Chris Writes About the End of the World

#37 The Big Bad: We Interview the Writer, Director and Star

2012-02-15T11:41:00.001-08:00

Here at Chris Writes About The End Of The World we usually cover apocalypse fiction, but sometimes we like to venture out in the wider horror genre, such as when we get a chance to interview the creators of a film, or get our mitts on a review copy. This is for two reasons- firstly it makes us feel important, which is much why the blog uses the royal “we” when it’s really obviously written by just one guy, and secondly because we really love free stuff.

For both these reasons, we decided to take a look at The Big Bad, a film that’s been getting awards and nominations across a whole bunch of films festivals, and employing our first ever interviewee, Jeremiah Kipp, as assistant director.

“The Big Bad” is a title that calls up to things to mind- wolves, and end-of-season bad guys from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It doesn’t disappoint, and by the end of the film you’ll had your fill of werewolves and badass monster-killing heroines.

The world is one that modern horror fans will easily recognise- There are things that go bump in the night, and those things now have jobs and families and pay their taxes on time. They form a shadowy, behind the scenes society that’s somewhere between Alcoholics Anonymous and the Mafia. It’s a trope that’ll be familiar to anyone who watches Buffy, or Being Human, or Grimm.

That said, care-free quipping interspersed with the occasional “dramatic” scene is really not what this film’s about. In the world of The Big Bad even the most well-meaning people are all kinds of fucked up. Where Buffy will try to talk about the nastier side of life through the lens of a paranormal metaphor, here there are all kinds of monsters, but they exist alongside all the truly horrible regular things that can fuck up your life, and in the end, those are the worst parts.

Okay, I lied, getting your eye ripped out its socket is the worst part.

The Big Bad’s influences are worn pretty clearly on its sleeve, there’s plenty of Noir in here and a massive dose of Quentin Tarantino (including the obligatory view-from-a-car-boot shot). However, this film doesn’t have the flash and zap of a Tarantino film- there’s barely any soundtrack, and the dialogue is far more naturalistic, so that the end result is this feels more like the sort of thing that would influence Tarantino than the other way round.

Having seen this movie, I got a chance to ask a few questions of the film’s director, Bryan Enk, and the film’s writer and star, Jessi Gotta.

1) We write a lot on this blog about how all writers are stealing from all the other writers. Can you tell us who you've been stealing from to make The Big Bad, and why?

JESSI GOTTA: This was my first script, so I am new to the scene and not aware about the stealing amongst screenwriters? (Although it completely stands to reason that plagiarism does happen.) ...a specific writer doesn't really stand out? The idea and story itself was all developed by Enk and I, but I would say the style of moments were definitely influenced by Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi... maybe hints of David Lynch.

BRYAN ENK: In developing the script and story with Jessi, I was definitely coming from a director's point of view, so a lot of my input was based on a certain kind of image or a specific kind of tone/atmosphere that I wanted to get across (or at least try to). I think the distinct two-act structure of Tarantino's DEATH PROOF and FROM DUSK TILL DAWN was always something I was thinking of in terms of their sudden tone and content shifts in their respective second acts, even though THE BIG BAD ended up having three acts. And, with us both coming from theatre, I've often referenced playwrights such as Sam Shepard and Tracy Letts when describing the story -- their often surrealist flourishes were definitely influences.

2) Like the TV series Ultraviolet, and so many zombie movies we've made it a drinking game rule, in The Big Bad you never actually name the monster, although anyone who knows a bit about horror will know which monster comes out at full moon, dislikes silver and infects others with its bites. (It's Sasquatch isn't it? This is a sasquatch movie?) Why did you decide to go down this route, running the entire length of the film without naming the monster?

Pictured: Possibly sasquatch

BE: I don't think that was a conscious decision on our part but rather a natural result of the whole process of developing the script. It might have something to do with the fact that there might be something inherently goofy with the term "werewolf," or that the film ultimately approaches monsters (and the idea of something "monstrous") on a heavily metaphorical level (as well as a literal one). I think at some point we realized that our film might be more of a supernatural mystery than a "horror movie," and not naming the monster added to that sense of approaching it as a detective story.

3) Jessi, you produced, wrote and starred in this film. At what point did you decide to take on the lead role, and how much did it influence the writing process. Did you find yourself saying "I want to stab a werewolf (or possibly sasquatch) a whole bunch of times" or "You know, I think I would look bitching in an eyepatch"?

JG: It was always the plan for me to play a lead in the film and for Bryan to direct; what was not planned was me writing it. Looking bitching in an eyepatch was just a coincidence.

Coincidence, suuuuure...

BE: One of my earlier story pitches to Jessi as we were doing our first round of brainstorming was an idea for a short film that I had been mulling over for a while called THAT HAIRY MOTHERFUCKER, which was going to be just ten straight minutes of a woman and a werewolf beating the crap out of each other in the desert with no explanation or context whatsoever. I don't think the actual pitch went into much more detail than that. I had no potential "plot" for it beyond that; Jessi took it and ran with it, and from that came THE BIG BAD.

4) There's also quite a lot of fairytale imagery going on here, with your red-haired protagonist going up against an adversary who has the words "Big" and "Bad" prefixing his name, passing into a hidden world full of various threats and traps. Hollywood's latest thing seems to be fairytales at the moment, at least until they've hashed out a script for the Connect 4 movie. Do you think there's a reason for that, and what do you think makes for a good or bad use of fairytale imagery in movies?

BE: Fairy tales look to definitely be the new "comic book movie." It seems pretty inevitable -- like comic books, they're properties with huge built-in fan bases and all the creative heavylifting has already been done, so all Hollywood has to do is swoop in with a few million bucks and a handful of at least semi-clever twists with which to call it "revisionist" and you've got yourself a blockbuster. I think they've just gotten started, though, and it's too early to tell what might make for "good" or "bad" imagery or approaches. I think it has the potential to be completely polarizing, though -- SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN looks amazing whereas MIRROR MIRROR… does not.

5) Finally - It's the zombie apocalypse. What's your survival strategy?

BE: I recently attended the Anchorage International Film Festival where I saw an animated zombie short called YEAR ZERO. It's the first zombie movie I've ever seen that made me feel like I just wouldn't make it under such circumstances. With zombie movies like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and DAWN OF THE DEAD, you put yourself into the shoes of the survivors and kind of watch the story through their eyes. Something about YEAR ZERO made me identify more with the ex-roommate locked in the bathroom (who's now a zombie) or the many zombie hordes stumbling around New York City than with the rogue survivor. Great short, though the whole time watching it I was thinking, "Man, I wouldn't make it through this. I'd be one of the zombies." So I have no survival strategy whatsoever!

JG: One word: houseboat.

***

It has to be said, houseboat is one of the smarter zombie survival plans I’ve heard.

Currently The Big Bad is touring the festivals. If you happen in be in the States, you might be lucky enough to catch it at one of these festivals:

DC Independent Film Festival, Washington, D.C. - Friday, March 2

Charlotte Film Festival, Charlotte, NC - Monday, March 26

Brooklyn Girl Film Festival, Brooklyn, NY - Friday, March 30

I’ll let you know if a chance to view it on this side of the pond comes up anytime soon as well. If you get the chance, it’s definitely worth checking out.

#36 The Lynx Ark Advert: The Price of Survival

2012-01-18T15:56:00.000-08:00

Hello!

I’ll be honest with you, this week has not been the most productive of weeks and I haven’t found as much time to work on the blog as I should. But, skipping a week this soon into the new year would look bad. What I need is a really, really short apocalyptic movie- preferably one with an elaborate apocalypse survival strategy that I could pick apart. After all, we’ve seen the apocalyptic survival strategies of the super rich, the big society approach to apocalypse survival and ways for atheists to cope with a Biblical apocalypse. So a variation on that theme would be good.

Yep, this is exactly the sort of subtle symbolism I want to analyse

Fortunately, a certain group of creatives has seen fit to provide me with just that. Unfortunately, it’s in the form of an advert for a company I have a longstanding grudge against. See, back in 2003 this company unleashed an ad campaign under the slogan “Men’s sweat only attracts other men”. Despite a determined letter writing campaign on my behalf, they never issued a retraction to warn young gay and bisexual men that no, their BO is still massively off-putting, probably resulting in many disappointed, lonely and sweaty young men.

For this reason, I want to make sure that this review doesn’t inadvertently lead to this company getting a bunch of hits or an SEO keyword boost. So throughout this review I’m going to be linking to their site using a variety of insulting phrases, while never mentioning their brand name, or what they actually sell. Vengeance is a dish best served cold.

That said, here is that one minute long apocalyptic movie, as brought to you by the smell of your taint.

It’s a terrifying story. Regular readers will know that apocalyptic fiction is often used to show the darker side of human nature. Whether it’s the way that horrific events can bring out our worst instincts, or that in the end the biggest threats to our species aren’t apocalyptic catastrophes, but ourselves. This film, brought to us by the smell of a high school changing room, is the story of a psychopath’s mission to exploit the imminent apocalypse to create what can only be described as a floating hell for his passengers. Cleverly, the film resists the urge to show us this character’s dreadful comeuppance, instead simply leaving it implied.

Only the pure will survive
The film’s anti-hero is clearly a fan of Judeo-Christian imagery, building a kind of modern “Noah’s Ark”. However, the way these plans are executed hints at an extremely warped and disturbing world-view, on a par with the mad scientist in Human Centipede, or the killer from the Saw movies. He is a perfectly realised character, and even his tiniest actions show us his twisted vision of the world. Even an innocent act like carving a shape into a potato shows us his entire perception of womankind.

It's this. This is his perception of womankind.

As in the Bible, our anti-hero has his ship’s passengers, or maybe cargo is a better word, board the ship two by two.

This is the most obvious sign of the man’s sinister world view. Given that his passengers are entirely human women, and completely ignoring the implication that this man clearly sees women as animals, just what sort of “twos” is he dividing them up into? Nationality? Ethnic origin? The pairs we see have similar hairstyles and do appear to be paired up by race. This is in a situation that already has a very nasty whiff of eugenics about it. After all these are women with no visible disabilities, who fall within a very specific body-type and conform to a certain idea of beauty

But perhaps the most sinister aspect of his selection process is the question: Why does he need two of each type? In the original story, this was so the animals could breed. Since that’s biologically impossible here, the only possible conclusion is that the man needs a spare of each type... for some reason.

You know, in case one of his goths get broken...

Voyage of the damned
However, as is common in apocalypse fiction, you only realise the true horror of the situation once you begin to inspect the background. In Shaun of the Dead, the zombie apocalypse is happening right behind the protagonists for the whole first act. While playing Left 4 Dead, we only gather the true scope of the apocalypse when we see the constant presence of health warnings, barricades and abandoned military equipment.

In this film it is only when we look at the boat our protagonist is building that we realise just what a nightmarish future he is envisioning for the women who join him.

Perhaps our first clue is when we see the accommodation these women will be sleeping in. Except of course, at this point in the film we don’t know that this accommodation is built for women to sleep in. Going along with the Noah’s ark narrative, you might think that this boat is built for animals. If this is the case, it seems perfectly ordinary that the man is building them HUTCHES. Yes, the homogeneously shaped but ethnically diverse women will survive the coming end of the world, so long as they are willing to live in HUTCHES.

Okay, so maybe he wants to save as many women as possible and this is the most space-efficient way he can do it, and if he awards himself a little more luxury as captain, well, who can blame him? It’s his boat.

They get little curtains, what are you complaining about?

But as we see him build this boat, we get a horrifying glimpse of just what these women’s lives will be like. Aside from the hutches these women will sleep in, we see one other room.

Exercise bikes. There’re weights as well, but the exercise bikes are the focal point of the room. What are they there for?

I’ve got two theories. The most obvious theory is that, having gathered these prime physical specimens, he doesn’t want them to let themselves go when the floods come pouring in. There’s clearly not that much room on the boat, and the women are living in ACTUAL HUTCHES. But really, are they that likely to get fat? Given what we know about our main character so far, does he really seem like the sort to lay on massive feasts for these women?

No. The truth is far more sinister, and the clue is glimpsed in the very next shot.

We cut from the exercise bikes, to the record player. Taking its cues from Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series, in this film the women are expected to run the exercise bikes to generate the ship’s electricity.

Life for these women is going to be grim. Their days will be spent slogging away at the exercise bikes that will give you splinters in places where you do not want to have splinters, just to keep their overlord’s creature comforts running. Their nights are spent cooped up in an actual hutch, unless the Captain has decided that he wants to bed one of them for the night.

