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.

Giving the Gift of Zombies

Today is my birthday, and I’ve already written about a blog post for The Great Brain Robbery about the effects of “giving” on the brain. (It makes the brain feel good-- perhaps instead of eating people zombies should work for the Make a Wish Foundation). So why not do the same for the zombie blog? So I Googled “giving the gift of zombies.”

First hit: the Zombie Cafe wiki, a post on how to gift food to your friends’ refrigerators. Intriguing. So I looked up the game itself-- its Diner Dash, with zombies.

So add this as another brick in the wall of “zombies are everywhere.” However, I’m not complaining. My own book, Still Life, with Zombie, takes this approach. Even if a thing simply puts a zombie “skin” on something, I’m calling it legit.

Right now, you can get all kinds of Star Wars Lego things. Is this “Star Wars?” That’s not a rhetorical question. You have to decide for yourself. If you call yourself “hard-core” and you claim to be a “purist,” you might have reached the point where your identity includes sneering disparagement of all this brand-abuse. But zombies, see, they’re not a brand. Go ahead, get mad when they make Walking Dead Legos (and I just drooled at the thought of that, so you know where I stand).

Merely slapping a zombie skin on something, as a marketing technique, is fine, and is no different than the way Hooters brings in customers to eat bland burgers. Sex sells, and so do the undead. But we don’t call Hooters a brothel, and we don’t claim Zombie Cafe adds to zombie lore.

So go ahead and play Zombie Cafe if you want, and if people sneer at you for doing so, just remember, they do it to define themselves, and it has nothing to do with you. That’s my gift to you today. Enjoy!