Overview

We are now moving on from literature and cinema to gaming and walking. We have certainly come a long way from Zoroaster and ancient Persia. Our fears of the dead and of the apocalypse continue to drive us and shape our lives, but nowadays we have new outlets for their exploration and release, a wider diversity of arenas and technologies, certainly, than Zoroaster, Moses, Jesus, or Muhammad had. And recently apocalyptic zombie gaming has become a very big deal. As Peter Dendle, whose work on zombie films is the most expansive to date, observes: “Video games provided one of the more important vehicles for zombies in the late 1990s and 2000s, and Resident Evil (Capcom 1996) was the first (with its sequels) and most successful of these.”¹ Zombie gaming is indeed prolific, sprawling, spawning, and infecting like a horde, of, well, zombies. How do we make sense of this? Why are people so obsessed with zombies? Why do people continue to obsess with the apocalypse? What are the ethical implications of enjoying the thrill of seeking to kill the afflicted? Do we ourselves become zombies as we lower our heads while walking and looking at our phones while mowing them down?

There is something zombifying about walking around a large urban university’s campus and seeing thousands of people strolling about with their heads thus lowered, their gaze fixed on their little screens, earbuds in place, thumbs sometimes frantically tapping away. It actually is frightening, a bit apocalyptic, and some of them are surely setting out rows of plants to ward off zombies, or playing Pokémon Go, which now features creatures that have, for all intents and purposes, been zombified and gives the gamer an opportunity to eliminate or cure (“purify”) them. In another reflection of the zombie’s almost unparalleled ability to captivate in popular culture, there are also zombie walks throughout the world, in which people saunter around masquerading as zombies, oozing fake blood, and eating equally fake brains. As major pieces of the massive global zombie economy, and as reflections of humanity’s ancient and ongoing fear of an apocalyptic End of Time, such walks and games raise deep philosophical and sociological questions.

Zombie Games People Play: A Necessarily Brief History

At least since Zoroaster, humans have feared the end of the world because it is inevitable and no one knows how or when it will happen—plus, prophets like him inspired them to fear. Millions around the world today think of the apocalypse as involving zombies, and one wonders why so many are fascinated by the living dead, and why they watch them, play with them, kill them, dress up like them, and walk like them. Both the apocalypse and the zombie are the stuff of fear, but why are they centerpieces to a huge gaming industry? Stephen Webley offers this interesting answer:

Game studies scholars have pondered “the rise of the zombie” in papers and conference proceedings. . . . It appears the only firm agreement among zombie game scholars is that the zombie is so prevalent because the zombie makes for a less controversial victim to dispatch in the most violent fashion, and that its basic behavior and uniformity of appearance make for easy artificial intelligence programming routines and easily replicated game art; in short, they are convenient.²

Seeing as philosophers have for hundreds of year contemplated questions about human rights, animal rights, and environmental ethics, it is unsurprising that zombies have become a big deal in the field of philosophy, for all of the intriguing moral questions they raise. Especially the question about the ethics of killing them. In Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead (the blockbuster television series), one of the scenes that I found most compelling philosophically was when Rick Grimes and his wandering posse of survivors take up residence at the farm of a retired veterinarian named Hershel Greene, an elderly God-fearing man who is something of a philosopher. Herschel reasons correctly that viruses like the one that has spawned the zombie apocalypse have always risen to powerfully challenge humanity and threaten our very existence, but this is nature’s way of creating balance. Shock rocks philosophy, though, when Grimes and his band discover a pit in one of Hershel’s barns where he is keeping zombies, or “walkers,” alive, members of his own family, in the hope that one day they might be cured. For Jeffrey Hinzmann and Robert Arp, what is philosophically compelling about this discovery is that “the main reason people extend any moral consideration to zombies in any form or fashion is that they used to be people.”³

I would like to suggest here that philosophical contemplations of the meanings and implications of the zombie could be amplified by considering leading theories in religious studies and anthropology concerning ritual sacrifice in the history of religion, especially René Girard’s mimetic theory. (Mimetic is related to the word mime and derives from the Greek mimetic, meaning imitative).⁴ As Wolfgang Palaver explains, “mimetic theory . . . is centered upon a hypothesis regarding the origin of sacrifice,”⁵ based more deeply on Girard’s idea that human desire, and human culture itself, is ultimately about imitation. As Girard puts it: “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desire.”⁶

In this scheme of things, sacrifice was often driven by the belief that it could stave off punishment from the gods, and perhaps even the apocalypse itself. Furthermore, throughout the ages humans have performed “sacrificial rites, hoping in this way to protect themselves from their own violence by diverting it into expendable victims.”⁷ Such victims are the targets of “scapegoating,” or “the violent and arbitrary convergence around a victim or group of victims who are seen as uniquely responsible for a particular group’s misfortune.”⁸ Such a convenient, expendable, dispatchable, scapegoated victim makes a splash in video games, especially as the zombie. With a few notable exceptions, it is always acceptable to kill a zombie while gaming, to take down a suitable victim who is somehow responsible for the unspeakable plight in which the gamers find themselves.

Video games are not nearly as old as ritual sacrifice, of course, though many of them are full of sacrifice. We spend money and time on them, after all, and they sometimes afford us opportunities to eliminate sacrificial victims to let off steam. This diverts our innate propensity for violence in a safe manner. Video games emerged ten years before the appearance of George Romero’s epic apocalyptic zombie film Night of the Living Dead, which shocked audiences with its graphic scenes and horror as soon as it appeared in 1968. In 1958 a physicist named William Higinbotham created the first video game, Tennis for Two.⁹ He had previously worked in Los Alamos, New Mexico, on the first atomic bomb, so the video game was born out of violence.¹⁰ Higinbotham (1910–1994) created the game for the annual visitor day at the Research Laboratory where the A Bomb was made, and although it was popular among those who wandered in, he never patented or marketed it. But it was “eerily similar” to a mass-produced and highly successful video game by Atari that would appear ten years later, Pong.¹¹ Pong, though highly popular and soon available on home consoles, was just plain boring.

Action games would soon take over the new universe of video gaming though—including Asteroids (1978), Pac Man (1980), and Super Mario Brothers (1985)—setting the stage for the zombie to enter the emergent fray. The zombie and the video game were a match made in heaven, a match that would earn creators and production companies an incredible amount of money.¹²

This seemingly inevitable tryst was consummated in 1984, when the first zombie video game appeared, Zombie Zombie, produced initially in Europe. You, the player, with the toggle looming beneath your attentive and surely sweaty hands, drop into a maze from a helicopter and wander about, luring zombies to climb up on ledges and fall off. That is how you kill them before they kill you.¹³ Your helicopter can build the ledges, which you then jump across without falling. And that is how you save humanity from the zombie apocalypse.¹⁴ Evidently, zombies cannot jump, at least they couldn’t in 1984.