Because, putting it bluntly, this is a rape ship. We already know that this man sees women as nothing more than animals, and the only part of them he really sees is their orifices. The only reason any woman would sign up to be on this boat, the only reason why they could possibly all be queuing up while this man covers himself in what I can only assume is some sort of spray-on cooking oil, is that they know the world is going to end, and this boat is their only hope to survive. If you sleep with someone because the only alternative is death, that’s rape.

The future of our species
The film ends leaving us to ponder the future of this doomed vessel. It could very well mark the end of our entire species- a gene pool where everyone shares the same father is going to lead to all kinds of disorders later down the line.

And yet, there is hope. As we’ve already noted, this man sees women as nothing more than animals, less than animals really. The hutches have no doors, there’s no security, no real way of enforcing his dreadful regime. It’s as if this man not only has total contempt for women, but is actually incapable of conceiving of the idea that they might have any will of their own.

It is this fatal flaw that will lead to the women banding together to overthrow him. Then hopefully they’ll keel-haul the fucker.

Think of it as a sort of post-apocalyptic Amistad

#35 The Enemy/The Dead/The Fear: Zombie Apocalypse for Kids

2012-01-10T08:09:00.000-08:00

It’s been a whole year since I first sat down and decided that the Internet needed to hear all of my opinions on zombie apocalypse fiction. Say, you know what I’ve not done for a few weeks? Given you my opinions on some zombie apocalypse fiction! Let’s do that today.

With that in mind, here’s my review of Charlie Higson’s Young Adult zombie series, The Enemy, The Dead and The Fear. (By the way, is it just me, or is there something vaguely patronising about the phrase "Young Adult"? Why doesn't Teenage Fiction do the job any more? I can't help feel it's more for the benefit of people in their 20s and 30s who still want to keep reading Harry Potter (and all power to them) than for the supposed intended audience of the books.)

Anyway, let’s start by talking about Lord of the Flies.

Lord of the Flies was a book I saw on my mum’s bookshelf as a kid but didn’t read because the cover was a decomposing pig’s head on a stick, and I was a sensitive child. Then at 13 we were made to study it in English, and fell in love with it.

Pictured: A children's book, clearly

I’m sure I wasn’t the only kid to read that book and realise that A: It was 100% spot on, and B: If I and my classmates ever ended up on a desert island I would probably get my head cracked open with a rock.

But there’s one thing that people always seem to miss about Lord of the Flies. It’s a science fiction story- a post-apocalyptic science fiction story. It’s definitely not a large part of the plot, in fact aside from one mention in the first chapter of the book, I’m not sure it’s ever mentioned again, but it’s definitely there.

Right at the beginning Piggy tells Ralph, “Didn’t you hear what the pilot said? About the atom bomb? They’re all dead.”

It’s not referred to again, but it does cast the entire novel in a different light. Firstly, it means that for most of the novel the characters aren’t just kids without their grownups- they’re possibly the last surviving people on Earth. Secondly, it throws a different light on Ralph’s thoughts about the grownup world. Throughout the book Ralph remembers the adult world as a place of law, order and civilisation. Yet what we actually see of the adult world is a plane getting shot down, atom bombs being dropped, and the only actual adult we meet is a military officer. The wider world the characters of Lord of the Flies live in is, in the end, just a bigger version of the island.

Since then other writers have chosen to write similar stories and instead of stranding their children on a desert island (where sooner or later you apparently have to start dealing with smoke monsters and bizarrely multi-faith churches in parallel purgatory universes). A quicker and easier way to do it is to just wipe out all the grown-ups with a deadly virus.

One example of this was New Zealand’s series The Tribe, where the death of all adults meant that the survivors all decided to wear far more hair gel and facepaint. Actually, that’s probably pretty realistic. Another version of this plotline- and one a good deal closer to Charlie Higson’s series, was the Star Trek episode Miri, where the crew visits a planet identical to 1960s Earth, except that the grownups have all been infected with a deadly disease that fills them with homicidal rage.

This episode featured the most disturbing romantic subplot in Star Trek history, apart from the episode where the Enterprise carries a “cargo” of wives, or the one where the Enterprise-D has a cargo genetically designed to become every man’s fantasy, or the one where Scott Backula and his crew are given sex slaves as gifts... You know, looking back, there are a lot of "women as property" plots in Star Trek

In actual fact, it’s surprising that there aren’t more well known stories about all the adults getting wiped out. After all, it’s a well known truism used by everyone, from Charles Dickens to Roald Dahl to Jacqueline Wilson to J.K. Rowling, that you’ve got to kill the parents off if your child protagonist is going to do great and heroic things. It only makes sense that for a really dramatic story, all you need to do is kill off all the grownups on the planet.

It also plays in nicely to the wish-fulfilment/careful what you wish for aspect of the apocalypse genre. On the one hand, nobody will ever make you eat your greens again. On the other hand, you quickly learn exactly why your parents were so keen on doing laundry all the time.

Well, we’re almost eight hundred words into the blog post by now, so I should probably start telling you a bit about the books themselves.

In Charlie Higson’s series the grownups are most definitely The Enemy (Oooh, see what I did there?). Even where grownups seem to have avoided the symptoms of the plague, they aren’t to be trusted. There are even scenes where we are given the grownup/zombie point of view, which is usually a twisted parody of grownup thought, including a vicious hatred of kids that’s only a hairs width away from what is genuinely said by adults in a culture that just loves villainising its youth.

There are times when children reminisce about how kind and smart and super awesome their parents were, but those times are pretty much restricted to immediately before a child dies a horrifying death. Oh, and children dying horrifying deaths happens a lot.

One way in which Charlie Higson’s books differ from your usual zombie apocalypse fare (aside from the young protagonists) is the size of the cast. It’s huge, and on more than one occasion in the last three years I’ve been reading these books I’ve had to go to Google to remind myself which character is which (seriously guys, we’ve got an extensive and detailed wiki for Bones (http://bones.wikia.com/) but not for this? What’s wrong with you?). The massive cast serves two purposes. Firstly, it allows Higson to kill off a lot of people. The cast is about 90% Red Shirts. What I’m saying is: Charlie Higson loves nothing more than murdering children. Often when writers enjoy murder, they’ll introduce lots of minor characters who are given just enough dialogue and description for you to distinguish them from the furniture, then quickly jog forward to the satisfyingly gory deaths (This is sometimes known as being a Mauve Shirt. In The Enemy series Anyone Can Die (That’s two links to TV Tropes- I’m really sorry if you’re reading this at work, and for the two hours of time you’ve just lost).

Aside from giving Higson plenty of zombie-fodder, the big cast also allows him to show a variety of different post-apocalyptic set-ups. Anyone who was reading this blog early enough to take part in our Zombie Drinking Game will be familiar with my theory that zombie apocalypse stories are nearly always about locking a bunch of people who hate each other in a room together. When it comes to The Enemy series this theory still stands. In fact the series reads pretty much as a tourist guide to London for the zombie apocalypse survivor. Over three books the survivors form communities holed up in Buckingham Palace, The Imperial War Museum, The Natural History Museum and the Houses of Parliament. I’m pretty sure this list will expand in future books, depending on which London landmarks Higson wants a behind the scenes tour of next.

Each of these landmarks serves as a testing ground for a different response to the apocalypse, with a cargo-cult style society being built around it. For some it’s parliamentary democracy, for others it’s a dictatorship, for others it’s simply having lots of big sticks to hit the grownups with. In each of these places, the same power struggles we see in all the standard zombie movies are still going on, alongside increasing paranoia and competition between the various encampments.

However, it’s got to be said- this series is not a sociological treatise on how to best rebuild the world. Nor is it trying to make any big statements about the relationship between kids and grownups. First and foremost, Higson is trying to write an adventure book. You can tell the writer is having his most fun when he is lovingly describing the various states of disrepair of the grownups as they stumble about a ruined London, or in the frenetic and extremely violent combat sequences. I think if this book has one thing it does really well, it’s that no punches are pulled here at all. Higson is writing a horror book, and giving his readers nightmares is what he is here for.

#34 An Interview with the Zombie of the Year!

2011-12-31T08:04:00.000-08:00

It’s been a big year for Chris Writes About the End of the World, not least because it’s the first year it existed. There’ve been quite a few highlights. We’ve been in a zombie movie, interviewed a movie director, taken part in numerous zombie LARPs, managed to get a picture of Hello Bear bassist Tom Harvey’s face photoshopped onto a chimpanzee’s body to the top of his Google results, and we've seen the actual end of the world. Twice.

But the biggest story of the year has to be when, on sending my good friend Hannah Eiseman-Renyard of Whippersnapper Press to report on an event, I inadvertently got her arrested.

Blogging about zombies is only for the hardcore

On the day of the Royal Wedding she and disappointingly small number of people turned up to an event touted as a “Royal Zombie Flashmob”. Since there were only about five of them, they instead decided to have a cup of tea in Starbucks. Their cup of tea was interrupted by four police vans and sixteen police officers who arrested the lot of them for “A potential breach of the peace” and held them for the rest of the wedding, before releasing them without charge.

The story shot all the way around the Internet twice, and eventually lead to her being nominated Zombie of the Year by the Zombie Rights Campaign. Under the circumstances, we thought it was time for us to catch up with the woman who is now introduced only as “Zombie Hannah” when meeting people at parties.

We forgot to ask her for her skincare tips

So, you've been voted Zombie of the year. Can you tell us how this makes you feel about this, preferably while thanking various people, including God, and crying a bit?

Firstly I’d like to thank you, Chickenhawk [Ed. I've no idea what this word means], for putting me in harm’s way, and also John Sears and the Zombie Rights Campaign Blog for bestowing this award. I’d like to thank my fellow arrestees Ludi, Erich and Amy. If it weren’t for the “what can we do now?” chat we had down the pub straight after our release I’m not sure I would’ve had the belief to pursue it properly. Thanks to Mary Hamilton of Zombie LARP for the iPhone interviews she did with us on the day. I’ve had brilliant advice from friends with legal/human rights/protest backgrounds – you know who you are. I’m forever indebted to Green and Black Cross for bringing together wider groups of arrestees from the Royal Wedding so we could launch a group legal action. Also our lawyers Bhatt Murphy have been absolutely brilliant.

Hannah celebrates her new award by eating it and attacking the photographer

It's been over six months since your arrest. How's the arrest affected your life since?

Uh… hmm… well I have a pretty unique surname and I did decide pretty early on that I would put my name to this stuff (because I don’t think I’ve got anything to hide and I knew it would be more likely to be reported if it had a name to it.) However, I’m jobseeking at the moment and it’s a bit weird to know that if a future employer Googles me they can find out that I’ve been arrested in a matter of seconds.

But generally the outcomes of the arrest have been brilliant. With the precrime lawfail I’ve jumped head-first into a lot of protest and activism stuff which I’d never taken such an active part in before. (Y’hear that Met? I am ‘increasingly radicalised’.)

Radicalised

We’ve got permission for a Judicial Review, I’ve become a legal observer (someone on protests who is not part of the protest but there to monitor the police’s actions), and I’m volunteering with NetPol – the Network for Police Monitoring. Um… yeah. The arrest gave me a cause. So that’s been nice.

A lot of my readers are very stupid. Could you explain what a Judicial Review is so that they can understand?

A Judicial Review in English Law is a legal review of a decision made by a body such as a government authority, a local council or *cough* *cough* the Metropolitan Police. It's an investigation which private citizens (or groups of them) can request if they feel their (public law) rights have been violated in some way, and they want a legal examination into the decision which led to their rights being violated.

As the review can go as high up as it needs to; it can be long, costly, and time-consuming. Therefore Judicial Reviews are not that easy to get & you have to jump through a few hoops before it even begins. Lawyers under instruction from the plaintiffs must apply for a Judicial Review within three months of the incident. They must submit all the evidence they have as for why there's grounds for a Judicial Review, and the other side will submit their counter-argument/evidence for why there doesn't need to be an investigation. Then there's a reading of the evidence and a Substantiative Hearing which takes place with a barrister from each side and a judge - and if the judge finds there are grounds for a Judicial Review then permission is granted for one to take place.

I doubt my readers' attention span as well. So here's a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger in funny glasses

THEN the Judicial Review actually happens.

This is the stage we're at with the zombie case (now known legally as Hicks & Others): we have been granted permission but the review hasn't started yet.

In our case the Judicial Review is into whether or not there was a policy of pre-emptive arrests across London on the day of the royal wedding. We, the plaintiffs, believe that the fact that we were arrested, having not committed any crimes, in at least four different incidents across London on the one day strongly suggests that there was a London-wide policy of pre-emptive arrests in place. The police claim there wasn't. We don't believe them. The Judicial Review is to see whether there was such a policy and (if it turns out there was one) we hope that a judgement will rule that it was illegal and cannot be done again in the future.

