So Zombies Have Changed . . .

And so have I, and frankly, we're now a bit close for comfort.

Image description: A poster for THE LAST OF US series, with an adult man in the foreground, wearing a backpack, and a young woman ahead of him, also with a backpack. Both are looking back at us. Before them is a ruined city, and above their heads are the bottoms of the words OF US.

I don’t know when zombies started changing from lovable, shuffling undead types to something else, but I am increasingly alarmed. I attribute this to my disability, but also to my insistence on close-reading everything. Zombies have changed, and so have I. And honestly, I think it has come to a weird and fascinating head with The Last of Us.

So strap in for some spoilers and annoyance and half-thought-through . . . thoughts. Four things, really. Because I think I’m on to something, and it’s complicated.

Thing the First: A Very Brief and Incomplete Theory

I think something interesting is happening in the second season of The Last of Us, even though the first season has a(n inadvertently?) fucked-up message, especially in this MAHA moment, where disabled folks like me are increasingly viewed with fear and contempt. And vaccine skepticism. But Season Two. Something is afoot.

So a tiny bit of horror-geek background, if you don’t mind. There are lots of ways of thinking about monsters but one general binary is vampires vs. zombies. Vampire stories are usually worried about contagion of some sort—Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula was so obviously about AIDS and the forbidden love that will kill you. Interview with a Vampire was all about sexual liberation and decoupling sex and reproduction (wasn’t it? I mean, with pretty Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt?). Twilight, Vampire Diaries—come be like us (or I’ll make you like us) and pervert the natural order! Even Stoker’s original novel was a warning about how feminism was going to poison our women, or maybe how the east would infect the west with its superstitions, or possibly how the poisoned ground of the Irish famine might migrate to other countries. End result in any case? Reproduction is curbed, though seduction is not. Not for nothing, Stoker’s Dracula had hairy palms.

Zombies, on the other hand, are about invasion. Hordes of previously dead people shambling back to life and taking over a town or country. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is the seminal film, a 1968 warning about kids and Black people fighting their parents (or grandparents, you know, the dead previous generation) and/or the cops, who might as well be zombies. But always, the setup was that the dead inexplicably come back to life and must be stopped before they kill us all/destroy our way of life. This continues through Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead; The Walking Dead has folks being attacked and killed, before coming back to life. Even in Jim Jsrmusch’s (not very good) The Dead Don’t Die, the zombies are risen because the earth is off its axis (or something, I wasn’t really paying attention). The main point is: You have to be dead first to become a zombie. Even if just for a few minutes.

So the opposition has been: Vampires = contagious seducers, zombies (already dead!) = invading hordes. And this maps (kind of) onto cultural moments: the 19th-century New Woman = vampires; Civil Rights protests = zombies; LGBTQ visibility and AIDS activists = vampires; Communism and the Cold War = zombies.

Thing the Second: The Evolution

Okay, so this is where we start, right? (And sure I might get argued with by horror-movie aficianadoes, but don’t bother because I am making a point!) In the last 30 years or so, something has happened to zombies, and it’s picking up speed in this cultural MAHA moment. Zombie stories have evolved into contagion stories. They are no longer the walking dead, brought back to a hideous form of life after rotting in the ground. No, now you catch zombie-ism, whether it’s the Rage of 28 Days Later and 28 Years Later, or the fungal infection of The Last of Us. (It strikes me as important that Danny Boyle, when asked about his 28 movies, very specifically does not call his monsters “zombies,” but “infected people.”)

Another aside, because that’s what I do. The novella, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, on which at least three movies are very poorly based, has a sort of zombie thing. But Matheson is pretty clear that the air-borne virus/bacteria (he’s not big on the science) turns you into a vampire. Afraid of the sun and all that. And his conclusion is wild, especially if all you know is the gung-ho jingoistic Will Smith vehicle or (reaching way back), Charlton Heston in Omega Man. We might return to this later, too, but meanwhile, read I Am Legend! It’s so good. Your mind will be blown.

Where was I? Oh right. So what we all call “zombie” movies/video games/apocalypses have morphed in recent decades from invasion into contagion stories, where someone gets infected and then infects others. The infected really don’t do anything else—most importantly, they don’t die first. And the only way to stop the cycle of deadly-infection-creating-scary-infected-people is to thus kill the infected people.

And here, as someone infected with a disease that other people find frightening, I have to pause.

It’s one thing to normalize killing me if I am already dead and walking around because some voodoo priest or astronomical anomaly has disrupted the universe. I mean, that’s a good metaphor right? Here is this outside force threatening us all, and it manifests as us vs. them, with all of us collectively in danger.It is another thing entirely to normalize killing live people (ahem, me) who are infected with a disease that scares you, or that makes them look scary to you and which, if you get close enough to them, you might catch. Suddenly it’s you vs. me, and only one of us has the power of the state behind them. (Hint: Not me.) Collectivism is out the window, and for disabled folks, that’s a problem.

And yes, yes, OBVIOUSLY MS is not the Rage, or the fungal infection, but these are theatrical exaggerations of increasingly normalized realities. Because let’s say Rage-infecteees scare you onscreen. Who’s to say that you won’t also be just a bit creeped out by my hunched and staggering body, which incidentally, just SUDDENLY BECAME SICK FOR NO REASON. Especially after a pandemic shut the world down for a year, and the takeaway for most people was, Not fair! Only certain kinds of people were really at risk in the first place (i.e. immunocompromised, elderly, sick). And if you’re a little nervous, about all this happening again, maybe you’ll be more open to the idea that those folks are not such a terrible sacrifice, in the scheme of things. Or that my quality of life must be shit anyway, and perhaps it’s more humane to isolate me or help me end it all. Or worse, perhaps it’s better for society overall, if I am not here taking up resources from healthy, working folks who can write poems and pay taxes (below).