In 1988, an iteration of one of the biggest blockbuster franchises in the history of gaming, Super Mario Brothers 3, was released, and it featured action and antagonists, by another name, that were effectively zombies. Innovative in this classic Japanese game for Nintendo were “its unintimidating skeleton turtles (a.k.a. Dry Bones),” which are “fleshless, and like traditional zombies they’re nearly impossible to kill – Dry Bones resurrect themselves a few seconds after Mario or Luigi stomps on them.”¹⁵ Four years later, the hugely successful video game Wolfenstein 3D came out, which featured zombie-like beings in a far more graphic and violent fashion. The Undead Guard “have a surgically implanted gun grafted into their chest.”¹⁶ Making these horrific beings doubly evil, they are also Nazis. This was soon followed by the “cult classic” Zombies Ate My Neighbors, which launched in 1993 and positions players as teenagers who have as their objective saving “neighbors from being devoured by flesh-eating zombies and a host of other enemies, including a demonic giant baby.”¹⁷ Then the zombic doors blew wide open in gaming, in 1996, when the first of fourteen iterations of Resident Evil came out, a “highly influential” and madly popular zombie apocalypse game that we discuss more extensively later in the chapter.¹⁸

Another key entry into the zombie gaming universe is Pokémon Snakewood, which is something called a “rom hack,”¹⁹ a pirated alteration of another game called Pokémon Ruby. The player is wandering about in a recently devastated place called Littleroot Town and is bewildered by the inexplicable ruin all around. Embarking on this adventure requires a sidekick, so one chooses from three different Pokémon (weird fighting creatures with roots in the wildly successful card trading/fighting game launched from Japan in 1996). Then one wanders about, only to find Professor Birch being attacked by a zombie, who has a zombified Pokémon as his pugnacious wingman. You must defeat them, which is a constant in zombie fiction, film, and gaming (albeit not elemental to zombie walks):

After defeating the zombie and its zombified Pokémon, Birch takes the player to Oldale Town, which has been turned into a fortified safe-zone. There the player is informed that the entire region has been taken over by a zombie apocalypse, and that the player’s older brother Landon (who is also the Champion) and his rival, May, have gone off to fight the zombies. They haven’t been seen since.²⁰

Unsurprisingly, many of the most successful zombie video games are either derived from or inspire television series or movies. For instance, in Last of Us, which debuted on PlayStation in 2013, the third-person player seeks to escort a teenaged girl through a post-apocalyptic America that is awash with zombic creatures who have been infected by a fungus and seek to infect the heroic player and his charge. It won the British Academy Games Award for Best Game of the Year and quickly became one of the most popular video games ever. Ten years later, in 2023, an HBO television series by the same name launched to rave reviews. The order is reversed in the case of The Walking Dead, the most successful television series ever, which debuted in 2010 and ran across twelve seasons. It is a drama of human survival in a post-apocalyptic America flooded with hordes of zombies. In 2012 the first of several video games based on the series appeared, and they have enjoyed accolades and popular success ever since. Chances are, somewhere in the world at any given moment countless people are playing either of these gaming masterpieces, testimony to the power of the visual in zombie apocalyptic culture and the ready transfer across media of the living dead and the end of the world.

But beyond the visual, the human obsession with death, and the human passion for fear and the evasion thereof, what explains the explosive success of violent video games? One of the most legendary game creators in history, Tim Schafer, the mastermind behind numerous classics including the 2009 Brutal Legend, offers that the answer lies in self-discovery and in having an outlet, a pressure valve, for our own violent impulses. The “idea of exploring in the shadow, the shadow archetype inside your own mind, I think is valuable.” Furthermore, “It’s important to explore, how does it feel to be mean to someone, how does it feel to be cruel in a safe environment?”²¹ The echoes of René Girard are unmistakable.

And what about violent zombie apocalypse games in particular? Peter Malloy has something very interesting to say about this:

To fully appreciate the struggles of zombie survival, we know that we must try it firsthand. Only then can we understand the anxiety, the insanity, the sick satisfaction that comes with outlasting the undead. This is how we will begin to truly understand the zombies and perhaps…ourselves. But how? Will you need a machete? Yes, eventually. But also, like with many of life’s problems, there is a lazier solution. The answer is – of course – video games.²²

Early zombie video games, furthermore, place an “emphasis on rescue” and “self-preservation,” themes that remain central in zombie cinema and gaming to the present day.²³ Given the newness of video gaming technology, however, those early games may seem somewhat crude and “childish.” But that all changed with the appearance of Resident Evil, which “set the standard in zombie gaming,” adds Malloy. “The original Resident Evil broke onto the scene when graphics were just sharp enough to produce a reasonable level of unmitigated dread. The creepy music, the puzzle/survival format, the cheesy voice acting – it was all perfect.” Over the course of Resident Evil’s sequels and spinoffs, though, there is a notable thematic shift from “survival/suspense to action/horror.”²⁴ This game was a game changer in the zombic gaming world, “one of the biggest horror franchises of all time, with 16 games and expanding into films, comics, novels, and action figures.”²⁵

Along with Resident Evil, we will now look at Plants vs. Zombies, DayZ, Minecraft, and Call of Duty. There are so many other zombie video games that it makes one’s head spin, as do the countless films, books, e-zines, and comics, such that we cannot really profile more here, because later in this chapter we have to go on zombie walks. But, before analyzing these five games, let us just consider a couple of other interesting-sounding video game offerings that Malloy profiles and praises, and then we’ll gaze momentarily upon an impressive app made by a Chicago teenager. The settings and sagas of zombie games are as diverse as they are sometimes surprising, like fighting zombies on a Russian whaling ship at sea in a major storm, which is where you are when you play Cold Fear, or on a spaceship, which is where you are when you play Dead Space. Patrick Shaw also lists among the best zombie games The House of the Dead (1996), Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green (2005), the “light-hearted” Dead Rising (2006), Left for Dead (2008), Call of Duty: Nazi Zombies (2008), and Dead Rising 2 (2010), among a couple of others, including Plants vs. Zombies, which has made my own top-five list.²⁶

In 2015, a Chicago teenager invented a zombie game app for the iPhone. Then fifteen years old and a sophomore at Riverdale High School, Ryan Robinson, a huge fan of the TV series The Walking Dead and a zombie aficionado, “wanted to continue his thirst for zombie destruction online,” so he got creative and did something about it.²⁷ A veteran of Mario Brothers and other classic Nintendo games, Robinson set out to create a game that would both captivate those seeking to destroy zombies and be a “throwback,” a nod to the technically cruder graphics of earlier-era gaming. He realized, by virtue of being, well, a teenager with an iPhone who was really into zombie gaming and other forms of gaming: “A lot of kids are into throwbacks.”²⁸ The game is called Bashy Zombie, and here is a summary by Tammy Joyner:

The player becomes a man holding a hammer. There are two buttons on either side of the screen. One button is for changing directions. The other is for bashing zombies. You score a point for each zombie you bash. The game gets harder the longer you play. It also includes a tutorial Ryan developed to help newcomers.²⁹

Created by Robinson in just three weeks, it soon attracted many users and earned him fifty dollars a day. One veteran insider of the gaming industry calls the app “incredibly impressive.”³⁰

Bashy Zombie evidently still enjoys a small cult following and is impressive on many levels,³¹ but other zombie games attract millions of players daily. Meanwhile, certain leaders in a number of professional fields, like health care and education, have found zombie games to be helpful to educate or train. As such, there are zombie games designed to enhance elementary school learning and at least one designed for students in med school.³² There is another that is part of “an effort to stimulate interest in the nursing profession,” a joint effort between nursing professors in Canada and Qatar. Players, as nurses, try their hand at “wrestling zombies into a ‘de-zombification’ station.” It is about healing, as is nursing itself.³³ There is also an audio fitness game called Zombies Run!, which “uses Augmented Reality (AR) to allow players to stage their own zombie encounters,” as Kris Darby explains. “Through the intimacy of a pair of headphones, such engagements establish an imaginary space for the player to kinesthetically engage with the figure of the zombie and to deliberate on how it defines us as human beings.”³⁴

As of this writing, in 2021, Wikipedia lists 148 zombie video games, but that is surely an undercount, as some of them spin off into series and others have been missed here.³⁵ Plus there are underground zombie games that are not marketed but just shared and played informally among friends. Before going on our international zombie walk, let us consider the following games in less-than-minute detail: Resident Evil, Plants vs. Zombies, DayZ, Minecraft, and Call of Duty. We’ll do this in chronological order, sticking to the original versions rather than chasing the sprawl of subsequent versions or spinoffs down the proverbial rabbit hole or opening the proverbial Pandora’s box or can of worms—or can of zombies.