For this reason we would love the case to go through and get sorted out soon (and we get a judgement/ruling) before there are more strikes, demos and the Olympics, but it's a lengthy process.

What's going to happen next? What are you looking to see happen?

Well, the Judicial Review should be concluded sometime next year.

My point of view – apologies for biting the hand that feeds – is that this was never about zombies. It’s about the police and the powers that be increasingly treated legitimate protest like a crime. And I wasn’t even protesting anything on the day – but I am protesting now. (That said – if it hadn’t been something as idiotic/photogenic as zombies I’m not sure we would’ve gotten half the publicity we did.)

Pictured: Photogenic

I think the rights of the living (and the undead) will continue to be curtailed and the laws regarding protest and public order will continue be re-interpreted for the worse until a few test cases come through. I think it’s clear from the occupy movement that the police are working to a brief which is more partisan than just ‘enforce the law’. I’m pretty sure it’ll get worse over the Olympics.

Finally, this is a usual question for the blog, seems kind of bad taste here but... What's your zombie survival plan?

Well, since I am a zombie my survival plan is to eat fresh, exercise, get plenty of sleep, stay away from gunfire, axes and law enforcement. Drink lots of water. Maybe some yoga. Y’know, common sense stuff.

Happy New Year!

#33 A Christmas Zombie LARP Carol

2011-12-19T10:46:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's time for yet another Zombie LARP blog! You can read about my previous LARPing adventures here and here. Also, thanks go to Oliver Facey who took a lot of the photos you see here and Thomas Greenwood, who took our Morris dancer's team photo. You can also read my guest blog What I Learned by Actually Role-Playing at Zombie LARP over at the zombie LARP website.

It was a cold winter night and I was ready for a peaceful night’s sleep. I had put on my Super Ted pyjamas, and had read a bedtime story to Mr Fluffy Duck. The two of us were spooning up, waiting for slumber to take us, when suddenly the windows blew open and I noticed a gaunt and terrifyingly pale figure looming over the foot of my bed.

The figure, a sallow waste of a human being, raised a single, quavering finger towards me and intoned “Christopher! MEND YOUR WAAAAAYS!”

“Tom?” I asked, started. “Is that you? The Hello Bear bassist plus regular punching bag and butt monkey for my apocalyptic fiction blog?”

“Indeed, it is I, back from the grave with a terrible warning!” Tom groaned. “Also, I really wish you’d stop introducing me like that. I mean, I thought we were friends dude.”

“You’re not dead. I mean, at all. How did you get into my room?” I asked. “Is this about that photo of you looking like a chimp that I keep trying to get to the top of your Google results?”

This picture.

“Question me not!” Tom boomed. “Tonight you will be visited by three spirits. Mend your ways! Mend your ways! Mend yoooouur waaaaaaays...” he said, drifting back through the curtains.

I sat, alone in the darkness except for Mr Fluffy Duck.

“Are you still behind the curtains?” I asked the darkness.

“No,” said Tom.

I lay back in bed, trying to get some sleep and ignore Tom’s mouth breathing from behind the curtain. And that was when the first ghost visited me...
Later that evening I was woken by a sinister looking black man standing at the foot of my bed.

“I am the Ghost of Zombie Christmas Past!” declared the apparition.

I sat up, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and said, “Really? I mean without even beginning to dissect the phrase “Ghost of Zombie Christmas”- That’s what you decided to go with? Not its origins in vampire myths, or the fear of the great plagues, but plantation owners worries about Haitian Vodou?”

The sinister looking black man said nothing. He simply waved a hand, and the vision began...

Jingle All the Way

By the head of the Friar’s Mall Morris Men
The 34^th annual performance of the Friar’s Mall Morris Men was, on balance, not the most successful of our annual performances. The turnout was lower than it had been in previous years, several of our number had unfortunately passed away in the days leading up to the dance, and an attempt by some company called BioFlex to introduce a new holiday had unfortunately the mall had been taken over by a vicious horde of undead cannibals.

We found ourselves allied with a band of heavily armed survivalists. Now the Friar’s Mall Morris Men have played some pretty tough crowds in our time, but these guys seemed particularly reluctant to be saddled with a people dressed in ribbons and bells who made a habit of shouting “Hey Nonny Nonny!” at inappropriate moments.

Talking amongst ourselves we decided that, despite our best intentions, Morris dancing was not actually ideally suited to a combat situation. All we could do was wait until the right moment, then draw the horde towards us with our highly choreographed pagan fertility rituals.

The plan to nobly sacrifice ourselves to save our fellow men failed however, due to one crucial flaw.

It turns out Morris dancing is fucking badass.

This

Bad

Ass.

Somehow the four of us made it out alive, and went on to have a very merry Christmas...

As the image wobbled and faded away, I looked up at the Ghost of Zombie Christmas Past and said “I really don’t get the point in that... Why were they Morris dancing at Christmas? Isn’t that more of a May Day thing? I really don’t see what I’m supposed to be learning here. It’s almost as if this is some sort of poorly constructed framing device your using to crowbar in a bunch of Zombie LARP stories...”

But the Ghost of Zombie Christmas Past was already gone.

I tried to return to sleep, but as I turned over in bed I was disturbed by wafting smoke crawling across the room, I coughed and sat up, to see the smoke begin to clear. In the midst of it sat a kindly looking old man with a white beard and a greying ponytail.

“George A. Romero? You’re the Ghost of Zombie Christmas present?”

George nodded sagely.

“But you’ve not made a decent zombie movie since 2005... and haven’t made a truly great one since 1985...”

“You shut up!” George Romero said, and blew of a cloud full of cigar smoke into my face.

Thus begun the second vision...
A Very Corporate Christmas
By the CEO of Organiflex

Organiflex is one of the leading companies in the applications biochemical, genetic, nanotechnological and occult technology in the fields of military, industry, cosmetics and nutrition, matched only by the Bioflex corporation in terms of market penetration and Presidential campaign contributions. Often, our two firms have worked well together.

Following notable outbreaks of so-called “zombie” outbreaks, we collaborated to put forward the case that the best way to avoiding apocalyptic pandemics of undead cannibals is to reduce the restrictive regulations on the industry and let the invisible hand of the market prevent the total collapse of all human civilisation.

That said however, we have often objected to the non-competitive practices BioFlex has engaged with, in terms of the subsidies it has received from several governments and world religions, and have lobbied heavily against them while encouraging prudent investment in Organiflex products.

This approach has seen an impressive payoff, and so I saw fit to reward my top staff with a weekend of corporate team building at the Friar’s Walk Mall. Among my staff was Alina Sandu, my Resource Utilization Consultant, Matthew Barnes, our Envisioneer, and the new office boy and corporate butt monkey whose name I can’t remember off the top of my head.

This picture won't make it into his google results

No sooner had we arrived at the mall and begun some healthy bonding exercises based around the murder of zombies, when we discovered our long-established rivals, BioFlex, still had a recruitment office operating in the mall.

I took a unilateral decision and decided that the Christmas team-building exercise should experience and paradigm shift into more a hostile takeover exercise. We headed straight over to the recruitment office, carrying a heavy machine gun, and explained how the optimum use of BioFlex resources would be in the realisation of core Organiflex directives.

Unfortunately our utilisation of heavy firepower was disrupted by a band of boy scouts trying to get something called a “pacifism” badge. I explained that Alina had killed boy scouts before, but the scouts were pretty resolute.

As it turned out, there was no need to take out the BioFlex representative, he willingly told us about their project to give over a set of three “White Knights” (products highly derivative of Organiflex’s own “Bright Nite” project) to an apparition known as a “Nightmare” that had taken up residence on the top floor of the Mall.

By Matt Barnes, Organiflex’s “Envisioneer”
"When we've delivered the 'toys', what's to stop these nightmares just eating us?" I asked

"Erm, nothing really." the recruiter cheerfully told us.

Well at least that was now out in the open.

Taking down the White Knight was actually easier than I'd expected, largely thanks to Alina's fully automatic machine gun which she could barely lift, but couldn't half tear through zombie flesh (for a few seconds at least, before it ran out of ammo). We then confiscated his axe and began dragging him upstairs to the nightmares' lair.

I'd now like to introduce you to the most terrifying monsters I've ever had the pleasure to encounter. They're dressed all in red, have horrible bloody masks on, and they DON'T DO ANYTHING. We arrived with our prize, and they stood there, leaving us alone, and cheerfully beckoning us in through a child-sized gap into the murky playpen. Call me paranoid, but there was no way in a million years I was going to go through that gap.

By the CEO of Organiflex
After surveying the situation and observing the overall emotional climate, it was decided a tactical market withdrawal was the best way forward. By this point many of the undead were beginning to gather and I regret to say my staff didn’t rise as well to this occasion as I would have liked- I was forced to kill three zombies with my own gun. The zombies on the other hand, performed admirably, and I left my business card with one of them.

We continued into the bowels of the mall, but soon found ourselves circling around to the children’s play area where the Nightmares were still in residence.

By Matt Barnes
My next encounter with one came a few minutes later, as I came down the main stairwell and suddenly found myself face-to-face with that familiar smiling mask. After warily circling each other a couple of times, it intoned, "Do you like games? What's your favourite game?"

Too nervous to summon a clever, witty, or indeed any answer, I waited for his next move. He stepped slightly towards me.

"Do you like... RUNNING AND SCREAMING??"

I didn't need any more encouragement than that, and I set off as fast as my little legs could carry me into the main hallway and past several zombies too slow-moving to come near me at this point. Just when I thought it might be safe to check behind me and slow down, I could suddenly hear running footsteps behind me and the cry of "Yay! Running and screaming!"

By the CEO of Organiflex
As Matthew ran screaming into the darkness, I reflected up on the fact that I’d always been a little unsure of him as employee. He didn’t adhere to the dress code as well as I’d have liked, and didn’t really seem to “Feel the win” as I always encouraged my team to do.

I turned to Alina and suggested that OrganiFlex had been in need of some downsizing for a while now. We turned around and calmly walked away in the other direction.

Rather surprisingly we found Matthew alive and well later. I reluctantly rehired him, and we headed back to the BioFlex recruitment centre. I arrived in, I will admit, an aggravated state. I pulled my pistol on the BioFlex employee, asked why he hadn’t warned us just what the Nightmares were like. At this point, I decided the time for collaboration had ended. I took his desk, and providing what I like to think was the calm, confidence-inspiring leadership that has always been my hallmark.

As I surveyed the room, I noticed a certain young go-getter who reminded me of a young me.

By Dave the Plumber (Of The Zombie Shop)
I switched on the camera we use for the drainage an' that and point it at Jimmy.

"How you feelin' about this?" I ask.

He shifts, all agitated like. "A bit nervous to be honest with you Dave. I've had easier jobs." He looks worried. "To tell you the truth, the blockage in the basement is gonna be a bit of a bugger to clear."

"Too right!" I says, as one of them groaning freaks comes barrelling at us.

We sprint, ending up in a crowd in one the HR geezer's offices.

A posh bloke in a suit trots up and gives me his card.

"I think I like you son,” he told me.

"Alright fella." I tells him. "You need anything sorted; you give Jimmy an' me a shout mate."

All of a sudden things go mental. People runnin' and scream' all over the shop, well messy.

"Jimmy... what we gonna do?" I ask.

Jimmy swings a sawn-off and yells. "We'll give 'em both barrels. Wallop. Sorted!"

"Effing wallop mate." I agree, hefting a crowbar.

"Like you an' me sister last night," adds Jimmy "I heard you mate..." He winks. "I was on yer Mum."

"Cheeky slapper!" I says. "Let's get out of here. Anyone seen Mr Farnell?"

By the CEO of Organiflex
As news that an escape route had opened up spread through the office, people began to flee, including several members of staff I’d thought better of. I realised it was time for me to leave as well, but before I left there was one, crucial task remaining. I turned to the Bioflex representative and asked. “So, we don’t really need you anymore?”

“Well, I don’t know about that...” he prevaricated, as the zombies began to close in on the door of the office.

I drew my pistol and shot him in the stomach, before turning and running. Sadly, in taking the time to eliminate my company’s competition, I had given the zombies too much time to get close. A swipe to my shoulder knocked me to the ground, and the horde enveloped me entirely.

“Wait! Stop!” I cried out, and for a moment, they actually did. I pulled a cigar out of my pocket and popped into my mouth, savouring the taste. “There,” I said, satisfied. “Bring it.”

The image faded as the corporate CEO was ripped apart by slathering monsters, I turned to George A. Romero, confused, and asked, “Was that supposed to be satire?... I mean, it wasn’t exactly subtle was it? It made Land of the Dead look underplayed...

George Romero blew another puff of cigar smoke into my face, and disappeared in a sulk.

