traditional zombie. In many cases of "fast" zombies, creators use humans infected with a pathogen (as in 28 Days Later, Zombieland and Left 4 Dead) instead of re-animated corpses to logically counter the "slow death walk" of Romero's zombies.

Reality

According to a 2009 Carleton University and University of Ottawa epidemiological analysis, an outbreak of even Living Dead's slow zombies "is likely to lead to the collapse of civilization, unless it is dealt with quickly."

While an outbreak of a recently unknown lethal pathogen could lead to serious world wide political, economic and social repercussions, there is a school of thought that even a large outbreak could be easily controlled. These theories point to how quickly the 2009 out break of H1N1 influenza was identified and contained by organizations like the United States' Centers for Disease Control and the United Nations' World Health Organization. The theory is that within days of the initial outbreak, government safety measures would be put in place to prevent the general populace from being affected.

Subtext

zombies! it will fu**ing happen

Fandom

Thanks to large number of films and video games, the idea of a zombie apocalypse has entered the mainstream and there have been efforts by many fans to prepare for a hypothetical future zombie apocalypse. Efforts include creating weapons, selling posters to inform people on how to survive a zombie outbreak, and creating websites "documenting" zombie attacks.

Some notable individuals have discussed what they would do in a zombie apocalypse. Mixed martial artist Nick Denis said "I plan on getting, one, an aluminum bat [and], two, a rope ladder, so if I live in the second level of an apartment, that’d be my exit, in and out the window. And then I’d like to get chainmail. No zombie can bite through that. That’d be a good start for my bag." Adam Cayton-Holland said he tried to practice firing a gun: "in order to prove my worth to the denizens of whatever abandoned hovel I will inevitably hole up in during the zombie attack, I should learn how to fire me a flintlock."

In an interview with Ain't it Cool News, The Zombie Survival Guide author Max Brooks commented on the fans of zombie apocalypses: "I don't know what's scarier, the fact that zombies could rise or the fact there are actually people out there that can't wait for it to happen. So they can just start loading up with guns and get on their motorcycles..." Brooks also compared the interest in surviving a zombie apocalypse to people preparing for a Soviet invasion of America in the 1980s after the film Red Dawn was released.

Examples

Films

• Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2008) and Survival of the Dead (2010) by George Romero. A remake of the original Dawn of the Dead was made in 2004, directed by Zack Snyder, along with a Night of the Living Dead (1990)
• Zombi 2 (1979), starts with a small group of zombies, which expands to engulf a city.
• 28 Days Later (2002), and its sequel 28 Weeks Later (2007), in which a man-made "rage" virus is unleashed in Britain, and then continental Europe.
• Resident Evil series
• The Zombie Diaries (2006), in which a virus creates a plague of zombies.
• Fido (2006), a zombie comedy set in the 1950s, where humanity is saved from a zombie apocalypse by a corporation who turns zombies into personal servants.
• Planet Terror (2007), a biochemical agent causes a worldwide zombie infection.
• Colin (UK, 2008), at the onset of an apparent zombie apocalypse, Colin is apparently bitten and is turned into a zombie, yet his point of view implies residual human memories of the recent past.
• Dance of the Dead (2008), An American zombie comedy surrounding a zombie attack on the night of a highschool prom.
• Zombieland (2009), a comedy where America is ravaged by a zombie plague, but a small group attempts to survive while traveling across country to an amusement park in California.

Comics

• The Deadworld comic series by Stuart Kerr and Ralph Griffith, which began in 1987.
• The comic series The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman, beginning in 2003, chronicles the story of survivors in a world overrun by zombies.
• The 2005 comic series Marvel Zombies and its sequels: Marvel Zombies: Dead Days, Marvel Zombies vs. The Army of Darkness, Marvel Zombies 2, Marvel Zombies 3.
• The manga series Highschool of the Dead, beginning in 2006, features a group of Japanese high school students caught in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.
• The 2008 webcomic The Black Cherry Bombshells by Johnny Zito and Tony Trov and illustrated by Sacha Borisich, where all the men in the world are turned into zombies.
• The Flash cartoon series Xombie produced by James Farr, which tells the story of a little girl named Zoe, who washes ashore near what is left of Washington D.C. nine years after a zombie plague has wiped out most life on Earth and replaced it with bloodthirsty reanimated versions of the planet's previous inhabitants. She is saved from a swarm of zombies by Dirge, a "variant", a zombie who has retained their conscious mind and the ability to think like a human.