Resident Evil

Resident Evil was inspired by George Romero’s films and by earlier games like Alone in the Dark (1994) and Doctor Hauzer (1994).³⁶ Though Alone in the Dark and Doctor Hauzer were not zombie games per se, they quickly became classics in the genre known as survival horror gaming. But over and above those earlier games, Resident Evil’s creator, Shinji Mikami, took Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, which when released abroad was actually called Zombie, as his chief influence.³⁷ Mikami’s effort was hugely successful, and the game is widely considered a, if not the, pioneering survival horror video game. To date, the franchise/series has sold nearly 120 million copies, more than any other horror or zombie game ever.

Produced by the Japanese gaming company Capcom and released on PlayStation in 1996, the first iteration in the Resident Evil series launched as a shooter game, one in which the player goes around shooting zombies. The player uses tank controls in going about a dreadful life, confronting horror, and seeking to not only survive but to save the world from the zombie apocalypse. Matt Perez explains what this means, why some gaming reviewers deride it, and why it is largely a thing of the past in gaming, kind of like the dial function in Pong:

Tank controls refers to movement that is relevant to the character’s orientation rather than the camera’s orientation. Pressing up always propels characters forward, while left and right rotate with no acceleration. Pressing down causes the character to walk backwards instead of turning around and running in that direction. Criticism, and the mechanics name, come from the obvious fact that humans can move in any direction, making tank controls feel unnatural. It’s like pushing around an invisible shopping cart at all times.³⁸

Later versions of Resident Evil games would drop tank controls and shift to “first- and third-person” perspectives, or “over the shoulder” perspectives, but in the interest of spatial conservation let us focus on the first iteration of this blockbuster game.³⁹ The original initially carried the subtitle Biohazard in Japan, indicative of the element of contagion that spawns the zombies, but for copyright purposes that name had to be abandoned and, voìlá, Resident Evil it became. Its setting is a fictional midwestern American town called “Raccoon City,” where a lab creating viruses for use in biological warfare leaks one into the world, and this pathogen turns humans into zombies.

In an effort to stop the virus from spreading beyond Raccoon City, the place is nuked by the United States government. That doesn’t quite work, though, as it and other pathogens soon spread about the world, something that must sound quite relevant during our present COVID saga. For our purposes, Resident Evil is highly significant, too, for inserting the zombie into survival horror gaming at the very outset of the genre. It’s not about tennis anymore and is getting serious and deadly. “Zombies take a star turn as the key enemy, surrounding your location, slowly breaking in,” explains Malloy, and technology had just become advanced enough to make playing Resident Evil dramatically interactive, captivating, and terrifying. “Resident Evil is the truest instance of a zombie game: defined by the pressure to conserve necessary equipment, to investigate, and to avoid being eaten.”⁴⁰ For a walk-through of a remake of the original Resident Evil zombie survival horror game, one can go to YouTube,⁴¹ but for now we should move on to plant biology—sort of.

Plants vs. Zombies

First launched in 2009 and initially and poetically called Lawn of the Dead, Plants vs. Zombies seems rather childish compared to many zombie games, with a cartoonish horde of zombies advancing slowly toward the player’s house and absorbed by crude graphics. “Rather than look like many other horror games, it has a parodic quality,” as K. J. Donnelly explains, complete “with comic zombies, a deranged neighbor (called Crazy Dave) with a saucepan on his head, and bizarre varieties of anthropomorphic plants.”⁴² To ward off or destroy the zombies, the players deploy these plants in their yards to shoot seeds at or launch bombs upon the menacing but shuffling undead enemies.

Despite a rather meager marketing budget to promote the app, Plants vs. Zombies soon developed a cult following that mushroomed into global success, with actors on talk shows speaking about their fondness for the game and moms baking birthday cakes iced with images of its characters.⁴³ It became especially popular for players using iPads, although more frequently it has been played on smartphones. Because it centrally is “a siege with enemy’s relentless forward movement toward the player’s battlelines,” it is categorized as a “tower game.”⁴⁴

The original Plants vs. Zombies offered players five modes, with “Adventure Mode,” consisting of fifty levels, seemingly the mainstay. And, as is the case with many video games, the more success you have (in this case by killing zombies), the higher level you reach. The zombies move in a unidirectional linear fashion as they saunter toward your house. Their master, who rarely appears, is Dr. Edgar George Zomboss. There is a monetary dimension to the game, as the player starts out with a limited number of seeds and purchases more as the supply runs dry. Some plants are more effective during the day and others at night, so a good deal of planning and strategy needs to be employed to advance. And different kinds of zombies appear:

Certain plants are highly effective against specific types of zombies, such as the Magnet-shroom, which can remove metallic items from a zombie, such as helmets, buckets, ladders, and pogo sticks. The zombies also come in a number of types that have different attributes, in particular, speed, damage tolerance, and abilities. Zombies include those wearing makeshift armor, those who can jump or fly over plants, and a dancing zombie able to summon other zombies from the ground.⁴⁵

One can also plant vegetables and flowers to ward off the dancing zombies, who sometimes find that they must get across a swimming pool. One dancing zombie actually first appeared in Plants vs. Zombies as the “Thriller Zombie,” depicting Michael Jackson in his zombic video for his smash hit “Thriller,” but his estate protested, thus he is no longer a menace to the homes, lawns, and gardens of suburbia.⁴⁶ Not to be outdone, there are also zombies that ride dolphins and others who pole vault.

And just what happens if a zombie breaches the vegetal wall of defense and saunters within reach of the player’s house? Since the battlefield in Plants vs. Zombies is a suburban lawn, why, there must be a lawnmower somewhere, right? Sure enough, as if by magic, a lawnmower suddenly appears to mow down the breacher, as well as any zombies behind him in his lane. But once used, that mower is no longer available to protect the home against subsequent zombies lumbering up the same lane, and, alas, “the other plants and zombies stop moving while that zombie enters the house. Crunching sounds will be heard, accompanied by a scream and a message saying, ‘The zombies ate your brains!’”⁴⁷

Minecraft

What is Minecraft? Here is a succinct answer about this multiplayer game, a bit of a techno throwback, from Ty Hollett:

At its most simple, Minecraft enables players to break and place textured three-dimensional blocks to produce various edifices. Players can freely move through a three-dimensional, algorithmically generated open world, collecting resources, crafting tools, and building structures. Single-player and multiplayer options are available, with a vast amount of user-driven multiplayer servers emerging – unique game worlds hosted by individual players themselves on their computers – that cater to various styles of play.⁴⁸

That doesn’t make Minecraft like a survival horror or zombie game per se, but you can die; you must endeavor to survive. In fact if one plays in “survival” mode, as opposed to “creative” mode, zombies appear, some of whom are human babies and pigs. It is not nearly as graphic as any of the other games summarized here, but there is blood.