I stood, alone in my room, waiting for the final ghost to appear. When nothing happened I climbed into bed... when suddenly a Rage infected zombie leapt through the curtains and ran at me. I jumped from the bed and legged it down the landing, the running zombie hot on my tail, only just making it as far as my apartment building’s lift, as the door shut on the zombies greasy, gore stained fingers, the third and final vision began...

The (slightly less than) 12 Deaths of Christmas
As I watched I saw many a heroic demise as an evil looking creature stalked the halls of Friar’s Walk Mall. I tall, dark figure, dressed in black and white and carrying knifes as long as your arm. Bullets simply bounced off him as if they were made of foam, many a poor soul died at his blades.

I myself on two occasions was so overcome by fear that I fled my own team mates to hide in silence in the dark corners of the mall, praying for the creature to pass. Meanwhile, elsewhere there were players in the dark for an entirely different reason...

By Matt Barnes
I had a special event for this run - when I (inevitably) died, I was to come back to life with my eyes gouged out and completely unable to see. Tying a blindfold around my head for verisimilitude, I crept through one of the dark corridors, hoping the first thing I came across was still alive.

As luck would have it, he was, and I clung onto his arm. "Don't worry, I'll guide you through", the disembodied voice assured me. He led me along a bit, and I could tell from the light coming through by blindfold that we must be moving back out into the main hallway.

"Sorry about this", the man mumbled to me under his breath.

"Sorry about what?" I was about to ask, when he shoved me forwards, shouted "Everyone eat him, he's blind!" and ran off into the distance.

As it happened, I miraculously stumbled all the way into a safe room, and in the hope of finding a slightly more reliable guide, asked "is there anyone alive in here?"

There was a few seconds of silence, and then a very emphatic:

"Nope."

"Not us."

"Definitely no-one alive round here."

I didn't survive that run. Can't think why.

By Tarnia Mears
“Well, Father Flexmas doesn't have any concept of good or bad, you see,” chirped the Bioflex employee, “just sort of, alive or dead.”

That's how it started, really. Twelve of us crowded into a small office, demanding to know the whereabouts of the nearest escape route from a man who - given the apocalyptic circumstances - seemed remarkably unperturbed. As it turns out, the exit was not only being blocked by a growing mass of shambling walking dead, but also by the nest of Father Flexmas, Bioflex's latest experimental psychopath. He'd set up camp by the main doors and, whilst he lived, we were trapped. To kill him, we were told, we would have to trick him into eating silver tinsel. Black is his favourite, but were we to mix it with enough silver, he would become poisoned and die.

We searched the complex. One piece of silver tinsel found its way to Flexmas' lair, but we needed more. After nearly an hour of searching, all we had to show for it was a string of black. “If you give that to Father Flexmas,” someone had told me previously, “he will spare your life.”

“If Father Flexmas kills you while you have it,” someone else told me, “he will destroy your soul.”

I don't know who was with me when we left the basement. I had the black tinsel in one hand and led the group into the dim light of the first floor. Father Flexmas was waiting. A tall, round, masked man wearing black robes and a bloody apron, dual-wielding butchers knives. The party split, screaming, and the only thing I could do was throw the black tinsel at his feet. He stopped. “Ah ha ha HA!” He picked it up, and began to walk away in the direction of the main exit – in the direction of his lair.

“We need to kill him, we need to kill him now.” No-one heard me. They were all running in the opposite direction. I might have followed, had I not then seen, leaving C&A, a zombie grasping two long strands of silver tinsel. I beat the creature to the floor and tugged the tinsel from its arms. There were more of them behind me. A White Knight joined them. I was alone. I dodged its axe and hit it back with a hammer, which gave me enough time to sprint towards the still-retreating Flexmas. Near his nest, littered with Christmas lights, was another ball of silver tinsel, a remnant of some other brave soul who didn't quite make it. I picked it up and began to yell. Father Flexmas had reached his nest, but before he could turn around, I grabbed him by the neck, and forced the wads of tinsel down his throat.

“EAT IT, FLEXMAS,” I screamed, “EAT IT!”

He struggled, and wailed – a terrifying, echoing sound – but soon, he was silent. The zombies were upon me, then. I tried to fight, but the White Knight was back, and I knew then that I was finished.

Still, I had done it. I had killed Father Flexmas. When I fell, I landed on his corpse. The tannoy was playing Silent Night as my eyes closed for the final time. Sleep, in heavenly peace... rest in heavenly peace.

I watched as Tarnia lay dying on the floor of the mall. Then, miraculously, I was back in bed again.

“It was all a dream!” I shouted gleefully jumping out of bed. “I’ve learned some sort of non-specific moral! I will change my ways!”

I ran to the window, throwing the curtains open, ready to give Christmas spirit everywhere. The Norwich skyline was burning, and screams could be heard as people ran through the street before being torn apart by half decomposed monsters. I went back to bed.

Merry Christmas Everybody!

#32 Z-Rated: Zombie Proof Your Home

2011-12-03T08:49:00.000-08:00

As regular readers will know, at the beginning of last month I went to the much publicised Zombosium at the University of Winchester, where I gave a talk about the ways Hotel Rwanda resembles a zombie movie that wasn’t in bad taste at all. As anybody who had to endure my company for the two months previous to that knows, I recently had to move out of my house conveniently placed between a gun shop and a shop full of tinned food. As I’ve shown in previous blogs, the majority of apocalypse-proof-housing on the market is prohibitively priced, but fortunately, while at the Zombosium I met Roger Cooper, a freelance architectural designer, and Jordan J. Lloyd, a PhD architecture researcher.

This pair recently entered the 2011 Zombie Safe House Competition and at the Zombosium they unveiled the fruits of their labours. You can see their plans for yourselves here. After giving their presentation, they were interviewed by a visiting journalist from The Sun, but I think it’s fair to say that the definitive interview, featuring questions that have been described as making Paxman “drop a bullock”, is below this paragraph. Featuring not only some ingenious ways to defend your home with flat pack furniture, Jordan and Roger also explained how the Big Society could impact our zombie apocalypse survival strategies, as well as how to fuel your car on dead zombies.

1. So, firstly, so we know where we stand: ANSD sufferers, or zombies. Judging by your materials, your strategy is designed to deal with 28 Days Later/Left 4 Dead style infected rather than the actual living dead? If ANSD sufferers are actually reanimated corpses of the “destroy the brain or remove the head” variety, aren’t strategies such as electrocuting them or setting them alight extremely risky? Burning zombies in particular would be extremely dangerous to have wandering around your street.

Jordan
One of the first things we actually talked about when considering the project was the evolution of the zombie protagonist. I wouldn't say we were hardcore zombie fans, but we'd both seen enough media representations of zombies to understand that around the 90's they evolved from these slow, shuffling hordes of the undead to incredibly dangerous post human cadavers whose thirst for both brain and human flesh was only matched by their rage and intensity.

Assuming that ANSD sufferers will only be 'put down' by compromising the brain function, then we have to be imaginative about how we can do this, as one of the central tenants of our scheme was that citizens around the world for the most part do not benefit from the Second Amendment which allows them to carry firearms. When you have to engage the undead without guns like you see in the movies, then you exponentially increase the risk of getting infected as it usually involves hand to hand combat. Our mitigation measures like electrocution or burning through reconfiguration of household systems will affect brain function. Let's put it this way, if someone is set on fire long enough, chances are brain function will cease because there is permanent burn damage. Without knowing for sure, we're at best killing them (again) outright en masse, or at least slowing them down. How is a zombie possibly going to eat your brains out when their jaws have burned clean off?

Roger
The electro flooded street requires heavy use of water, which could otherwise be used to sustain pod occupants. Therefore this defence mechanism is intended for use only during an extreme zombie horde attack, as a final one off means of buying some extra time to allow a final air lift evacuation to occur. In such an evacuation the leftover water in water butts would no longer be required and could be dumped onto the street and any fire risk generated would no longer be a threat to human safety.

2. Could you give us a rough summary of your zombie survival strategy for those of my readers who are too lazy to click on links?

Jordan
Sure. Basically we're doomed. Mathematical models of a zombie contagion conclude that the spread of infection will far exceed any organised resistance, unless aggressive counter tactics are employed. In the United Kingdom (and indeed most countries in the world), citizens do not have the benefit of the Second Amendment to carry firearms like our American cousins; resulting in a much lower survival rate for untainted humans.

Popular media portrayals of the Zombie Apocalypse show frightened individuals aimlessly heading for an unknown destination, accruing a gang of other frightened individuals fighting their way out of unfamiliar environments, usually ending in military intervention once most of the protagonists are (un)dead; with any survivors being relocated to a centralised military run facility to re-populate the Earth when the contagion has run its course.

So our solution to the idea of a zombie apocalypse is not a ‘one-off’ mobile fortress, but rather a socio-economic strategy, culturally embedded in our social psyche in the way we know best: the cult of consumerism. Rather than create a ‘zombie-proof house’, it is instead proposed to zombie-proof your own home in the event of a zombie apocalypse. The proposal approaches designing a zombie proof house from a perspective which assumes a future of everyday (albeit unwanted) co-existence with the undead. Z-Rated: Zombie-proof your own home projects a typical suburban London based strategy for adapting ordinary Londoners homes for protection against the marauding zombie threat.

If establishing the prime objective of the zombie-proof house is to increase one’s chances of survival, this approach has a number of pragmatic advantages:

• Good defence is based on familiarity, and no place on Earth is better known than your own home;

• Strengthens communities;

• The familiarity of the home will help frightened untainted citizens adjust to their new-found unwanted co-existence with the undead;

• Should our current communications infrastructure break down (i.e, phone, Internet), any untainted close family, friends and neighbours will instinctively head towards a trusted home;

• With forward planning, neighbourhoods can become zombie-proof, creating a safe, self-sufficient haven where life carries on relatively normally until military intervention;

• When military intervention arrives, zombie proof houses/neighbourhoods become stage points for a military counter-strike over a decentralised network;

• Creates a resilient system where the human survival rate becomes much higher and is based on existing community clustering and co operation

• Big Society in action.

Roger
A government response to a zombie contagion considers a strategy without the options of an antigen or vaccination. Integrated into Prime Minister David Cameron’s vision for the ‘Big Society’, a parliamentary response is prematurely distributed online, and runs as the main headline in a popular free London newspaper. It describes a strategy using Big Society rhetoric: building communities, decentralised power and localism. In short- getting the proles to pay for everything themselves, in the perfect union of the public and private sectors.

One quarter of the UK’s housing stock are tightly knit terrace typologies, clustering in cities and industrialised market towns, representing a significant part of the population. Demand for housing in London and the south east of England is high and growing each year. Z-Rated: Zombie-proof your own home locates itself within an already present demand for new space in the city. The strategy’s biggest intervention introduces a string of building regulation approved loft extensions that litter the roof-scape of London, typically providing an extra bedroom and bathroom for an expanding family or space for a new tenant, until such a time it is needed to provide genuine civil defence. An opportunity exists using the combined flat roof-scape of loft extensions to provide a secondary elevated street/battlement protected from the zombie threat at ground level, allowing citizens to engage in a variety of mixed programmes from leisure to food growing - at a comfortable distance away from the undead.

Like ordinary streets, the secondary street is envisaged to provide numerous programmes including:

• Elevated walkway/battlement;

• ANSDiesel & solar powered street flood lighting;

• Zip wire as a low tech means of crossing the street quickly to other terraces;

• Space to grow food (continuous productive urban landscapes);

• Seating and street furniture;

• Means of emergency escape and supply deliveries - helipad;

• Elevated surveillance of immediate vicinity

When the crisis is too big for emergency services to handle, in order to provide the volume of extensions that might be required nationwide, a public/private sector initiative is initiated using army and sponsored RAF air transport facilities to rapidly deploy prefabricated loft extension units produced at pre-existing commercial production facilities. The same mechanism provides a quick extraction if the elevated street is compromised: the lofts cleanly cut away from the existing house when airlifted by air transport and redelivered to a designated safe zone.

A popular international home products retailer is a key commercial partner, being the only company that has suitable worldwide production facilities, understanding of the commercially marketable home, with a suitable track record of high quality design and manufacturing.

They look so cheerful now that everyone they know is dead

3. Why did you decide to take this approach?

Roger
We were keen to explore a design response which consciously explores and addresses our current social, political, economic and environmental condition in relation to the zombie safe house housing typology. In order to reflect this desire we chose to use a newspaper as our presentation format.

