What is Zombie-Ness

Imagine you’re at Zombie Con. All around you, people are enjoying themselves. They’re buying and selling merchandise, discussing movies and TV shows, playing games and fantasizing about the ultimate zombie stronghold. Here and there, you see individuals shuffling in tattered clothes, skin a sickly green, oozing wounds dripping, faces half-torn off.

You feel a touch on your shoulder. Just a simple tap. And now you have the uncontrollable urge to tap someone else on the shoulder. So you do, and for a moment, the urge goes away… only to bubble up inside you again. You must tap someone else on the shoulder. So you find someone else, and it’s the same thing… the urge goes way, but then comes on again. But the next person you see, well, you don’t feel like tapping that person. You barely notice that this person, too, is about to tap someone on the shoulder. You ignore that person, move towards the one he’s going to tap, and tap that person too. There’s no sense of competition—it’s just fresh meat to tap.

In the above, who are the “zombies”? Is it the people dressed up to look like the lurching undead, with their facsimiles of blood and gore and decay? Or is it the ones who can’t help but do what they do, and in doing so, make other people do it too?

I was thinking about this idea of what “zombie-ness” is. Since zombies aren’t actually real, there are two kinds of “zombieness.” There’s all the trapping and tropes, the things that make Zombie walks and Zombie cons so much fun. It’s that veneer if zombieness we’ve talked about ad-nauseum on this blog before.

Its like Angry Birds Star Wars. What is “Star-Wars-Ness?” Ostensibly, it’s a shiny black helmet, cinnamon-buns on the side of the head, a glowing stick, and big orb half-constructed. Those things can be used to dress up the Angry Birds.

But they don’t tell the story—they only work if you already know the story. Whereas the shoulder-tapping scenario is very zombie-like, but without all those tropes and trappings.

But are the two even separable? Yes, if we can have people dress up like zombies without requiring them to be dead and actually feed on people. On the other hand, the shoulder-tappers. Are they really zombies?

I’ll let you know at Shoulder-Tapper Con, where people trade elongated foam fingers, wear shoulder pads, and discussing movies like Night of The Living Interrupters.