Because Minecraft is the most popular video game ever, having sold more than 200 million copies since its 2009 launch from Sweden, its zombies clearly demand our attention in this chapter. In Minecraft, zombies “are generally slow-moving (except for their babies) and are fairly easy to defeat if you are prepared.” However, as Cori Dusmann explains, “If you don’t have a good weapon or armor, they can still kill you. And even if you manage to kill one, it will summon other zombies to spawn in the area.”⁴⁹

To begin my research on this game, I tried playing it but soon abandoned all hope of advancing, so I turned to my daughter Izzy, our resident Minecraft whiz, a seventeen-year-old veteran of Minecraft coding summer camps and a recent vanquisher of the Ender Dragon. She also has built and maintains an amazing village and goes on all sorts of plundering raids. Though Minecraft is not centrally a zombie game, and it often seems to me decidedly unapocalyptic, there are all sorts of zombies in its orbit or universe, and they are actually called zombies.

Following are Izzy’s zombie observations:

Minecraft Zombie Lore

• One of the first monsters added to the game looks very much like a zombified version of the player.

• Variations include:

• Zombie villager: a zombified version of the only other humanoid creature in the game aside from the player. Zombie villagers can be turned back into regular villagers, called curing. One does so by giving the zombie villager a potion of weakness made from a fermented spider eye (a mix of spider eye, sugar, and brown mushroom) and a golden apple, a magical apple with restorative health properties.

• Stray: A zombie exclusive to the deserts, savannas, and badlands. Acts identical to a normal zombie; the differences are purely aesthetic.

• Giant: Essentially just a massive zombie that acts the same as a normal one. It has now been removed from Minecraft.

• All zombies walk very slowly, groan, and are hostile toward the player as well as the villagers.

• All zombies, with the exception of drowneds, burn in sunlight.

• An enchantment, a.k.a. a magical power up called “smite,” when applied to a sword damages zombies, as well as all undead mobs, quite effectively.

• Drowned: Underwater zombies that sometimes use tridents to attack the player. They have underwater monuments that contain loot. Confronting drowned is the only way that players can obtain the trident weapon as well as nautilus shells.⁵⁰

I take it that most drowneds spawn in seas and rivers, while others are simply drowned zombies. Sounds a bit confusing to me, but evidently there is more to it than what my daughter just explained, her brilliance and expertise notwithstanding. For one thing, zombies in Minecraft cannot take too much sun and can actually catch fire if they do, enabling them to burn you with flames and fury. Furthermore, there are the Endermen, which “are mobs that come from the End, but they can also spawn in the Overworld. They are not hostile unless you look them directly in the face, at which point they will attack.”⁵¹ Sounds downright apocalyptic and zombic, though the Endermen are not called zombies in Minecraft. There are also other menacing and creepy beings to watch out for as you create your village and roam the Overworld, like skeletons, spiders, and creepers, while Izzy’s village at times has been invaded by polar bears that swim from a distant iceberg to raid. But another category of zombies in Minecraft, per Dusmann, are the Zombie Pigmen, which used to be pigs but became zombified when struck by lightning, though thankfully “this is rare.”⁵² Time to escape the Zombie Pigmen and move on to DayZ.

DayZ

“The survival genre owes a great debt to DayZ,” opine Jordan Sirani and Jared Perry, in large part because the game, first released with the since-abandoned subtitle of Standalone, “contrasted the surrealism of a zombie infestation with the hyperrealism of exposure, infection, hunger, and the degeneration of human nature in the face of disaster.” Given such a range of (virtual) realities and the creativity and resourcefulness required for the player to succeed (and survive), it is categorized as a sandbox game. Because of the aforementioned human degeneration, the players “simply never knew whether the next person you met was out to help you or murder you.” The result is “an addictively captivating experience” for the player, helping DayZ land at number ten on Sirani and Perry’s ranking of the greatest zombie games in history.⁵³ It is also unique insofar as it “has no quest chains to complete or any goal aside from survival.”⁵⁴

DayZ first appeared on the market in 2018. The setting is a rather expansive fictional former Soviet republic called Chernarus; one would not be wrong to wonder if the game’s creator (a Kiwi named Dean Hall) came up with that name to evoke the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Ukraine. Infection is the premise here, as some sort of contagious plague has infected many humans and turned them into zombies. The player’s goal is to survive in the face of the zombie apocalypse, finding resources to do so and wiping out the infected along the way, to avoid becoming one of them. For Lars Schmeink, DayZ is also noteworthy for moving away from the “first-person shooter” that had come to predominate in zombie games, situating “the player into an ongoing zombie apocalypse.” Furthermore, “the game shifts the emphasis of gameplay from a mission-oriented, narrative-driven shooter to a non-scripted open-world survival game.”⁵⁵

Given that the horizon is vast and the player in DayZ must find resources to survive, over and above killing zombies, you must “Slay, Scavenge, Survive,” to cite the title of Schmeink’s excellent paper. You start out on the shores of Chernarus, called by the game “a harsh post-apocalyptic landscape,”⁵⁶ in only what you happen to be wearing when you wind up there and possessing just “a flashlight and batteries.” Then things get real: You “will have to scavenge for food, water, medicine, and shelter, as well as deal with both zombies and human bandits to survive.”⁵⁷ But the flashlight is hardly useful for repelling or eliminating zombies and bandits, so the search for weapons is an integral part of scavenging and survival. Because DayZ is configured technologically to be a multiplayer game, once you make allies (or get your roommate or a sibling to play with you), you don’t have to face these challenges alone. Be forewarned, though, that other players can “tend to be hostile” and represent “a continuous threat.”⁵⁸

An advanced player of DayZ will have found food, water, weapons, and shelter and survived zombies and bandits. They continue to roam about Chernarus, scavenging, in the quest to survive. It is helpful to find vehicles that still work to get around, and usually they are near buildings, though some are damaged beyond hope or out of fuel. But once you die, that is it. You lose all that you have gathered and must start over on the Chernarusian shore as a new character with just a flashlight and batteries. The goal is to survive as long as you can, but ultimately there are no winners, and the post-apocalyptic horror just spins on and on ad infinitum. Once dead, though, you can come back to life and play again to explore this dystopian world and sift through eerie “dilapidated villages, decrepit military bases, or rotting urban centers.”⁵⁹

This chapter opened with one expert’s opinion as to why zombies have become so common in video games and why so many people play them every day. Other experts actually polled frequent players of DayZ, or “Survivors,” using “a theological and psychoanalytical framework” to help us understand what the experience is like for them.⁶⁰ Robert Geraci, Nat Recine, and Samantha Fox got intriguing responses to their queries: Only a handful of players expressed fears of “dying” in DayZ, whereas more players simply indicated that one result of death is that “It is fun to start over.” One respondent replied: “I am a pretty good survivor. I can get well geared up pretty easily and am a force to be reckoned with. . . . But I am still so bloody scared.”⁶¹ Most players indicated, furthermore, that they rather enjoy “the fear of being frightened in DayZ.”⁶² But one must fear not only zombies in DayZ:

The terrifying possibility that other players are the monsters who hunt raises the stakes and reminds us of the evolutionary response to agency in the environment. A shadow flitting across the screen could be a sign of impending doom, but more likely at the rifle of a hidden human sniper than at the hands and mouth of a mindless zombie.⁶³

Finally, fears in DayZ, along with other zombie apocalypse games, literature, and film, are philosophically quite intriguing, as Schmeink observes:

The zombie apocalypse is . . . both a poignant commentary on the anxieties of the present and an extrapolation of consequences for the future. Zombie apocalypses comment upon current issues of systemic control in times of crisis and on anxieties about future sociopolitical realities.⁶⁴

How much of this sounds so familiar to us right now? How might considerations of notions of othering, sociophobics, and the outbreak narrative shape our reading of what we all went through during the COVID pandemic? How can we take all that we have learned about apocalypticism in human history and about zombies and make sense of this horrific global disease and promote compassion and a more understanding future in which, instead of blaming the other, we unite as a species and make this a better world? We turn to these questions in Chapter 12, but now let us answer a call to duty.