At the very least we should probably let the government surveil people like me. I mean, who wants monsters walking around all free and shit, amirite? (And before you get all eye-rolley and tell me I’m exaggerating, please consider that some folks think we are in the middle of a “woke” crisis because they heard about some drag queens reading books to kids once. And then they voted.)

Thing the Third: Is The Last of Us Doing It Again?

Which brings me to the second season of The Last of Us, in all of its complicated glory. This will have a LOT of spoilers, so y’know, proceed with caution if you don’t like that sort of thing. When we take up with Joel and Ellie, it’s been five years since Joel killed all the doctors and saved Ellie from being made into a vaccine and/or cure for the fungal infection that has turned much of humanity into mushroom-headed zombie-LIKE creatures. So we ended with a little anti-vax affirmation, celebrating the “nobility” of saving one child’s life, even if doing so condemns millions to death or worse. Joel ended season one as a hero for the viewer, and a hope for saving humanity.

But Joel and Ellie’s relationship in Season Two is strained, and we learn over the course of the episodes that he isn’t that well-liked by some in the community either. And then he dies, killed by the child of one of those doctors he shot, because it turns out that there’s more than one child in the world who has parents. And suddenly the ableist path of Season One becomes rocky. This culminated for me with the infection and death of one of the community members, and Ellie’s ultimate denouncing of Joel. (Though his death makes her regret some of that, which is more than this essay can take on.) A community member, late in the season, is remembered in flashback as having gotten bitten by the mushroom people, while Joel is out with him. He says to Joel that he knows he’s only got about an hour until he turns, but that will be enough time for him to go back to his wife and say goodbye before Joel kills him. Joel agrees, and then shoots him when his back is turned. A sad but necessary betrayal.

Wait, WHAT?

A person who is sick, who knows what being sick means and is inhabiting the sick body, says that they also know they will be okay just long enough for one last request. But he’s killed by the able-bodied person anyway, because the able-bodied person knows best. What the actual fuck? Honestly, I was gobsmacked—a dramatization of literally the worst fear of anyone living with an illness, that someone more fit (??) will decide for you whether you live or die. Because necessary? I was ranting to Michael all that night. Once again, The Last of Us was making it clear that sick people should die quickly and out of sight.

This is where I fear the evolution of the zombie has led us: to the further acceptance that sick people are monsters who threaten us all with contagion, rather than a warning that we should work together to ensure that even the most vulnerable survive. I was reminded of this watching 28 Years Later, too, as the population of non-infected people dwindles and the sick have taken over England. There, too, killing the sick is the given, right thing to do, even if they are now the dominant population. I’m reminded of the book I Am Legend here, too: Matheson asks the one question that these movies/shows do not ask: Whether, having become the minority population, the able-bodied are perhaps the monsters now. After all, they keep killing the vastly more numerous sick, who now comprise the bulk of society. Doesn’t that make them the scary ones?

Thing the Fourth: In Which Everything Ends In a Complicated Way

Which brings me to the end of this rather long brain-dump. Because this zombie evolution also seems to be bringing some interesting complications, and therefore I plan to keep watching. In 28 Years Later, the former doctor played by Ralph Fiennes appears to have figured out how to live among the infected without killing them. He paints his body with iodine, because the infected “don’t like it,” and when he must, he tranquilizes them with darts. He’s clearly a hero of the film, as opposed to the leaders of the able-bodied community who are surviving on the outskirts of England, and he offers the main child character a glimpse of a life that honors the dead and coexists with the sick. I couldn’t help but see the iodine as the metaphorical equivalent of masking, his careful coexistence indicative of his true valuing of life. (I suspect he will not be in the next movie, but his appearance here is notable.)

So, too, with the end of Season Two of The Last of Us, where Ellie demonstrates a growing horror at the able-bodied actions that Joel undertakes, and articulates a different way of moving forward. When asked by the wife how her husband died, Joel spins a tale of “bravery” that echoes Frank’s fate in Season One: he knew he was sick and so he bravely killed himself. But Ellie stands up and loudly contradicts him with the truth. She proclaims that the husband knew he was sick BUT THAT HE HAD TIME, and that Joel disregarded his wish and shot him in the back of the head. The wife is horrified and rejects Joel’s comfort.

Later, Ellie demands that Joel tell her what happened when she was under anesthesia at the end of Season One. When Joel admits that he killed everyone in order to save her life, her face falls. How could he? she asks. How could he decide that her life was more important than everyone else, that it was okay to shoot many folks in order to keep her from serving as a lifesaving possibility? What had been building all season as a conflict between father and daughter reveals a deeper rift, one that underlines that central question of survival. Who survives? And at what cost? And who gets to decide? The abject horror that she feels at learning that Joel decided that his wants (because that’s what they are: he loves her and so he wants her to stay alive) outweigh everyone else’s. And it is better to save one able-bodied person than to listen to or save the numerous sick. Ellie isn’t having it, and seemingly, The Last of Us is torn.

So where does this leave us? Welp, nowhere! I mean, these are just movies and shows, right? Who knows if these questions will continue into the next season or movie? Who knows if the infected/ing zombie will ever actually be cured or lived with, rather than killed? But as a disabled person with a chronic illness, I am obsessed. I am starting to find myself rooting for the infected, even if they are a little bit angry or have mushroom heads. Because I think something is happening here, and I can’t look away.