Literature

Author	Title	Year(s) Published	Description	Source(s)
David Wellington	Monster Island, Monster Nation, and Monster Planet	2004-2005
Max Brooks	World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War	2006	Novel details humanity's efforts to defeat a worldwide zombie apocalypse.
Stephen King	Cell	2006	Novel features people being made into zombies through a cell phone signal that "pulses" them into zombies with supernatural powers.
Carrie Ryan	Forest of Hands and Teeth	2009	Set over 100 years after the zombie apocalypse in an isolated village surrounded by a forest full of zombies.
Seth Grahame-Smith	Pride and Prejudice and Zombies	2009	Novel combines Jane Austen's classic 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice with elements of modern zombie fiction.
Josh Hilden, Joshua Sanford and Kevin Siembeida	Dead Reign	2009	RPG book features survival and the remnants of civilization immediately following the transformation of over 80% of the global population following a mysterious event called The Wave

Television

• Masters of Horror, episode "Dance of the Dead" (2005), directed by Tobe Hooper, features a manmade virus causing a zombie outbreak after World War III.
• Dead Set (2008) involves a zombie outbreak and the real television show Big Brother UK.
• The Walking Dead (TV series), based on the comic book series of the same name.
• Highschool of the Dead (TV series), an anime based on the manga series of the same name.

Video games

• Zombie Panic features a human and a player-controlled zombie team fighting against each other in a zombie apocalypse.
• Left 4 Dead, and its sequel Left 4 Dead 2, a co-operative horror, first-person shooter where a rabies-like pathogen infects humanity.
• Zombie Apocalypse, released as a downloadable title for the Playstation Network and Xbox Live Arcade is a shoot 'em up title. The player takes control of four survivors and may fight against hordes of mutated zombies as a team, rescuing other survivors and investigating the cause of the infection.
• OneChanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad where two sisters fight against a zombie infested Tokyo.

Music

• The zombie parody of The Beatles, the Zombeatles, began in 2006 with the song Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead and are set in a world where the zombies have eaten all the remaining humans.
• Technical death metal band Brain Drill's 2008 album Apocalyptic Feasting has cover art and songs ("Consumed by the Dead" and the title track) depicting a zombie apocalypse.
• All music, lyrics and imagery surrounding metal/hardcore band Zombie Apocalypse revolve around the idea of a zombie apocalypse.
• The 2008 Metallica music video for the song All Nightmare Long features the Soviet Union using a spore found after the Tunguska event on the United States to covertly create an army of zombies, and then openly destroy all of them, in order to take over the US.
• Metalcore band The Devil Wears Prada will release their Zombie EP on August 24, 2010. The five song EP is about an impending zombie apocalypse derived from lead singer Mike Hranica's strong interest in the subject.
• Savage Circus's song Empire is about lone survivor of a zombie apocalypse

Theatre

• How To Survive A Zombie Apocalypse - A Seminar that premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2009 that teaches all the necessary skills to survive a zombie apocalypse.
• Zombie High School - An original a cappella musical, part of the 2010 Minnesota Fringe Festival.

See also

• List of zombie films
• List of zombie novels
• List of zombie video games
• Xombie, Flash cartoons by James Farr
• Zombie
• Zombie Squad, a non-profit charitable organization that uses an upcoming zombie apocalypse as its shtick
• Zombies in popular culture

External links

• "Zombie Movies from Hell". The Gothic Lilith eZine. Retrieved 2007-04-27.
• 5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen by David Wong, TE Sloth
• Zombie Apocalypse Movies
• Military Developing Blood Farming Machine, Zombie Apocalypse Coming Soon by Jesus Diaz on Gizmodo
• 10 games to prepare for the zombie apocalypse by Conrad Zimmerman
• The zombie boom of 2003 by Racer Django