Call of Duty

So popular has been the Call of Duty franchise of zombie games that Matthew Barr calls it a “perennial sales behemoth.”⁶⁵ Publishing that comment in a book on zombie gaming, Barr, though referring to the entire Call of Duty franchise, especially has in mind the 2009 Call of Duty: Zombies.

In this section, we focus just on the spinoff, but first a few words on the storm by which the Call of Duty franchise has taken the gaming world. The first iteration of this behemoth was released in 2008 and called Call of Duty: World at War. It is a first-person shooter game in which the player is armed and gazes down the barrel of a rifle during combat. It features multiplayer options and is rather violent and gripping to play, especially in zombies mode, as reflected here by Adam Rosenberg:

Zombies mode is the sort of wave-based survival minigame that’s become so prevalent in modern day game development. There’s no end to the mode, and no real script either. It just continues. The more you play, the tougher the zombies get. Eventually, the size and strength of the horde overcomes the firepower available, and the players — up to four of them, playing cooperatively — succumb.⁶⁶

At first glance, zombies mode might seem the only thing zombic in Call of Duty: World at War, but there are also zombies. They are not in the central mechanics of the game, but they do appear in a “map,” which, if you click on it, brings you to a “minigame.” When you open the map that carries the name “Nacht der Untoten,” which is German and literally translates as “Night of the Undead,” you will also find “Nazi zombies.” It is a complicated place to enter, and Nazi zombies are doubly dreadful, as they are, well, zombies and Nazis. Here is a brief description from Fandom, which, by the way, has a massive amount of material on almost every video game you can imagine:

It begins with a short cutscene where your character sees a swarm of Nazi zombies heading towards him after his plane (which was carrying 1–4 people depending on how many players are in the game) crashes in “No Man’s Land” near an abandoned bunker. Nacht der Untoten features many weapons from both the campaign and multiplayer modes (although there are no Russian or Japanese weapons available), and introduced the Ray Gun.⁶⁷

The original zombie map in Call of Duty is fairly basic, featuring a bunker and three rooms in a structure, but the enemies are terrifying, dressed as German soldiers and sometimes as SS officers. They must be combated as they swarm and attack. Other zombie maps and amplifications of zombies’ powers would be added to later iterations of the game, but for now let us look briefly at the second, Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies, released in 2009.

We’ll just call it Zombies here for the sake of fluid reading. In this game, the player is tasked with defending a single bunker against a wave of attacking Nazi zombies. One is armed up, bunkered in, hunkered down, and spraying bullets against the undead enemies. You earn points for kills, which can be exchanged for additional weapons and ammo in a shop. Blades also come in handy here, because “when a zombie gets too close, you can slice it with a knife.” Grenades are good to have, too, as they can take out groups of zombies at a time.⁶⁸ It is violent, and the graphics are quite advanced. The timing for the success of Zombies could not have been better, as this occurred just two years after Apple introduced the iPhone, the platform for which the game was initially designed. On the iPhone, and subsequently the iPad, millions of people soon found themselves slicing apart, blowing up, and shooting zombies. And what is it like to play? Let’s turn to a reviewer named arn for a brief intro:

The game begins with you in a house with boarded up windows. Waves of zombies slowly start attacking and you need to defend against their attacks. Windows are repaired with the press of a button, though having your attention split across the different entrances is a challenge. The ramp up is rather slow, but soon you’ll have trouble surviving the oncoming hoard of zombies. As you kill zombies, you earn coins which can be used to buy better weapons which are found throughout the structure.⁶⁹

So killing zombies makes you richer, but you soon lose your fortune by stocking up on other weapons to kill them. It’s a catch-22 scenario of utter dread, but millions of people love inserting themselves into it, at least fictionally.

Conclusion: Zombies in Video Gaming

Most zombie video games are quite apocalyptic in tone. They force us to philosophically confront our own death, if not the end of the world as we know it. Many of these games are “Romeroesque.” According to Webley: “The video game zombie has its origins with one man – the independent film maker George A. Romero.”⁷⁰ Let us also consider the following commentary by Tanya Krzywinksa on why zombies are so popular in gaming:

The popularity of zombies in video games may in part be informed by the way that they articulate, in a mediated fantasy context, contemporary cultural fears about the loss of autonomy or the capacity of science to create apocalyptic devastation. . . . Game zombies provide the ideal enemy: they are strong, relentless, and already dead; they look spectacularly horrific; and they invite the player to blow them away without guilt or a second thought.⁷¹

Perhaps this downright Girardian comment is the perfect segue from gaming to walking. For, unlike zombie gaming, in which we are never zombies and seek to “blow them away,” in zombie walks people revel in dressing up as and behaving like the undead. This is altogether mimetic, indeed.

Walking the Undead

A zombie walk “is not actually the apocalyptic rise of the undead,” as Julia Round explains, “but instead . . . an organised event that has become an established cultural practice at a global level since the early 2000s.” That is indeed the case, as people gather, dressed as zombies, to saunter about city streets, through forests, along boardwalks, and over fields throughout the world, from Toronto to Cape Town, from Asbury Park to Cleveland, from Hong Kong to Sydney, from Bristol to Tokyo, from Paris to Buenos Aires, and so on ad infinitum. Some of them are formally organized, while others are more of the “flash mob” variety. Some take the form of “pub crawls, zombie marathons, zombie LARPs, and zombie ice-skating parties. Like the zombie plague itself, such events are becoming ubiquitous, perhaps even endemic.”⁷² Why? Where did this come from and what is the point? Round provides part of the answer, stating that they are sometimes forms of “political protest” (think Occupy Wall Street) or part of “a movie tribute, or simply a Halloween celebration.”⁷³ Furthermore, it is about fun, evidently, and often about booze:

The pursuit of fun is the most common reason, although community spirit and a love of zombies also feature. Families and children can often be found in the horde. The activity itself seems to be motivated by a dual imperative toward group bonding (zombies are never alone) and individualism (both costume and performance are frequently elaborate and unique). The walk inscribes the duality of fear and play so often found in the gothic.⁷⁴

Where Girard’s mimetic theory seems, at least to me, very helpful in understanding the popularity of zombie games, it also has limited application to the analysis of zombie walks. In these gatherings there is really no scapegoating at play, no surrogate victims to sacrifice toward allaying the human proclivity to intraspecies violence, but clearly these participants imitate zombies. Rather than being potential sacrificial victims who are cathartic to kill for the participant to survive, here the walkers are make-believe zombies intent on having a good time and perhaps getting hopelessly inebriated while contributing to the next world record for the largest zombie walk ever.

