There are many things and situations in this world that can provide an eerie parallel to the human existence _ an extreme scenario, or a depiction that is ridiculous in some way and still too true to life for us to acknowledge.
The metamorphosis of a caterpillar is one of these juxtapositions; the plight of the laboratory rat is another, with his world of chemicals and iron bars.
However, there are situations whose human parallels are less obvious than these.
Those situations are too extreme for most people to link to normality, or else their characters are too removed from the average man's perception of humankind.
In the scenario you'll be reading about today, the majority of the subjects aren't likely to be found grazing on milkweed or scurrying below a city in foul metros.
They are superhuman, and they are not human at all _ not any more.
I am, of course, talking about zombies.
These last few years have been good ones for zombie films; in 2004, the remake of "Dawn of the Dead" won the award for Best Zombie Baby Performance, due to lack of competition. In 2006, "Shaun of the Dead" proved to all of us that no one can make gore, violence and horrible maiming as funny as the British can. This year, "I Am Legend" climbed the box office statistics, successfully skirting around the fact that its ending was the product of five epileptic chinchillas and a typewriter because the actual writers had forgotten to write one beforehand.
There are truly great zombie movies, and then there are zombie movies that aren't. You may know the latter as anything with "Resident Evil" or "Why Video Games Should Never Be Made Into Movies" in its title.
Whatever its worthiness of life, almost every zombie movie begins the same way: There's an epidemic.
The epidemic is usually spread by saliva-blood contact, because otherwise it's very difficult to explain why the main character isn't infected (unless the writers take the "I Am Legend" approach, which is known colloquially as "Because we said so"). Most people die, in the sense that they fall down and then get up again.
How does this relate to the life of the average theater patron? This point is fairly open-and-shut: Epidemics, like college children, are no longer safely destroying things in remote locations such as the 1920s or California. They've come home to lurk in our basements, and every five months or so we're shaken by an ominous tremor in the form of a pandemic resonating upwards from the floorboards. These tremors come more and more frequently now that the efficiency of modern news is thinning the floor; SARS and bird flu sent us squealing by tipping over the furniture. There are many questions about the likelihood of a deadly epidemic, but only one is real: How long? How long until it actually happens to us? How long until an airport monitor slips up or the quarantine officials make an error? How long until the wrong raft of immigrants washes up on an American shore? How long?
Because it will happen again. As the human population swells well beyond what nature ever intended it to, the number of organisms that live and grow inside human beings can only mount. Any naturalist will tell you that whenever a population of animals is confined to too small a space, disease rampages through it. The human population passed the point of "too little space" about 150 years ago. The line between a man-eating variant of rabies and an airborne viral scourge is gray and very thin.
Whether he remains alone or stumbles into a group of people that have clung to their omnivorous natures, our B-horror hero is inevitably shown hunting for supplies. Zombie movies don't usually span more than a few months of a character's post-apocalypse life, so the characters normally forage from abandoned stores, houses, or in the case of the second-most famous zombie flick, a mall. If any thought is given to where supplies will come from once the neighborhood is pillaged, it's usually the ambiguous case where a person who's never handled a gun before can miraculously bring down prey with a rifle.
However, the great gods of Hollywood are unlikely to be so helpful in a true apocalypse scenario. Once the local mom-and-pop store is left for the rats, what do you do for food? What do you do for water if there's no bottled water and no rain? What do you do to get those precious metal slugs that make the rotting boogiemen go away? Furthermore, are you willing to kill for your food or a shelter that you manage to find? Are you willing to kill and skin and gut sweet little woodland creatures? And what are you going to do about the hungry survivors bashing down the door to get your food? Can you kill them? Because they can kill you.
There are zombie movies where our hero and his band of merry men are confronted with post-apocalyptic gangs: groups of formerly ordinary civilians that travel in massive groups for protection and ravage towns like conquistadors, stripping liquor stores and grocery stores and laying waste. Such an idea sounds ludicrous in a comfortable theater seat, but if there is no government, then all that remains is anarchy. Think of the domestic dogs that were left behind in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina _ the same dogs that became feral within two weeks and quickly formed packs that were nearly identical to those of wild dogs. Could humans so easily remove the prim domesticity that is taken as their birthright? The humans that would survive an apocalypse could.
I'm sure that many of you take this article as humor; the reason that an apocalypse scenario seems so foreign to all of us is because we're taught from the incubator onward that the government would never let such a thing happen to us _ the government is in control.
Obviously, the American government does quite well in protecting us from outside threats, as is evidenced by our generally comfortable lives. We may rage against it from time to time, but every single one of us is fully reliant on our government to keep away the disease and missiles that many countries would so gladly send to us.
Indulge me and exercise your imagination: The government is gone, its remnants hiding in a bunker in Antarctica. The police are gone. Nearly everyone you've ever met _ your father, your girlfriend, the guy who serves you your Mocha Blended Fun latté every morning _ is either dead or infected. Even the people you're living with would put a bullet between your eyes if you showed signs of infection. You are the only one looking out for you. You are the only one making sure you survive. You are really, for the first time in your miserable life, alone.
Lights on _ the movie's over. Zombies aren't real, and the rumble of the Pepsi delivery truck will still make you swear at 4 tomorrow morning. However, there may come a day when your mind ventures back to that theater for reference: a day when the television can't be switched off because the disease or the missiles are real. No matter the strangeness of its subject, there is nothing like a zombie movie to make you realize how incapable most of us are of surviving in a world without Pepsi and aspirin and double-sided tape. Pray to George A. Romero that that world never comes _ the zombies may be gone, but the threat lives on.
Jessie Matus is a junior at Oneonta High School.
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