Jordan
Nothing is free of consequence and that is certainly true of design in particular. I've been fortunate to develop my design process in an environment that emphasises social awareness and the consequences of what your design brings to the table. The concept itself was really borne out of considering the effects of ANSD and the constraints it would bring on society, then you start asking the right questions. How fast is the rate of infection? How can we best defend ourselves with no access to guns? How can we get on with our lives if our emergency services were compromised? Really, the idea of a 'zombie proof house' at its heart is simply about making sure you survive, but at the same time it immediately conjures up an overwhelming sense of isolation. The thing is, when you look at the course of human history, nothing significant, least of all survival, ever got done in isolation. When you strip away the convenience of the modern world, all that is left is the instinct to survive and have enough food, water and shelter to live another day. Which means you have to band up with your neighbours. And there lies the inherent success of the scheme on a fundamental level. When you band with your neighbours and your communities (or just other survivors), 'zombie proof' streets, neighbourhoods, towns and cities contract and expand naturally based on what resources and ingenuity you have at your disposal. I feel it would be a natural consequence of what would happen in real life if (when) the zombie apocalypse happens.

Let's imagine for a moment that this happened. What would you really do? Run towards the nearest centralised military facility? Of course not, you wouldn't even know where it was. I guess at this point people would be going through a Kübler-Ross stages of death mentality: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. But before that, people will head home. Why? Because it's familiar. It's safe. You know your own home better than anywhere. You know if you can't get hold of your loved ones or your friends, if they had any sense they would gravitate towards your home. So there is the basis for the rest of the strategy, it's a process that begins with accepting that most people will instinctively head home. All the rest is about emphasising this basic point and mitigating the inherent dangers of zombies invading your streets.

Then there is another fundamental question. If this seemed like a fairly logical approach, how on earth would you fund this? We're still in the turmoil of a large economic recession that's showing no signs of letting up, and so the vast majority of people simply wouldn't have the capital to be able to afford a zombie proof house. It can't just be a 'only the rich get to survive' mentality. The scheme is about quick wins. This idea you can buy some ready to use 'z-rated' items that double up as weapons or defence at affordable prices. Assuming a future with the undead would be taken as normal, then there is this absurd sense of reality in it because we're essentially appealing to the cult of consumerism, which like it or not, everyone is familiar with it.

Obviously, although we treated this as a serious design exercise, a lot of it, particularly the presentation format is very tongue in cheek. We were very pleased when we found an electronic version of the Metro (a popular free paper distributed in the UK's cities), and spent a bit of time researching newspaper graphics and made sure we matched the typefaces, headlines and colours matched. Even the tone of the articles had to match the kind of thing you would read in these popular newspapers. Roger and I had a great deal of fun with the adverts, but it also worked as a graphic device to show off aspects of the scheme that would have only come across in 'architectural drawings' or a text description. I think when you look at things like the smartphone insurance application on the corner of the back page, there is this implication that although that shit has hit the fan, companies would still be making a quick buck out of your misery - but when you put this glossy veneer over it in the form of an advert, you sort of gloss over how crass it really is.

Civilisation as we know it is at an end, but our TV is MASSIVE

4. You suggest that a well-known Scandinavian furniture store may be best equipped to provide the components for your survival pods. Whenever I’ve purchased furniture from a well-known Scandinavian furniture store there always ends up being a piece missing. Won’t that be a particularly serious problem in this case?

Jordan
The pods are largely prefabricated off site to ensure their zombie proof integrity (Z-Rating). On site, they are delivered airlift by helicopter and IEAK's delivery team who ensure the final customisation of the product and a snug fit into the loft.

Roger
There's actually two different flavours to the IKEA/IEAK premise. The first as Jordan said is the survival pod being pre-fabricated to ensure its defence integrity, but the idea of z-rated products has more to do with the hundreds of other products suppliers like IKEA actually provides. For space reasons, I don't think this particular strand came off as effectively as we hoped, but it's a fairly reasonable assumption in the interests of profit, large companies would happily make modifications to their existing products to turn them into defences or potential weapons. Not to mention the amazing IKEA hacking community on the web on websites like Instructables.com or Life Hacker. Funnily enough, IKEA actually do provide spares. I know this because I have just moved flats and as a result have purchased some new furniture from IKEA. They will include one or two extra screws, fixings etc.

With regard to the pod, it was actually a logical extension to the idea of Z-Rated products. Just like you can buy a 99p plate, you can also spend £999 on wardrobes. Why not spend £9999 on part of an 'all-in-one' living survival pod? One thing that made me laugh when we were putting together the pod advert was just how ridiculous the price tag was. We're so used to seeing reasonable or even cheap prices (usually slashed) on IKEA adverts, putting a few extra zeros so it nearly ran off the page just looked absurd.

The pod though was interesting because we were developing this conclusion of the Z-Rated products with this idea of building regulations. As both of us come from an architecture background, we are both very aware of the UK's stringent planning guidelines which have in theory been designed to mitigate the worst excesses of development (arguably with very limited success). The Approved Documents for building regulations basically cover everything from fire escapes to how wide a corridor should be, or the incline of a ramp for wheelchair users. When you're dealing with potentially large changes to the structure of your existing property or land, like putting in a survival pod, even in absurd scenarios like the zombie apocalypse, there would be no doubt that the Government and Health & Safety would find some way of introducing some bureaucracy into it. In fairness, there are already guidelines to cover what you need to do for a loft conversion for example, and the pods were an extension of that.

Then we thought about not just installation, but also using Chinook helicopters as a device to extract pods away quickly in the event of a zombie takeover, so relocation can be immediate. So we designed some anchors and hooks to attach to the helicopters, but we would also use the same anchors to plug in other things like the lighting and zip wire rig. Part of an effective defence involves an elevated condition, and then it led onto this idea of your street potentially being compromised, especially in the early days, but your elevated street being completely safe. When you have this wide avenue spanning all your neighbours and your street, then it's going to be a fairly obvious thing to start growing your food or sunbathe or let your kids play on the roof area. I think my favourite part about the pods is just how complete they are - a lot of work went into condensing basic living amenities into a very small space - a bit like those capsule hotels or the YOTEL chain. In a way, the pod was probably the most literal aspect of the judge’s agenda we addressed as they are in themselves 'zombie-proof houses', but its effectiveness is limited when you don't consider the much wider socio-economic strategy we developed. When you analyse the spatial interior of one, you will find everything you need to live a modern lifestyle in it, which can then expand depending on how many more people you want to accommodate or how wide your house is between your neighbours if you live on a terraced street for example. Then of course, if you wanted to really take the communal living thing to the extreme, why not combine pods together so you can have several families or friends co-exist in a giant pod? People are very versatile and can adapt to any condition.

The best part is, I'm pretty sure IKEA really do have helicopters like that.

5. Your strategy is very much grounded in the ideals of the “Big Society” as put forward by the Conservative party. Part of this strategy includes financing the construction and installation of survival pods through special loans, which would be terminated should the holder of the loan be eaten by zombies. Doesn’t this create a serious risk that, based on their perceived ability to survive the coming zombie apocalypse, some families may be seen as “subprime”, resulting in banks attempting to off-load the debts of less-likely-to-survive families onto one another? The last thing we need is another financial collapse in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

Roger
The pod system has been designed so the rate of survival increases as the number of people daisy chain pods together increases - therefore the individual (and his or her ability to defend her/himself) is less important than the number of people linking together in the pod community. It creates a scenario where individual financial wealth is less important than community spirit.

Jordan
Let's be clear about the Big Society thing - in a way the proposal is a very tongue-in-cheek embodiment of the idea of the Big Society, but this is just as much a commentary on where we are right now as a society as it is about its survival. The 'People's Protection Fund' as you summarised in your question would be exactly the kind of thing that the Government would use as a vehicle to get this whole scheme off the ground. It's not like it's without historical precedent. When a country wants to finance its wars, it offers war bonds to its citizens so when the war is over and when the economy has stabilised, it will pay the amount back. The sub-prime aspect is interesting, because if you look back far enough, one could argue the whole recession started because sub-prime mortgages increased substantially in the years preceding 2008 before shit really hit the fan. When you are a mortgage company handing out mortgages to people with questionable credit histories based on a perception that a. your regulators have relaxed the rules, and b. you want in on the profit derived from an increasingly hyper-inflated housing market, then somewhere along the way, it's all going to come falling down. I'm referring to the US market primarily, but the UK isn't far behind. A friend of mine illustrated that if the price of a chicken was to match the same exponential inflation of property over the last decade, then a chicken would cost about £47 - ridiculous isn't it, but so is the credit based banking system because it is based on a perception, and now we have to live in a world where the majority of people will suffer because a small minority of people thought it would be a good idea to not think about the consequences of some terrible investments. To be honest, would another financial collapse be all that more tragic when you're trying to not get eaten? I don't really have an answer for a perceived preference in who the People's Protection Fund would be awarded to, because the zombie apocalypse would inherently change the rules of the game - like any major global conflict, attitudes shift considerably, and the zombie apocalypse isn't about resource control or territorial expansion; nor is it an ideological battle. It's about survival.

6. On a similar note, as our national infrastructure collapses under the pressure of the ensuing zombie horde, your plan proposes we fall back on a more decentralised system, generating the power in our own homes through methods that include breaking down slaughtered zombie corpses into bio-fuel. I mentioned this at the zombosium, but isn’t this setting people up for a fall? Sure, initially there will be hordes of zombies littering the streets, but, if your plans actually work, zombies will not be a renewable source of fuel. Eventually, don’t you run the risk of us hitting “Peak zombie”?

Jordan
Yes this is true. However zombie generated fuel is seen as a means to help battle against the zombie threat, not to replace existing fuel sources or true renewables. A post peak zombie scenario would imply the zombie threat is on the decline and therefore we would no longer require the extra fuel source.

The downside is you will need an absolute shit-load of Dettol before you can use that for chopping vegetables again

Roger
You make a great point. However, consider this. If you read academic papers on the spread of ANSD infection, it concludes it would happen very fast indeed, so you're essentially left with not a lot of humans, and a lot of zombies. A decentralised, or should I say hyper localised energy production wouldn't produce anywhere near the volume of bio-diesel commercial practices such as crop farming or algae farming would generate, nor would we be consuming anywhere near as much fuel as a pre-apocalypse society would either. We'd have to do some serious calculations on how much fuel zombies would actually generate, but I'm guessing it would be a pretty good rate of return for a considerable period of time.

I think it's worth actually explaining how the bio-diesel production from zombies actually works, because people are thinking how absurd the concept is, and something that really annoyed me about some of the other entries is that there was no discernible explanation on how they would derive fuel from zombies. Just like everything else we proposed, we take real ideas or things and just slightly stretch them into a new context and the bio-diesel thing is no different. The zombies themselves don't actually produce the bio-diesel, they provide the feedstock for its production. The idea is you would grind up the zombies organic matter and spread it as a substrate (along things like garden clippings, food waste and sawdust) in a container. You then add the vegetative part of fungi, known as mycelium, onto the substrate. The mycelium is amazing in itself - it cleans up contaminants, breaks down complex hydrocarbons and lignins, purifies water, and least of all, they sprout mushrooms you can then pick and eat! It's the reason why the earth isn't covered in 200 ft high dead organic matter, because mycelium is an integral part of the decaying process. So you have this mycelium and this rotting substrate. Then you add some yeast and a few other active ingredients to the fungal sugars that occur naturally as part of the process, let it ferment and voila, you have an ethanol that's no different from the bio-diesel you use in vehicles. Paul Stamets, the mycologist who pioneered the technique claims you can produce 3.5 litres of fuel from 48 kg's of organic matter. Now considering the average zombie would weigh just under twice that, it's a reasonable assumption you can produce about 5 litres of fuels per zombie you process. You can drive a car about 40 miles with one zombie's worth of bio-diesel or a lot more depending on how good your fuel economy is. A 5KW diesel generator would use up about 5 litres per hour, which is enough to power your home for a small period of time. Thankfully though, unlike other fossil-fuel based processes, this time the feedstock comes to you - all you have to do is kill it (again), collect and process it. Now I'm pretty sure most inner city neighbourhoods won't have any trouble acquiring a fair amount of fresh fuel sources every day! I'd estimate 'Peak Zombie' wouldn't happen for a long time and is entirely dependent on how successful the scheme is on a national level, and let's face it, if you're running out of fuel source then that's a good thing, right?

7. Do you think connecting up the survival pods is a wise move? In most movies it’s not the zombies who break the siege- it’s either a foolish mistake, or infighting among the survivors that lets them in. Surely the more people you bring into you network of survival pods, the more potential weak links you are adding to the chain?

Roger
Every pod has its own secure access. Whilst the pods could have been isolated, connecting gives many extra functions a space to occur, e.g. a further means of escape to a local elevated helipad, space for food growth, a surveillance platform. Most importantly the spaces created encourage individuals to work together as a community, where the whole becomes much greater than the sum of its parts.

Jordan
There are two hatches in the pod. One at the bottom where you would be coming up from the floor below, then an additional hatch directly above it that leads to the elevated street level. This controlled access requires a ladder. Now, even with hyper-dangerous '28 Days Later' zombies, I think even they would have a hard time breaking into your home, going up at least one floor, then negotiating a small ladder, trying to unlock a hatch, climbing through a pod, then doing it again to get to the elevated street.

We're not saying that the system is entirely fool-proof. On paper, it looks pretty tight but you raise this concern about the human condition. Human behaviour is anything but logical. Whether or not it's bikers assaulting the mall or Kevin Eldon's character in Dead Set literally opening the gate, somewhere along the line your system will be compromised. I happen to actually study resilient systems as my main line of research and one characteristic of resilience is this idea that when compromised an isolated part of the system can still operate and adapt under new circumstances. One of the more morbid considerations of small pods daisy chained together is that even if one pod was compromised, all the others are independently sealed. Saying that mind, the idea of seeing your neighbours getting eaten might appeal to some. After all, we're providing a suggestion in how to radically increase the rate of human survival against zombies, people fighting themselves is a whole other discussion!

8. Of the other designs in the zombie-proof home competition, which were your personal favourites?

Roger
Vanquisher, Gantry Stronghold and Vagabond.

Jordan
Yeah I really liked Vagabond, the eventual winner and I'm pleased it won as it was completely different from last year's winner. The idea of a mobile 'back packed' survival pod is very compelling and is infinitely more affordable and accessible than some of the things we were suggesting. I particularly liked the mirrored 'armadillo' shell which acted as a brilliant camouflage. That being said, there are some limitations to a truly mobile system, because you are trading genuine defence with mobility, which is great for your short term survival, but after a while, people would naturally want to settle and fortify as the novelty of constantly moving around would eventually get at people.

The Gantry Stronghold was also very well considered, but highly location specific which in my opinion made it a specialised option for a lucky few people. Funnily enough, I actually liked the basic idea behind the Zombie + Termite. It assumed that humanity would inhabit giant termite mounds that floated in the air on hydrogen generated by termites digesting zombie remains. That said, I think the entrants may need to recalculate a. how large their floating fortresses need to be, and b. how much hydrogen the termites would produce as the calculations in the entry were looking at a 100% hydrogen generation efficiency, which simply isn't the case otherwise we would already be in a hydrogen based economy based powered by termites!

9. With the financial climate the way it is, many of us cannot afford to buy our own homes, living in rented accommodation that we don’t have either the necessary permission or the financial resources to modify. What zombie-proofing advice would you give to those of us unable to buy a fortified, bio-fuelled, entirely self-contained habitat to add onto our homes?

Roger
Answer - start with a modified Expedit bookcase spike pit and go from there.

A book case, some sharpened table legs and BAM, you're ready to go.

Jordan
Ian Conrich made a brilliant point at the Zombosium about this and in a way it's the one major design flaw of the entire scheme. To answer Ian's question in more detail, I think a number of points should be addressed. Firstly, many people do own their own homes, and in an extreme circumstance such as the zombie apocalypse, there is no doubt at all many homeowners would gladly reinvest their kids university funds or their pensions in order to live. Secondly, we projected the scheme as a Government led initiative, and I'm sure more qualified professionals can make a better judgment on how to finance full out pods to provide from economically disadvantaged or renting tenants. In part, that's what the People's Protection Fund was intended to imply, but as with many initiatives, people can easily pick holes in it which was kind of the point - present some sort of glossy financial package that would literally save your life but then find out it's all a sham. One of the big drivers of development in the UK over the last decade has been PFI (Private Finance Initiatives) schemes popularised when Labour was in power. In essence, it creates a public-private sector partnerships (PPP's) that allow private investors to help the Government to build things like schools and hospitals and other large capital public services. The upshot is of course, that the private sector operates the service as a higher cost. It's a completely profit driven agenda, one of course that is struggling in particular when the credit based economy is crashing down all around us. Z-Rated is a reflection on the power of consumption, and is intended to have mass appeal on a number of levels, so as stated earlier, the Z-Rated scheme from a product point of view assumes the pod as an end result in a long chain of goods determined by value. As Roger says, spend £80 on a book shelf cum spike pit, or at the very least, buy yourself a kitchen knife for a tenner!

Thanks both of you for your answers.

You can see Roger and Jordan’s plans in full here.

#31 Pandemonium- Stories of the Apocalypse

2011-11-16T02:22:00.000-08:00

Well, this is a special day for the blog. More special than our first interview with someone who works in the field. More special even than the time we inadvertently got somebody arrested. Today Chris Writes About the End of the World achieves the dream every blog has when it starts out into the world- the dream of getting a review copy. Because what is the Internet about, if not criticising entertainment that you haven’t paid for?

The book I received to review was the e-book Pandemonium- Stories of the Apocalypse, an anthology of apocalyptic fiction inspired by the paintings of John Martin which are currently on display at the Tate Britain. In the 19th century John Martin was to painting what Roland Emmerich is to movies that- that is, he painted vast, dramatic, often apocalyptic images that were incredibly popular with the general public but which the critics of the time considered beneath them. His work was quoted as an inspiration by Ray Harryhausen, and Derek Riggs, who created the album covers for Iron Maiden. Looking at the images he painted, it’s not hard to see why. It’s not an exaggeration to say that standing a few feet away from a two by three metre canvas he painted is every bit as breathtaking as watching a Manhattan get blown up again on a cinema screen, and if he was born in another time it’s easy to see him designing heavy metal album covers or the green screen backdrops for a blockbuster with the budget of a small country.

It’s not hard to see how these pictures could make good story fuel.

Now, one of the things I enjoy about reading anthologies, especially anthologies by multiple writers, is that it is one of the few times in this day and age when you can jump into a story knowing nothing about it. When you start a story you may recognise the name of the author, you may glean something from the title, but there’s no blurb, and not many websites jumping up and down to try and give away the plot. For this reason, while normally I really don’t mind spraying spoilers all over the place, this time I’m going to avoid going into detail about the individual stories in the anthology, and where I do refer to specifics I’m not going to tell you the title of the story. That way, you have to go into this book every bit as blind as I did.

Instead, we’re going to talk about the anthology as whole- what common ideas emerge from the mess of different writers throwing their brains into the same bowl, how the book works as a discussion (admittedly, a discussion where everybody talks without hearing what anyone else is saying, but that’s not too different from most of the discussions I go into anyway).

First off, Pandemonium- Stories of the Apocalypse, is a great book for reading first thing in the morning. You could also enjoy it as a lunchtime read, or maybe a bed time story to curl up with as it’s pitch dark outside and the clock is approaching midnight. Just don’t read it on a late winter afternoon as the sky turns red and heavy clouds the colour of bruises drift across it. Do that and this book will leave you just a little bit jittery and not quite sure whether you’re living in a nightmare or not.

View from my bedroom window. Yesterday. (The Great Day of His Wrath, John Martin, Tate)

John Martin tended to paint Biblical epics and scenes of Book of Revelations style apocalyptic devastation, plus a few scenes inspired by Biblical fanfic like Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno. So it’s not all that surprising that many of the stories in Pandemonium have a pretty heady fire and brimstone flavour going. Many of them deal directly with the Biblical apocalypse, but even the ones that don’t make heavy use of a paint box of horned demons and lakes of fire.

Regular readers will know that I have taken to politely ribbing Christian ideas about the apocalypse once, or twice, or... okay, it happens a lot. But regardless of how hilarious I find it to talk about raptured souls getting sucked into jet engines (the idea of most things getting sucked into jet engines is pretty hilarious to me. I’m a simple soul.) the book of Revelation and its various fan fiction spin-offs have created a rich seam for story tellers.

The stories in Pandemonium exploit this seam for all it’s worth, and what’s interesting is how many of them approach it from a similar angle- to the point where a couple of the stories could be set in the same universe. The perspective several of the writers take is to peak behind the stage curtains of Heaven and Hell and look at the angels and demons for whom the coming apocalypse is just a job with all the usual workplace worries. The old fashioned themes of sin and redemption run right through these stories, and often we’ll see it’s the demons being redeemed and the angels doing the sinning. A couple of the writers look like they may have taken a leaf or two from Pratchett and Gaiman’s Good Omens, but since, as I have explained before, all writers are thieving bastards, and neither Pratchett nor Gaiman has been shy about picking from the best that went before them, this isn’t really a tick against them. And as with Pratchett and Gaiman, the jokes in these stories are often there to get your guard down before they deliver the emotional dragon punch.

While these stories are quick to subvert and criticise this version of the apocalypse, it would be too easy to say that they are anti-religious. One of my favourite stories in the anthology (again, not going to tell you the name, you’ll have to find it yourself) features a character who represents all the best things about Christianity, and a God who is a different matter entirely.

Incidentally, this is what happens if you're a gay. (Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, John Martin, Laing Art Gallery, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums)

The mechanics of the apocalypse is just one theme running through the anthology however. These writers were asked to submit stories over August this year, and several of them, looking for inspiration, just turned on the news. One of the stories is explicitly set in the aftermath of the London riots, but there are others that feature apocalypses populated by feral youths, social media and, tellingly, quite a few out-of-touch middle class characters desperately clinging to normality as the world tears apart around them.

Which brings us to the third theme running through this book, and this can be seen in pretty much every story in here- if not every bit of apocalypse fiction out there. In some of these stories there’s no Biblical fight between Heaven and Hell, no uprooting of the world by an alienated and disenfranchised under class. In some of these stories the world just goes to Hell (literally- to varying degrees). Ordinary people are going about their ordinary lives one minute, and the next minute the sky looks wrong, the city is the wrong shape, the ground isn’t as reliable as they thought it was.

It’s this book’s ability to instil that fear in you that is the reason you shouldn’t read this between three and five pm on a winter’s day...

Breaking News: The Starbucks Zombies Rise Again!

2011-11-11T06:05:00.000-08:00

Regular readers of our blog will remember how, on the day of the Royal Wedding, two of our intrepid reporters were arrested for, well, sitting in Starbucks while wearing zombie make-up. There was a small protest in response to this, but that's just the beginning of the Starbucks Zombies response to what was, basically a very, very stupid arrest. Here is a press release written by our intrepid Hannah Eiseman-Renyard (or "Zombie Hannah" as apparently people who are introduced to her now know her.)

Judicial Review of Pre-emptive Royal Wedding Arrests

Fifteen people who were arrested preemptively on the day of the Royal Wedding have been granted permission to challenge their arrests by way of Judicial Review. The claimants, who were arrested from different locations across central London, had not committed any crimes. Those arrested included people on their way to peaceful protests, as well as people the police merely suspected of being on their way to protests. None of the claimants were charged and all were released almost as soon as the public celebrations had finished.

“It is our view that the treatment of our clients was unlawful under common law and was in breach of their fundamental rights under the European Court of Human Rights articles 5, 8, 10 and 11” said a spokesperson from Bhatt Murphy. “The apparent existence of an underlying policy that resulted in those arrests is a matter of considerable concern with implications for all those engaged in peaceful dissent or protest.”

Those arrested include members of the ‘Charing Cross 10’ who were on their way to a republican street party, the ‘Starbucks Zombies’ who were arrested from an Oxford Street branch of Starbucks for wearing zombie fancy dress, and a man who was simply walking in London and was stopped and arrested by plainclothes officers because he was a ‘known activist’. The arrests have been dubbed ‘precrime’ in many circles.

The arrests, all said to be to prevent anticipated breach of the peace, are part of a trend on the part of Metropolitan Police of using increasingly heavy-handed tactics against peaceful protestors, which manifested itself most recently in the threat to use rubber bullets against students protesting against the rise in tuition fees. Such tactics create a ‘chilling effect’ which dissuades others from protesting in the future.

The use of such tactics, which on the day of the royal wedding appear to have gone so far as to include a policy of carrying out preemptive arrests in order to intercept and prevent public protest and other dissent, raises questions of constitutional significance with regard to the role of policing in a democracy. The grant of permission for a Judicial Review means that those tactics will now be subject to the full scrutiny of the High Court in a 5 day hearing some time next year.

Bhatt Murphy is a leading civil liberties firm which specialises in police misconduct, prisoners’ rights, deaths in custody and immigration detention.

#30 Hotel Rwanda: What Are We Afraid Of?

2011-11-08T05:52:00.000-08:00

Site updates have been a bit patch for the last couple of months, mainly because circumstances forced me to move from my conveniently placed zombie fortress and I'm now having to secure a whole new building. However, now that everything's to my satisfaction, we're going to be seeing updates much more regularly here from now on, and I've got some great stuff lined up for this month alone. Starting with this blog entry.

A couple of days before Halloween I travelled down to the University of Winchester (so called because they have a rifle above the Student Union bar, I assume) for their first Zombosium (for those wondering, yes, the plural is Zombosia). It was an interesting day that involved studies of the zombie survival strategy debate on Mumsnet, examinations of The WalkingDead and Dead Set, and some great theories about ways to zombie-proof people’s homes. While there, I gave the following talk on a subject I've been working up to writing about on the blog for a while.

What are we Afraid of?: Hotel Rwanda as a Zombie Movie

I’m going to start off with a couple of things that ought to go without saying, but I’ll say them anyway. Firstly- It is not the intention of this talk to be in any way flippant about the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Secondly- The focus of this talk is the movie Hotel Rwanda, not the events it was based on. I am going to argue that in terms of its plot structure and themes, the movie has a lot in common with movies in the zombie apocalypse genre. Fans of science fiction and horror like to say that our genres of choice deal with the big issues. If that’s the case, I think it’s worth comparing the way a historical biopic and a sub-genre of horror movie approach the same themes.

The Genocide

Before we get onto that however, I think it’s important to remind ourselves just what the historical events were that the movie was based on. Over 100 days in 1994 between half a million and a million people were massacred. The targets of the massacre were the Tutsi people, an ethnic group that had been given positions of power during Belgian colonial times because the colonialists believed that they had more Caucasian features. During the genocide rape was systematically used as a weapon and men, women and children were murdered with machetes.

While this was happening, in the Rwandan capital city of Kigali Paul Rusesabagina of the Hôtel des Mille Collines was able to shelter 1,268 Tutsis, including his family, by bribing the militia and army with money and alcohol.

It’s Paul Rusesabagina’s story that is told in the film Hotel Rwanda. However, no matter how truthful director Terry George wanted to be in telling this story, it was a necessity to change some details. Multiple real life people were combined to create composite characters. Events that took place over a number of days instead happened in a single scene, rough edges were smoothed. Because he was telling a true story dramatically, the tools available to Terry George were the same tools available to any fictional film maker.

So what we’re going to do now is go through the movie, look at those tools, and see how the same tools are used in zombie movies.

Everything is Normal

The opening act of Hotel Rwanda establishes our characters and the world they live in. We see Paul talking to businessmen and running his hotel. We see the pleasant suburban neighbourhood he lives in, the kids that play there and how he spends time with his friends and family.

You’ll see similar scenes at the start of a bunch of zombie movies. Night of the Living Dead opens up with a brother and sister bickering on their way to drop off flowers at their father’s grave. The opening act of Shaun of the Dead introduces us to Shaun’s relationship problems and his dead end job. The 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake shows a nurse finishing her shift, going back to the suburb where she lives, chatting to her neighbour’s daughter and spending time with her husband.

The purpose of these scenes in a zombie movie is pretty straight forward. They exist to establish the main characters as people we can identify with. They have jobs and relationships and lives not that different from yours. The implication is loud and clear- these people are you. This could happen to you.

Likewise, on the commentary to Hotel Rwanda, Terry George says that he “Wanted to show they had a very Western lifestyle not unlike Europe and America".

Apart from the Problems in the Background

In Hotel Rwanda, while these scenes of domestic bliss are taking place, we can still see trouble brewing. A large part of this comes through news on the television and radio. The movie opens with radio propaganda from George Rutaganda saying why he hates to Tutsis. During the opening scenes we overhear news broadcasters talking about the Rwandan President’s involvement in peace talks.

Then in the background we see other details. While Paul is buying food and drink for the hotel, a crate tips over revealing it’s full of machetes. A neighbour is mysteriously dragged away by the army. Roads are mysteriously empty. Paul’s brother-in-law comes to him begging him to leave the country, and even while Paul is reassuring him that everything will be fine, there’s a power cut.

Again, we can see this reflected in a lot of zombie movies.

The first clue that things might be wrong in Night of the Living Dead is a news report about a crashed space probe from Venus, which the brother and sister promptly switch off without listening to. The Dawn of the Dead remake’s opening scenes have a background filled with mysteriously ill patients suffering bite wounds, news broadcasts that are almost immediately switched over to music stations, and “emergency bulletins” appearing on muted tellies.

Perhaps there’s no better example of this trope than Shaun of the Dead. The opening scenes of Shaun of the Dead are filled with half glimpsed headlines containing words like “mutilated remains” “GM crops blamed” and “Super-flu scares public”. A story about a space probe returning to Earth is heard on a passing radio, and the scenery is full of background hints such as sick people falling over in the street, ambulances and army trucks dashing about and a couple outside the pub who appear to be making out, right until one of their heads falls off.

The purpose of these scenes again, is pretty self evident. It’s that old saying about boiling a frog, gently ramping up the danger level so that our protagonists don’t notice it until it’s too late, while also firmly rooting a story that is about a small group of people in a much larger event.

Then Things Go Horribly Wrong

So, it’s at this point in the film that things start to really go bad. The president is assassinated. Tutsis from around the neighbourhood arrive at Paul’s house, begging for help. Soldiers turn up at the house, loading everybody into a van and driving them through the city. As they drive through Kigali, we see just how bad things have become. We see front gardens littered with corpses, people running around the streets with machetes, shouting and screaming and attacking other people. It really doesn’t take that much of a leap at all to see how these scenes resemble the scenes in a zombie movie. It’s a portrait of a society that’s fallen apart.

But for the sake of argument, we can see these scenes mirrored in the same zombie films we’ve been looking at already. When Ana runs out of the house to escape her zombie husband in the Dawn of the Dead remake, we see the city burning, people running and screaming through the streets, an ambulance ploughing someone down as it speeds past. In Shaun of the Dead, when they finally leave to pick up Shaun’s mum we see parks full of zombies and body bags struggling in the backs of crashed ambulances.

These scenes are crucial for setting the scene, because before long each of these films goes onto the next stage of the plot, which is the siege.

The Siege

In Hotel Rwanda the story really begins once the characters are inside the Hôtel des Mille Collines. More than anything else, Hotel Rwanda is the story of how Tutsi refugees are kept safe inside that hotel.

More than anything else, this is something Hotel Rwanda has in common with the vast majority of zombie movies. Whether it’s the pub in Shaun of the Dead, the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead, the mall in either Dawn of the Dead movie, the Big Brother House in Dead Set, the radio station in Pontypool, the stately home in the final act of 28 Days Later or the campsite in the first series of The Walking Dead, the pattern is the same.

Most zombie apocalypse movies work by first establishing a vast, world shattering catastrophe and then narrowing the action to a single group of people at a single location.

The Apocalypse will be Televised

Of course, while the characters in Hotel Rwanda spend much of the film restricted to the grounds of the hotel, we are still given a picture of the world beyond the hotel’s walls. We see footage from news crews that have been out there, depicting the slaughter. We hear stories from aid workers and refugees who come to the hotel after Paul and his family have arrived there.

The techniques used here are techniques used all over the place in zombie movies. George Romero likes his gore, but some of the most horrifying things that happen in Night of the Living Dead are things that we hear about, not things we see. One of the creepiest scenes in that movie is when Ben tells the story of a flaming truck he saw barrelling down the road, with attacking ghouls all over it. The fights between the characters are often over who has control of the radio or the television, which becomes a lifeline that the survivors use to find out about the extent of the outbreak of dead cannibals. The same is true of both Dawn of the Dead films, and in Shaun of the Dead, we know the problem is widespread because by the time they get to the pub none of the TV channels are broadcasting.

Nobody’s Coming to Help You

The refugees hiding in the hotel place there hope in the international community to intervene. Paul’s hope is that all he needs to do is hold out long enough for military intervention. His hope proves to be unfounded- the white guests at the hotel are evacuated, the UN pulls out.

A reporter responds to Paul’s hope that footage of the massacre will drive people to action by telling him “I think if people see this footage, they'll say Oh, my God, that's horrible. And then they'll go on eating their dinners.” Eventually Paul tells the refugees “There will be no rescue, no intervention for us. We can only save ourselves.”

Zombie movies are quick to demonstrate that the protagonists can expect no help from anyone in authority. In Night of the Living Dead, news broadcasts feature lists of refugee camps where people will be safe. In the original Dawn of the Dead it’s pointed out that those same lists are out of date and people are going to their deaths.

In the Dawn of the Dead remake, attempts to get attention from passing military helicopters are in vain, and the constant news footage only serves to emphasise how little the government knows about what’s actually going on, and in 28 Days Later a military outpost that claims it has the “answer to infection” turns out to be run by a madman.

The Siege Breaks

Now a siege narrative can only end one way- with the siege being broken. Every zombie movie that uses the siege narrative ends with their defences being broken down, the hordes coming in, and if the characters are lucky they will make their escape by helicopter, pub trapdoor or homemade heavily armoured van.

While the siege of the hotel in Hotel Rwanda is less literal than in the movies we’ve been talking about so far- using bribes and political influence as defences rather than boarded up windows and shotguns, this film ends the same way, and during the mass exodus of the hotel the only visible difference between the attacking militia and the hordes in 28 Days Later or the Dawn of the Dead remake is that these people have machetes. They aren’t individual characters, they are a mass.

So what?

Having been through the similarities between Hotel Rwanda and films such as 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead, and Shaun of the Dead, the next big question is “So what?”

I’m not going to argue that Terry George deliberately copied a bunch of tropes from zombie movies to tell this story. I think this film resembles a zombie movie because it’s preying on the same fears.

A lot of people have talked about what zombies represent. They have been used as stand-ins for our fear of mortality, consumerism, our love of celebrity or couch potato culture. But before a zombie is any of those things, it is preying on a fear that is far more straight-forward and literal. They prey on the fear that ordinary people such as your friends, your local shopkeeper or your neighbours, could turn into homicidal maniacs.

On the commentary to the film, when he is asked if he realised the scale of the massacres at the beginning of the genocide, the real Paul said, "No at that time I didn't realise. I knew it was happening in Kigali but I never thought my neighbour back home in the village where I came from could kill his neighbour."

It’s no secret that George Romero had the Vietnam War on his mind when he was making Night of the Living Dead. In that war clean-cut American college kids were sent off to another country, and found themselves having to do horrendous and unspeakable things. Then Romero released a movie where the threat was that ordinary people were turning into killers.

Over the last ten years we’ve seen more zombie movies released than ever before. During that period our biggest fears haven’t been that we will be invaded- that foreign troops will walk through our streets or bombs will drop out of the sky. What we’ve been afraid of is that someone down the street from us- a doctor, or a student, or a teenager who’s been hanging with the wrong crowds or reading the wrong websites, will try and kill us on our way to work. Most of the comparisons I have made with Hotel Rwanda could also be made with 2006 film Right at Your Door, about a man holing himself up in his house after a dirty bomb is set off.

I believe that the reason the zombies have entered the popular consciousness in a way that slasher movies or alien invasions haven’t, is that the images we see in zombie movies could easily be from the news. You look at events in Katrina, or Haiti, or even our London riots and it doesn’t take a tremendous amount of imagination to picture zombies running through those streets.

The Fear and the Fantasy

But there’s another side to this, and here is where things get disturbing- because we aren’t just afraid of a zombie apocalypse. We fantasise about it. There are countless books, magazine articles and websites about how you can survive the zombie apocalypse. The Centre for Disease Control in the US even tried to cash in on this with a blog using zombie survival plans as a jumping off point to talk about disaster preparedness- and it was so popular that it crashed the site.

In the movies, alongside the horror there’s a big dose of wish fulfilment. The Dawn of the Dead films, 28 Days Later and Night of the Comet all feature scenes of the survivors happily running through shops taking whatever they like. Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland both feature protagonists who have trouble dealing with the pre-apocalypse world, but who turn into action heroes when the zombies attack.

A big part of that fantasy, and a reason why zombies continue to be popular foes in videogames, is that more than terrorists, or Nazis or even invading aliens, zombies are creatures who you can murder wholesale without a shred of remorse.

I don’t think I even need to name a film where a character is told to shoot someone they knew who has become a zombie because “it’s not them anymore”. I’d be more interested in hearing if anyone knows of a zombie film where this doesn’t happen. Anybody who shows reluctance to kill zombies in a zombie apocalypse movie is portrayed as at best naive, and at worst dangerous.

Put simply, part of the fantasy of the zombie apocalypse is the ability to kill without any legal or moral consequences. I’m not saying this a bastion of moral superiority- at time of writing I have killed 45,022 zombies in Left 4 Dead- the equivalent of the population of Winchester- and it was a hoot.

Coming back to Hotel Rwanda, when the real Paul was discussing the way Tutsis were treated he said it was “dehumanising, like [they were] insects of no value". We see this all the way through the film. The Tutsis are constantly referred to as “cockroaches”. The Hutus are able to do what they do because, like the survivors in a zombie movie, they cease to see the people they are killing as in any way human.