Let us take a brief look at the history of zombie walks before putting on our Indiana Jones hats to specifically consider a few of them. Then we explore further just what they mean and why they are so popular. Zombie walks are a somewhat new form of cosplay, a word that is a mash-up of “costume” and “play.” The term was coined in 1984 by Japanese journalist and publisher Takahashi Nobuyuki after he attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles, where many in attendance were costumed.⁷⁵ Worldcon, as it is commonly known, dates from 1939. That year the first fan to dress in costume appeared, a man named Forrest Ackerman. In other forms, cosplay has a longer history, with much earlier roots—as deep as the Middle Ages, really—in events like masquerade balls, carnivals, and costume parties.

A few years ago I was visiting Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market and was quite struck by the hordes of people strolling around dressed up like any cartoon or anime or manga character one could possibly think of. They did what anyone else does at the Market—eat, drink, buy fresh produce, gourmet cheeses, spices, crafts, etcetera. I even saw Batman getting a shoeshine! A boot shine, actually. I had spaced out on what month it was, but I reassured myself that it was not Halloween, and, as it turned out, it was May. So I sat at the bar and chatted up Wonder Woman, who was pounding Bloody Marys at 9:00 in the morning. This tipsy superhero, fresh in from San Diego, informed me that Wizard World Comic Con was being held over three days in the adjacent Pennsylvania Convention Center. That explained it, as Comic Con is one of the most popular forms of cosplay in the world, with masses of superheroes and villains flocking annually from all over the country and sometimes from abroad to cities like Philadelphia and Chicago. I wish I had asked Wonder Woman if she had flown to Philly from San Diego in costume. Fitting (pun intended), as the first Comic Con was held in San Diego in 1970.⁷⁶

So zombie walks are not monolithic; they don’t just fall from the sky. In addition to cosplay, the walks are also heirs to the emergence of the flash mob (or flashmob, sometimes called smart mobs). Flash mobs largely rely on social media, which obviously is a recent phenomenon but one that has transformed much of the world, for better or for worse. Some are for charitable purposes. That said, the pioneering flash mob did not rely on social media, as far as I can tell. Myspace was the first social networking site, and it launched in 2003, the very year of the first ever mob event, in New York in a Macy’s rug department. Facebook began the following year, in 2004, YouTube in 2005, and Twitter in 2006. The senior editor of Harper’s magazine, Bill Wasik, came up with the weird (not sure what other word to use here) idea to invite a large number of people to go to several New York bars and prepare to be instructed on what to do next. More than a hundred people then followed the instructions to head to Macy’s and gather to visit the rug department en masse. Cynthia Bix explains what happened next: “When approached by a salesperson they were supposed to say that they lived together and were shopping for a rug for their warehouse loft.” Wasik later managed to get two hundred people to gather in the Hyatt Hotel lobby in New York to clap together for fifteen seconds. “With the Macy’s and Hyatt events was born the flash mob.”⁷⁷

Online networking would soon enable flash mobbing in many parts of the world. Not all of it has been good, though. A flash mob is basically a gathering of “a large group of people” who “assemble at a public place, more or less spontaneously. They do something wacky or surprising for a short period of time and then disperse.”⁷⁸ Given that the first flash mobs occurred in the bowels of such bastions of capitalism as Macy’s and the Hyatt Hotel in New York City, I would not disagree with Aristita Ioana Albacan that they are “proven to be performative acts that reconnect individuals with their environment in a collective and creative, playful manner [and] challenge the everyday life routine and the associate mainstream.” Not all of them are so “playful” though.⁷⁹ They have also served as effective forms of protest, but when honest citizens’ lives are disrupted or are harmed by such events, they no longer should be thought of in such terms, in my humble opinion. As someone living and writing in Philadelphia during violent “flash mobs” in the city in 2009 and 2010, I can hardly think of them as “playful,” though perhaps the term “flash mobs” for those events, which were mainly composed of African American teenagers, was simply misapplied by the media.⁸⁰

From cosplay and flash mobs to zombie walks. The first zombie walk was staged in part as a mockery of the vampire, and it all took off from there. The year was 2000 and the setting Milwaukee, at a Gen Con convention that brought together enthusiastic gamers of many interests. Dungeons and Dragons was then all the rage, and many conventioneers role-played as wizards and such, but the vampire remained popular. Irked that too many conventioneers were taking over the event by playing a vampire role-playing game, a few creative, other-thinking men decided to disrupt matters by dressing up as zombies. They gathered sixty folks to paint their faces, tear their clothes, and lurk about the convention space. They called their “LARP-disrupting event . . . Zombie the Hunger,” as the chief architect of the mission recalls. “When we were all properly zombified we extended our arms, started muttering ‘brains’ and lurched towards the closest Vampire LARP.” The groundbreaking zombie walkers were soon urged to disperse and leave by security guards. As they left, they chanted “equal rights for the equally dead!”⁸¹

The following year an innovative event was organized in Sacramento, called a “zombie parade.”⁸² Things really started to take off in 2003, when “400 people took part in a zombie walk in Vancouver, Canada,” while twice as many “transformed themselves into hungry monsters in October 2006,” as Redfern explains, “when a similar event was held at the Monroeville Mall, in Monroeville, Pennsylvania.”⁸³ The mall was chosen for the walk because it was the setting of George Romero’s epic 1979 zombie film Dawn of the Dead.

Immediately after the Monroeville zombie walk, the popularity of such events “reached near apocalyptic proportions.” To wit, Ledbury, England witnessed 4000 zombies invade in 2009, the same year that 5000 lurchingly descended upon Brisbane, Australia, and another 8000 sauntered about Grand Rapids, Michigan. South America soon caught the fever, as evinced by upward of 13,000 participants in a zombie walk in 2012 in Santiago, Chile, and some 24,000 at a walk that same year in Buenos Aires, Argentina. But those numbers were smashed when a zombie walk in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, attracted 30,000 undead.⁸⁴ The Ledbury event once held the distinction as the largest zombie walk ever in the Guinness Book of World Records, but, obviously, that has since been absolutely shattered, first by Asbury Park, New Jersey (my own hometown), then by Mexico City. Guinness started listing zombie walks in 2006, honoring Pittsburgh as the first holder of the turnout record, although a meager 846 walkers were counted. Asbury Park regained its title in 2013, with 10,000 zombies walking on its iconic Atlantic front boardwalk. Minneapolis would soon wrest the title from the Jersey Shore thanks to a zombie pub crawl and the participation of some 30,000 humanoids.

As with zombie video games, we will limit ourselves to briefly discussing five instances (in this case, locations) from among countless significant zombie walks: Asbury Park, Cape Town, Cleveland, Mexico City, and Tokyo. We’ll go about this alphabetically:

Asbury Park, New Jersey

In 2010 and 2013, this Jersey Shore town broke the record for the most zombie walkers ever gathered at a single event, with 4093 falsely bloodied participants tallied.⁸⁵ Asbury Park is named for the father of Methodism in America, Francis Asbury (1745–1816), and one can only wonder what he might think of thousands of zombies sauntering about his namesake city. In 2020, the Asbury Park zombie walk was virtual because of the COVID pandemic, but it has since resumed live and in-person, or undead and in-person.⁸⁶ The first was held there in 2008, the very year World Zombie Day was created (though by some accounts World Zombie Day was launched in 2006). So there is a good bit of history here, in a city most identified with Bruce Springsteen, The Boss. Even though the rock star did not grow up here (that was in Freehold), he lived here as an emergent musician and cut his teeth in local venues, especially the legendary Stone Pony, a favorite spot of some of the walking zombies who need a break from the nearby boardwalk to have a drink.

