I am literally terrified of zombies.
I have had, to date, three nightmares about zombies in my post-high school life. That means that on three separate occasions, I woke up in a cold sweat, called out to my dog in a meek and frazzled voice, half expecting (at least on some level) to hear a half-dead groan float back at me from somewhere in the closet area of my bedroom (I’ve often experienced my ‘closet area’—named that because I don’t have a closet but a poll my dad installed for me to hang things on—to be the most paranormal part of my room. That and under my desk, behind my bookshelf, and of course, the winner: the small fucked up door leading to the crawl space beside the stairs in which a sad girl with spine-bifida and taunt green skin lives. I don’t like her.). Once I happened to wake up right when a car was driving by my house at an angle that filled my room with headlights, and I thought
“OH FUCK THEY HAVE TOURCHES” then I thought “How do zombies know how to make torches?” then I thought “Oh, then it mustn’t be zombies,” then I thought, “…it’s most LIKELY not zombies.”
Sadly, I am not one of those people who have seen every classic (meaning ‘bad’ in the horror genre) zombie movie and who can argue to you what kills a zombie, what a zombie is and how it runs. I know there’s been a revival of zombie-ness in recent media, and I know this because I’ve seen the wicked awesome sweet ass movie 28 Days Later and also because my cousin has a shirt that says ‘Ask Me About My Zombie Survival Plan.’
I know where I would hide if a zombie outbreak happened. In the dead of night, I have promised myself that when I wake up I will throw some canned food and some flash lights in the crawl space (I always wimp out because during the day time Spine-bifida outranks zombie delusions on the fear scale) and make note of the best place to bury my head and ignore the screams and brain-hungry shrieks of my now sorta-kinda-dead neighbors. I’ve been trying to train my dog to feel terror, so he’ll know not to bark at the zombies thusly alerting them to our hiding place. So far I’ve found he just startles easy and occasionally defecates where his pants would be if he wore pants but he doesn’t cuz he’s a dog. It’s a process.
The real reason I’m scared of zombies:
I really think it could happen. Maybe not brain-hungry “undead” people running around in ripped jeans, but some sort of mass hysteria that causes the collapse of society/the ripping of good jeans (I don’t know why I think zombies wear ripped jeans. But I’m pretty sure they do. Also: suit jackets.). Maybe an airborne virus (or fuck, even a zombie-bite virus) that causes people to be
sick, and therefore to
panic. I can see people being
violent for the sake of being violent, and more so I can see that violence being met with more violence. Maybe this is because I’ve seen all these movies that popularize images of crowds of people losing it, or maybe it’s because the footage of the G20 riots in Toronto just shook me on some level, but something tells me we’re all gonna die and before that, everybody’s gonna go batshit crazy and some brains may be consumed.
This guy knows what I'm sayin' about ripped jeans and suit jackets.
Seriously, 9/10 zombies you see on TV are wearing ripped jeans and/or suit
jackets. CHECK IT.
Before I end this, I’d like to state that this zombie paranoia had subdued itself until my friend Scott scolded me for making an AIDS joke. He made a whole big deal about how “the epidemic isn’t over.” That night I had a SEQUEL zombie dream in which I had to convince my family that, you guessed it; the epidemic of zombies from my last dream wasn’t over. (They were eaten.) I know my fear of zombies has to do with all the things I know as a drop-out English Major zombie’s represent, but ‘zombies fucking SCARE ME’ is so much more direct and a much better mental image than “I’m really afraid some virus will come and kill people and no one will be able to stop it. And then society will collapse, and resources will become scarce and everyone will start killing everyone else to take these resources. And then things will be in chaos, and people will just kill other people because they CAN and WANT to. It would be like AIDS and the Holocaust but bigger and less organized.”
I said LESS organized.
Anyway, that’s why I’m scared of zombies.
Possibilities I have not ruled out include: My dog may already be a zombie
Are YOU scared of zombies?
One more less impossible to read demonstration of a zombie Apocalypse based exclusively for people in the GTA:
