It was a brisk November night. I was anxiously touching the trigger of my gun just to reassure myself that it was there, ready. A giant soccer goal was being pulled into place at my right, acting as a barrier, and 40 or 50 people backed up with me into the chain link fence.

"Get ready!" someone shouted into the moonless night. The only light dimly drifted onto the field from a building 300 feet away.

The chill of the imminent threat zapped through my spine and around my ears. At the other end of the field, a crowd was gathering. An amorphous mass of bodies moving both individually and collectively was both growing and approaching.

"Hold!"

Our two groups faced each other for the longest, quietest seconds. Frozen on the outside, but heart pulsing on the inside, I gripped the handle tighter, shifted my weight slightly to the back foot and sank ever so slightly, trying to manage my center of gravity.

A roar erupted from the mass ahead. They began to charge us.

Darts and sock-balls started flying as we opened fire on the zombies that were trying to keep as few of us remaining humans from reaching the extraction point. It was the final battle after a week's worth of hiding, sneaking, and running from zombies on campus.

It was the most fun and intense game I had ever played.

The zombies in front of the crowd were peppered with our projectiles, but they could hardly get out of the way (as was the rule), because of the gigantic crowd behind, pressing them into our trapped group.

I blinked once and shot a few zombies with my Nerf gun. I blinked twice and all I could see was blades of grass and the faint light from that building so far away.

I had been knocked to the ground. A body fell on me and seconds later was off of me.

This was one of the first times I realized I was in actual, physical danger. My thought was, "So this is how people die in crowds," having recently read a book about disasters. Luckily, the crowd of zombies somehow dispersed. Although we were counted as having won the game, I'm sure we wouldn't have been so lucky in a "real" zombie apocalypse.

I did come away with the coolest scar and story, though, right?

Although we have no reason to fear a zombie apocalypse, I think there is a valid parallel that brings these undead terrors to the forefront of our current reality.

Zombies in the Real World?

Despite usually being characterized as dim-witted and slow, the modern zombie (also called the Romero Zombie) has a lot of profound uses in exploring contemporary fears and social problems. From the shocking end in the classic movie Night of the Living Dead that reveals the systemic racism in the U.S. to the minimizing of female contribution to survival and worth that is only tied to “traditional” gender roles in The Walking Dead (1).

Today, we’ll focus on just two zombie concepts:

1. The danger of crowds
2. The Apocalypse

What does an apocalypse even mean? This is my understanding of the word based on cultural context clues: Destruction; a final wipe-out of humanity. I think of zombies or nuclear devastation, and how there was at least one apocalypse in every season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Looking at its Greek origin, however, it meant “to uncover, reveal.” That took me by surprise, especially given the long Christian history with the concept of The Apocalypse, which is often described as a gigantic collection of world-wide catastrophes and/or wars just before the Second Coming of Christ.

As a thought experiment, what might it mean if we looked at the Zombie Apocalypse trope not as a lesson about violence, gore, and survival, but as a revelation? What might be uncovered by our rotting corpses?

One piece we can look at is the fear that zombies embody—not literally, though, that’s out of scope, though we have looked briefly into disgust before. If we zoom way out so we aren’t distracted by the unsavory appearance, we’ll see crowds. Just like my “Final Stand,” I was completely unnerved when the crowd of “zombies” started to gather across the field.

Crowds can be deeply terrifying. The mass moves as if it’s one organism made of smaller parts. In some cases, crowds can kill just from the movement alone, no malice necessary. We have the psychological phenomenon of groupthink, where there is “a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment in groups that have an excessive desire to reach consensus…[G]roupthink emerges when maintaining a pleasant social atmosphere becomes more important than making the best decision.” (2)

We can be exceptionally lonely in crowds. Being among large masses can remove your feeling of individuality as you blend in with all of the other bodies, like a fish in its school or an ant in its colony.

There’s even the spark of fear when it comes to work, like mass layoffs whether in the U.S. government or in the callous trend with tech companies.

I’m not attempting to demonize large gatherings of people, but they do come with concerns that vary from circumstance to circumstance. Zombies can help us explore those dangers, and they may also be aiding our quest for “revelation.” As we confront these terrifying creatures, we start to see these connections to our reality, and we uncover the collective fears our society shares. A crowd realizing its fear of the crowd, in a way.

Dr. Yii-Jan Lin recently wrote a book, Immigration and Apocalypse: How the Book of Revelation Shaped American Immigration, that explores how apocalyptic imagery has been applied to U.S. immigration policies. Not only in the administrative sense, but also in inciting mass fears, racism, and xenophobia for U.S. citizens over the country's history. As I listened to the discussion she had about the concepts in her book, I couldn't help but see the connections to the zombie apocalypse that I had seen on the silver screen.

Whether through a zombie virus, or just the inexplicable rising of undead hordes, modern zombies fit within the West's ancient tropes about apocalypse, calamity, and destruction.

It makes me wonder if this apocalyptic imagery or rhetoric is really just a technology that we have developed over the years to convince the hordes within our in-group that we must take action against the hordes of the out-group? It is certainly a dangerous form of rhetoric and has caused deep harm and trauma to countless amounts of people throughout history.

We may be quick to dismiss the modern zombie as something silly or just for movies, but I think we'll be well-served to reflect deeply when any apocalyptic symbols are used in our speech. When politicians choose a population to demonize, we should be suspicious. Maybe our fears are what transform us into the mindless husk that follows the crowd, seeking human flesh?

Works Cited

(1) Savior narratives, and logistics of survival in The Walking Dead, By Martina Baldwin and Mark McCarthy. From the compilation of essays in Thinking Dead, edited by Murali Balaji.

(2) Social Psychology Fifth Edition, Stephen L. Fanzoi, 2009. pg. 319