As Asbury’s zombie walk grew more popular, interesting features were added along the boardwalk. For instance, there are now souvenir stands in Convention Hall and professional makeup artists, which is great if you have no idea how to make your face look zombic. There is also a “Thriller Dance Workshop” for walkers who wish to partake in a performance later in the day or evening, and an inimitable “Jell-O Brains Eating Contest.”⁸⁷ Many walkers converge in bars following their bloody sauntering and brain-eating march along the boardwalk. Booze and zombies seem to go well together. And there are plenty of bars in Asbury, the Stone Pony being but one of them.

One striking thing about the two zombie walks I attended as an observer years ago in Asbury Park was that most participants seemed to be from out of town, and almost all of the zombies were white.⁸⁸ The city has been gentrifying heavily in recent years, mostly and literally “on the other side of the tracks,” and it is unclear how much of this development benefits Black people on the other side, west of the tracks. One could also raise the question of what good zombie walks do for the marginalized in American cities. To walk, you need time, money for makeup, transportation, etcetera. But the organizers laud the zombie walk as part of Asbury Park’s renaissance after decades of poverty, sadness, racial violence, abandonment, and decay:

When it comes to zombies the dead never die… they just keep coming back. It is my sincere hope that everyone who joined us for this (or any) Zombie Walk in Asbury Park over the years will return to do it again in the future. The Zombie walk . . . has played a tremendous part in the revitalization of the City of Asbury Park.⁸⁹

It’s obvious that zombies are big money these days, but it is more than a bit ironic to hear them spoken of as agents of “revitalization.” Walk on, my undead brothers and sisters, walk on.

Cape Town, South Africa

Cape Town is home to a few “zombie monuments,” plinths or pedestals on which once stood statues of colonialists and imperialist figures, like, in this instance, Cecil Rhodes.⁹⁰ The beautiful South African city is also a key setting in a series of celebrated zombie apocalypse novels by Lily Herne, the Mall Rat Series.⁹¹ It thus makes perfect sense that Cape Town should be home to a popular annual zombie walk, and it is interesting to reflect on the zombie’s return to Africa (please see Chapter Five) in the form of masqueraders covered in fake blood. It’s been quite a journey for the undead, indeed, around the world and back again to square one.

Like most other zombie walks, Cape Town’s happens annually, is “family friendly,” and generates support for a local charity. The Zombie Walk South Africa website touts it as follows: “An event for all-ages making it fun for the entire family to participate and is the only pet friendly event of its kind.” I would differ with that statement, as zombie dogs are not uncommon sights at zombie walks elsewhere in the world. But I digress. The Cape Town walks, furthermore, “help raise funds for local charities like the Lucky Lucy Foundation for abused and neglected animals and they continue to do so.”⁹² The paradox of (symbolically) eating human brains while raising funds to save animals is worth contemplating here.

Tied to Halloween and clearly the city’s largest event during that holiday period, the first zombie walk in Cape Town was held in 2009 with just under 200 participants. In 2015, some 3500 zombie walkers took part, and soon Cape Town went on a campaign to break the Guinness Book record for largest zombie walk ever, aggressively marketing the event by tying it to the city’s lively party culture and assuring potential walkers that “Zombie Walk has a 100% safety record with no real blood ever spilled.”⁹³ Here are the rules:

• Obey the marshals, security staff, and medical staff and all traffic officers at ALL times.

• Mock weapons are welcome, however all blades MUST be fake.

• All firearms must have an ORANGE TIP.

• Consumption of alcohol during the walk is prohibited.

• Stay hydrated at all times please.

• Have a plan – if anyone in your group gets lost have a meet-up point.

• Share the event, invite everyone you know, attend on the day.

• Have fun!

Sober, obedient zombies! Go figure! The 2020 event, like many zombie walks around the world, was canceled due to COVID.⁹⁴ There is something additionally ironic about zombies cowering in the face of a viral pandemic, which foiled Cape Town’s effort to beat out Minneapolis for the record as the largest zombie walk ever. Maybe some other year.

Cleveland, Ohio

Chicago was a contender for consideration in this chapter, as it does have an annual zombie walk that is massively popular, one of the largest in the United States.⁹⁵ Seattle too. But I chose Cleveland just to do something less obvious. Usually Cleveland’s zombie walk takes place in a ring suburb on the lake, a town called Lakewood. As in Asbury Park, Cleveland’s zombie walk is tied to drinking, as observed by local journalist Julie Washington: “Within the hour, the zombies’ thirst will turn from blood to beer, and from chomping human brains to taking pictures of one another.”⁹⁶ The starting point is outside a pub, after all, the historic Five O’Clock Lounge.

Cleveland was an early entrant into zombie walkdom, with Ohio’s largest city launching its first event of this deadening, sauntering kind in 2007. That year, a modest seventy-five participants showed up, with “a couple of volunteer makeup artists” on hand for the ghoulish cause. “From there it has always grown,” said chief organizer and underground horror film producer Joe Ostrica. The walk quickly became so popular that by 2009 it was being held twice a year. Cleveland’s zombie walk enjoyed a serious dose of undead cred when one of the actors from Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Bill Hinzman, who played a graveyard zombie, was the event’s “special guest,” made up the very way he had appeared in the greatest zombie movie ever.

One of the curious things about zombie walks in general is that they are often designed to be “family-friendly events.”⁹⁷ So, in the Cleveland zombie walk, instead of setting up a lemonade stand, entrepreneurial children set up a stand from which they sell “zombie blood.” This is evidently a successful stop along the walk among the performing, lurching undead, who seemingly stop for nothing else—save, of course, to pose for pictures or grab a beer. In addition to being welcoming of children, in Cleveland the walkers, who each pay five dollars for their tickets, are all required to bring two nonperishable food items, which in 2009 netted over 500 pounds of food for a local charity. Meanwhile, passersby in cars, at the intersection of Clifton Boulevard and 117th Street, take notice and slow down to take pictures of the walking dead and to honk their horns.

And, like many cities, Cleveland also hosts a spinoff 5K zombie run, in which runners “have flags which represent their health. Zombies will try to steal those flags.” The runners are not zombies, but they have to navigate “a zombie-infested course.”⁹⁸ Another spinoff that might well be unique to Cleveland is an inimitable event called “Zombies on the Lake Paintball Annihilation,” where you can pay twenty bucks for a spot on a “zombie annihilation vehicle” and a rented paintball gun with 100 rounds of ammo. It is something like a hayride, and you stealthily maraud on your annihilation vehicle through the zombie-infested woods and try to shoot them. If you run out of ammo, five dollars will get you another 100 paintballs.⁹⁹

Mexico City, Mexico

Mexicans have long painted their faces to look like skeletons and walked through and slept in cemeteries in the amazing and beautiful tradition known as the Day of the Dead. In ancient Aztec religion, the dead were believed to live among the living, while in ancient Mayan religion there is a dreamworld in which “men and women transform into Flesh Dropper and Fallen Flesh: as their name suggests, they lose their skin and parade around as skeletons.”¹⁰⁰ Add to that the Catholic feasts of All Souls Day and All Saints’ Day, and you have, in this deeply Catholic country, the perfect baseline on which to launch one of the world’s largest zombie walks. Recall from the previous chapter that Mexico was also the first place where a foreign zombie movie was made, and there have been quite a few produced there ever since.

