Why I Can’t Watch Zombie Movies Anymore
This essay contains major spoilers for Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Train to Busan (2016).
I think it’s safe to say we’ve had one doozy of a year. It feels like every day, something else happens that makes me long for the end of the year. But as October began, I felt a little bit of hope. October meant Halloween, which was objectively the best holiday of the year. I was ready to be scared by something other than pandemics, wildfires, and the upcoming election. So what do I do when the world gets to be too scary? Put on some horror movies.
Although Halloween was going to look a bit different this year, I was ready to dress up in a homemade costume, stuff myself with KitKats, and watch movies under a warm blanket. My ideal Halloween starts on October 1, as I try to watch all the horror movies I can fit into 31 days. Having enrolled in a horror film class for the semester, I had a list of movie recommendations that I was excited to watch. My viewings were going well, the slasher movies made me jump and the creature features made me squeal, but it wasn’t until I reached George Romero’s 1968 cult classic film Night of the Living Dead that I felt a real sense of fear. At the end of the hour and thirty-seven minute movie, I felt hollow inside. I couldn’t fathom why at the time, as I had just watched gore-fests I hadn’t batted an eye at, but this film shook me to my core. It wasn't until a few weeks later that I realized why.
We had just started our unit on zombies (I know, literally the coolest class ever). I had brushed off the feelings of dread the movie had aroused in me. I was in the middle of my viewing of Train to Busan, the South Korean horror/action flick by director Yeon Sang-ho, that I felt this sense of unease. Not the normal type of unease that comes with horror movie viewing, the “oh shit, I have to stop watching or I’m going to have a panic attack” type of unease. Never before had I encountered a movie that I couldn’t emotionally detach from and that made me so upset that I had to take breaks while viewing it.
The realization hit me like a train: I was watching a movie that centered on a virus spreading rapidly throughout a country. Loved ones, people you had come to know and care for were falling victim to a virus that devastated the body. As the characters learned about the virus from the news and from loved ones in the movie, I had a flashback to last March, sitting in an office talking with my coworkers about a virus they’d heard had reached the states. I’d scoffed when my coworker said they suspected the school would shut down for two weeks. I never could have suspected it would shut down for two semesters. Watching these movies felt so uncomfortable because it no longer felt like a crazy horror story, it felt like the life we’ve been living for the last 7 months.
The parallels were uncanny. The virus spread rapidly, faster than could be controlled, between people in close contact; in the movie the virus ravages a train full of passengers. People were getting sick and dying, it seemed no one was safe. I thought back to my last ride on the subway before New York was forced into quarantine, how I was hyper-aware of every cough, how it felt like I was being stifled by the other passengers who could be carrying the virus for all I knew. By that point nowhere and no one felt safe. As I watched the characters in the film that I had grown attached to get picked off, I thought of everyone I knew that had been afflicted with COVID and felt the devastating sense of loss again. The movie no longer showed what could be, it was a frightening glimpse into our reality living in a pandemic.
The movies left me shaken and I had to take a few minutes once they ended to ground myself and remind myself that the events of the movie were merely fiction. So what do you do when the horror movies get to be too real? Put on some cartoons and hope to God the next pandemic isn’t a zombie one.