In 2011, Mexico City beat out Asbury Park for the record number of zombie walkers, topping 10,000 and entering the Guinness Book, a triumph that received worldwide press coverage, especially in Asia. Asbury Park bounced back two years later to retake the title, which New Jersey has since lost to the Twin Cities, as noted above. Mexico City has an advantage in being one of the largest cities in the world with some of the worst traffic in the world, so the feeling of being zombified in a car is very common there. In the view of Victor Ramirez Ladron de Guevara, the zombie’s wild popularity in Mexico has much to do with identity, for “the figure of the zombie points variously (and simultaneously) to past, present and (imagined) future Mexican national identities that are suppressed and/or encouraged.”¹⁰¹

For zombie walks, 2011 was a watershed year, as Mexico emerged supreme. Here is Guevara’s description and take on the events:

In this event, participants not only dressed as zombies, they also performed zombified versions of iconic Hollywood characters (zombified versions of Charlie Chaplin, Wolverine and Marilyn Monroe were highly visible during the march). Other Zombie Walks across the world privilege the recreation of a specific number of zombie types, such as “nurse zombie, business person zombie, geek zombie, sports zombie.” However, in Mexico’s Zombie Walk participants reinforced their condition as globalized citizens.

In Mexico City, the zombie walk is also readable as a form of resistance, he adds, for it “reactivates the memory of thousands of Zapatistas in a nation that has continuously and successfully suppressed its indigenous roots.”¹⁰² Zombies thus vicariously channel and celebrate Zapata and thereby bolster pride in indigenous Mexican history and culture.

Tokyo, Japan

Japan has a tremendously vibrant zombie culture, having produced dozens of films, video games, anime, and manga that are zombic in some way, shape, or form. Its largest city and capital, Tokyo, launched its first zombie walk in 2013, in a substantial and leafy place called Yoyogi Park. Michael d’Estries ranks this among the best eight zombie walks in the world, along with those in Asbury Park, London, Mexico City, Pittsburgh, Toronto, and Strasbourg, placing it in quite interesting, lofty, and global company.¹⁰³ Tokyo’s zombie walk is sponsored by an organization called Zombiena, “a self-proclaimed ‘zombie performance unit’ whose members refer to each other by number rather than name.”¹⁰⁴ Zombiena also takes over a local city bar for zombie nights once a month, a “fetish bar” called Crow, where late afternoon on the last Sunday of each month you can go in for a drink and soon “see the limp shapes start to shuffle toward you.”¹⁰⁵ Those would be zombies.

The zombie walk in Yoyogi Park features mostly Japanese nationals dressed up as any number of zombie sorts, including clowns, schoolgirls, and Buddhist monks or nuns, while toddlers with blood painted on their faces sip juice boxes as they are pushed around the park in strollers by their zombie parents or zombie nannies. The event, pre-COVID at least, has always attracted a good number of foreigners, as many people actually travel around the globe to participate in major zombie walks, such being the world’s obsession with the zombie. An American visitor asked a couple of young Japanese women walkers what the appeal of participating was, and one replied: “Freedom! Nothing to think and nothing to do.” Another replied, somewhat ironically for sure, “Because it makes me feel alive.”¹⁰⁶

Yoyogi Park is the largest zombie walk in Tokyo but not the only one, and there are others in other large Japanese cities, like Kyoto. In Tokyo, another takes place at Universal Studios, and zombie walkers have even ambled through the city’s red-light district. The one in the park, though, features “(simulated) flesh eating.”¹⁰⁷ The question remains: Why? Why have so many cities around the world taken up the zombie walk, and why do so many thousands of people participate? It is to that question that our attention now turns. But first, further acknowledgment is due to Tokyo, and to Zombiena, for hosting an unprecedented “girls-only” zombie walk in 2011, one featuring “an all-girl zombie army in bikinis terrorizing ramen shops and assorted bars.”¹⁰⁸ To their credit, they also drank a lot of beer, unlike the walkers in Cape Town.

Figuring Out Dead-ish Walkers and Gamers Who Kill Them

Games and parades are generally about fun, but they can also be about violence and protest, and about expunging the deep proclivities to violence in our species, ala René Girard’s theory of ritual sacrifice. Recall that the first zombie walk was held at a gaming convention and was something of a protest against there being too many LARPing vampires in Milwaukee that year. Many scholars read protest into zombie walks as well. So, it seems that it is all about fun, protest, and violence, though the violence actually hurts no one, and zombies seem to be morally easy victims of players’ potentially fatal gunshots, bombs, and plant seeds. Unlike players of zombie games, walkers are not armed with any lethal weapons (just fake ones), plus they are zombies and, out of solidarity, not about to wipe each other out. Solidarity and what Emile Durkheim calls “collective effervescence” (an intoxicating “delirium” produced by collective rituals) are sometimes on full display on such walks, as well as in most forms of multiplayer zombie video games.¹⁰⁹

In the following chapter we extensively cover zombie theory: interesting intellectual commentary as to why people are so obsessed with zombies and what philosophical questions the zombie raises and sometimes even answers. But for now let’s stick to some of the leading theoretical points made by scholars of gaming. Brandon Kempner makes the following observation: “Zombies and capitalism are cut from the same cloth. Both are relentless, multiplying without bounds, showing no mercy, no compassion, and no empathy.” And although “films and novels may have lost their revolutionary powers, the violence, spectacle, and immersion of zombie video games retain their ability to disrupt capitalist realism.”¹¹⁰ But is that entirely true? When zombie games generate billions of dollars for large companies in Tokyo and Silicon Valley—bastions of capitalism that they are—can we really conceive of them as anticapitalist? No one really needs to play zombie video games, after all, while so many people in our world wake up hungry every single day and must scramble to find food and potable water, feed and clothe their children, pay for their schooling, and acquire other basic necessities.

Similarly, some scholars have tried to read “resistance” to capitalism and to injustice in zombie walks, and here they are on firmer ground than the game theory folks, at least when it comes to those walks that are “explicitly intended to be read as political acts,” as Kee reminds us. “As part of ‘Buy Nothing Day’ protests, zombie walkers sometimes converge on local malls and shopping districts,”¹¹¹ for instance, and zombie walkers participated in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Meanwhile, in 2007, as Elizabeth McAlister explains, “a zombie flash mob invaded a San Francisco Apple Store to stage an anticonsumerist performance piece where zombies pretended to eat the computers on display.”¹¹² That is clearly an anticapitalist form of protest, though most zombie games and zombie walks seem not to be. Despite having been told by walkers themselves “that the zombie walk wasn’t a form of protest but was just for fun,”¹¹³ Sarah Juliet Lauro disagrees; then again, “protest” and “resistance” are the tropes that Lauro explores in relation to zombies throughout their history, dating back to the slave era.¹¹⁴

Concerning the majority of zombie walks that are not explicitly designed as protests, Kee also begs to differ: “The rise of zombie walks [and gaming] has coincided with growing post-9/11 reservations about the war on terror as well as global economic security. The fact remains, though . . . most walkers [and, I suspect most gamers] aren’t necessarily making these links when they participate.”¹¹⁵ If you have the spare cash to splurge on video games and the spare time to participate in a zombie walk, can this all really be about anticapitalism and resistance? There is much more to it than that, and we consider leading theoretical commentaries about zombies and the zombie apocalypse in the next chapter, some of which have deep and impressive philosophical roots. Enough with the games and the parades! Time now to get serious and deep.

Notes