One of the reasons I like zombie movies, and why I’ve kept following the genre for so long, is that so many zombie apocalypse stories don’t ignore these implications- they directly address them. In 28 Days Later the villain says at one point, “This is what I've seen in the four weeks since infection. People killing people. Which is much what I saw in the four weeks before infection, and the four weeks before that.”

I’ve already said that Night of the Living Dead is a movie about ordinary people becoming killers. It’s worth revisiting that and pointing out that the ghouls are not the only ordinary people who become killers in that film- the survivors do as well.

And that film was a direct take off the Vampire apocalypse novel I Am Legend, where the protagonist spends the book killing inhuman monsters only to discover at the end that they see him as the inhuman monster.

Before I finish I want to point out one major difference between Hotel Rwanda and all the other films we’ve been looking at. That difference is gore. In Hotel Rwanda the violence is seen in the imaginations of the viewers, and in an interview Paul has said of the film that “a lot of it is less violent than real life."

The reason for this, the director says, is that “Physically close to a million people were macheted or bludgeoned death and I didn't think I could get close to the horror of this.” At one point he even looked into using actual journalistic footage of the genocide, but decided against it because it would “it would have turned the film into some sort of weird snuff movie".

Zombie movies don’t face such restrictions, because, crucially, the events of those films never happened. In the films I’ve been talking about we see eyes gauged out, decomposed skulls, heads removed, people literally torn apart and their guts spilling out as it happens. There’s the occasional discretion shot, but more often than not the camera will linger, forcing us to look directly at the consequences of stabbing, shooting or bludgeoning someone.

Sometimes maybe the gore in these movies is just splatter, but personally I think there’s more to it than that. I think these films are able to do things that films like Hotel Rwanda can’t. In the context of fiction we have an opportunity see just how terrible violent death is up close.

At their very best, zombie movies aren’t just violent films, they are films about violence.

#29 The Rapture: For Real This Time, Honest

2011-10-22T07:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the day of the rapture. Harold Camping was finally vindicated, and the righteous were bodily lifted into the heavens, leaving us poor damned wretches behind. At least, that’s what I assume happened. To be totally honest, since I started freelancing I’ve not been getting out much, and don’t check the news all that often. Still, odds are Harold Camping was right- having predicted the apocalypse previously on 1994 and May 21^st this year he would have to really suck to have got it wrong a third time (EDIT: As of press time the rapture has been extended to sunset in Jerusalem on the 22^nd of October).

No harm in having a margin for error

So, while I haven’t turned on the telly or checked twitter to see if it’s really happened, I’m going to assume that all the Christians in the world have now been raptured away. After all, if God’s selection criteria for eternal paradise depends on your cultural background, upbringing, life circumstances and arbitrary gut feelings leading you to the right belief system, it’s only fair the God would spread a pretty wide net. It doesn’t matter that most Christians probably didn’t believe Harold Camping’s predictions or that the entire concept of the rapture only really dates back to the 19th century. It only makes sense that Fred Phelps, Rowan Williams, Stephen Colbert and Desmond Tutu have all gone to the same place, and to be fair, that’s a dinner party I’d pay real money to sit in on.

This leaves those of us left behind in an uncertain and terrifying world. The atheists among us are no doubt arguing that their Christian brothers and sisters were actually kidnapped by aliens and the Jewish and Muslim peoples are kicking themselves that they missed the right answer by one book.

But it’s time for us to move on. The creators of the Left Behind series have left us a wonderful “How To” video by the fictional PastorVernon Billings. But I’m sceptical about this (which admittedly, is how a lot of us got into this mess), since Vernon himself is pretty confident he wasn’t going to be here to deal with the world’s post-rapture consequences.

So here are some more practical tips for us as we move forward and try to reconstruct our society.

Tip One: Repurpose the Churches

Let’s face it, churches are great buildings. They look pretty and they are built to last.

You just can't get the medieval peasants anymore

In my adopted city of Norwich we had already made a good start on this before the rapture. We’ve something of an excess of churches, so we use the spares for things like puppet theatres and art centres while down in London they’ve converted a church into a pretty decent pub. These are lovely buildings and it’s a shame that non-believers have only ever been able to use them for family weddings and funerals. We’ll need to fix the heating and install some more comfortable chairs, obviously.

Tip Two: Do Away with Christmas

Finally! We can achieve what atheists, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Scientologists have dreamed of for centuries. We can do away with Christmas and establish Secular Gift Giving Day- a task we’ve had our best minds working on for years.

Once and for all we can replace tinsel, decorated trees, turkey, Santa Claus and watching The Great Escape with things that have nothing to do with Christianity!

And while we’re getting our hidden agendas out of the way-

Tip Three: Marry Your Pets

For as long as there have been people campaigning for the right of gay people to marry, there have been people saying that this will open the door to incestual and bestial marriages. Campaigners such as Rick Santorum who campaign on their Christian beliefs.

With them finally out of the way, we can end the subterfuge and legalise marrying both pets, and relatives. A generation from now our grandchildren will be able to do both at the same time.

Tip Four: Enjoy it While it Lasts

Yes, our new world of secular holidays, Starbucks cathedrals and dog/human hybrid cousins marrying each other is a glorious place and I’m sure we’re all going to have a great time. But you must enjoy it while you can, because on the 21^st (for some reason it’s always the 21^st) of December next year we’re due to get obliterated by the 2012 prophecy.

And if anyone thinks that I’ve been offensive to Christians in this blog, you just wait until you see the burns I’ve got prepared for the ancient Mayan religion!

Quetzalcoatl love, you've pulled!

Competition Time: See Dawn of the Dead in a Shopping Mall!

2011-09-27T03:47:00.000-07:00

So, this month of crazy busy continues, and in between suddenly and unexpectedly finding myself house hunting (None of these placesare within my budget), my actual job, and an exciting Chris Writes About the End of the World related event next month, I’m having to come up with yet more creative ways to not write the blog.

This week- Throwing a competition!

Cue trailer:

Yes the seaside town of Worthing is holding a film festival,showing movies in themed settings. This includes seeing Toy Story 3 in a children’s nursery- and more appropriately for our blog (although not as terrifying) they will be showing the ultimate zombie movie, Dawn of the Dead in a shopping mall THIS SATURDAY. And I have two free tickets.

Chris, I Want To See Dawn of the Dead in a Shopping Mall, How Much Shall I Bribe You With Cash and Favours to Attain This Gift?

Calm yourself, my sycophantic hypothetical reader, no bribes are necessary this time.

Nope. All I want from you is your zombie survival strategy. Only, like I said, I’m kind of short on time at the moment. And also I’m easily bored. So your zombie survival plan must be in one of the following forms:

Tweet- Sum your whole plan up in 124 characters or less, with the hashtag #shortzombieplan. (While you're at it, follow me at #chriszombieblog)

Alternatively, you can email your plan to chrisfarnell ...at... googlemail.com deliver your plan in Haiku- 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and 5 syllables again.

I will also accept limerick form.

You have until seven pm on Thursday to send me your plans. The best one gets the two free tickets. Winner will be announced Friday. Runners up will be posted on here to save me writing another blog.

So go forth! Show me your zombie fighting wisdom!

#28 Zombies & Cigarettes: The Art of the 15 Minute Apocalypse

2011-09-15T09:18:00.000-07:00

I am having an extremely mental week this week, so blog-writing duty has been handed over to our special guest blogger, Camiele White, writing about the short film Zombies & Cigarettes:

There have been many books written on the subject, many a hackneyed film portraying the event. However, almost every single article on the impending zombie apocalypse neglects the most important aspect of survival: time. Think about it: when you’re in a pinch, running for your life from mindless brain-hungry undead groupies, are you gonna want to try to remember every single step of the Zombie Survival Handbook, or are you gonna want a source that sums it up in 20 words or fewer? ‘Nuff said.

In Rafa Martinez’s Zombies & Cigarettes, we get all the gory, delicious brain munching of Zombiegeddon; however, where even the master of mental mastication, George A. Romero, fails, Martinez succeeds…getting to the point as quickly as possible. Not only are we plopped right in the social microcosm of a shopping mall in Spain (a location ripe for the fall and eventual regeneration of civilisation), we get all the violence, hubris, and character development necessary to ensure that even the casual viewer can get an idea of how vital speed is to survival.

While the idea of having the end of the world swirl around you like the fibres of cotton candy around a paper cone is intriguing unto itself, it’s the cleverness with which Martinez manages to focus on the fragility of time that impresses me. I wouldn’t say that it’s a direct commentary on the plight of a society wound up in its insecurities; however, it does make a very interesting point about the preciousness of time, the lack of attention paid to the intricacies of life around you. In as much time as it takes our hapless, lovesick hero to knock over a crate of passion fruit perfume, the world around him falls into absolute chaos: a woman falls from the second floor of the mall right onto her face, suddenly there’s a barrage of machine gun fire, a man in a chicken suit --it’s absolute ANARCHY!

As much as any film about the end of the world tackles the question of humanity’s insignificance, Zombies & Cigarettes hits you right in the gut. You’ve not only got to deal with the terror of eminent innard munching, you’ve got to figure out a way to survive and repopulate the world as you know it. The subtle brilliance of setting the zombie apocalypse in the confines of a shopping mall is worth praise. I imagine the person who created the mall saw his child making a shoebox diorama of the world and thought, “Yes.” It’s with this same wide-eyed observation that Rafa Martinez must’ve conceived of this 15 minute gem.

The mall: a toxic, poignant portrait of the scope of humanity as a whole. It illustrates the obsessive excess of society, the desire to have everything at your fingertips, grazing around a concrete mountain like robotic sheep. And just like sheep, these people playing their part in the human carnival are moved and swayed by the bright colours and capitalistic chaos...and so comes the eventual downfall. The zombies attack, feast, and infest, causing those too weak to get away to become swept up in another tragic collective of the mindless, hungry for the flesh of others, eager to gnaw on the minds of the delirious.

As is the case in most zombie flicks, there’s always a contingent of eager few who will stop at nothing to survive. These, too, are a representation of the varying types of personality in society: the feisty sweetheart, the arsehole muscleman, the pudgy best friend, and, of course, the reluctant hero. As is expected, the sweetheart and the hero make it to the end, ready to take on the mindless and free the flock. Then as soon as humanity seems little more than an epigraph on Earth’s slate-coloured tombstone, the doors open to a confusing scene: smiles, cheers, and cerveza for everyone.

To measure the freak and folly of human nature with 15 minutes of madness is not only well-played, it’s just damn smart. Rafa Martinez stumbled upon something truly genuine when he set out to make this campy horror flick. Original? Far from it. However, Zombies & Cigarettes has got to be the most informative and honest to goodness zombie flick I’ve seen in the last five years. I mean, the epic behaviour of being one slip away from your demise only to find out you’ve already missed the invasion is just too good to pass up.

If you’re a horror fundamentalist (I admit, I’m prone to wax philosophical about the imagery of the original When a Stranger Calls), this film may pass you by. However, even the most die-hard horror fan wants a reprieve from the depth of 70s horror, even if it is for just 15 minutes. Martinez’s short film is the perfect morsel wading through the slodge of new millennium horror flicks. I tip my hat to the man and can’t wait to see more of what he has to offer.

Camiele White suffers from too much film information. In order to remedy her psychosis she’s decided to write about it. Right now, she’s trying something a bit different and writes about Theatrical Costumes. If you want to engage in a little conversation (at your own risk) she can be reached at cmlewhite at gmail [dot] com.

#27 Zombie LARP II: Tales from Station Zero

2011-09-07T11:03:00.000-07:00

Friar’s Walk, Reading, used to be a shopping mall. Harassed mothers would do their last minute Christmas shopping there, nervous graduates would shop around for their first Interview Suit, teenagers would shoplift from the Claire’s Accessories. Not anymore though. Now there is no Claire’s Accessories.

Because in Friar’s Walk, everybody died. Usually more than once. Now it is a dark place, a quiet place, a graveyard of empty shop fronts, disused kitchenettes, and a tragically unused jungle gym.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

But as you stand there, in the dark, if you listen carefully you can hear whispers. Because is Friar’s Walk the walls tell stories.

Stories about the massive Zombie LARP game that went on there last weekend.

These are those stories.

Long-time readers will have already read about my last Zombie LARP adventure. There was one survivor.

This time around, most of the team was reunited. Myself, Alina Sandu and Matt Barnes were ready for action with a couple of important additions- One, Tom Harvey, Hello Bear bassist and our blog’s absolute favourite buttmonkey joined the team, as I felt it was important to have a red shirt character we could kill off easily and without remorse.

I'm not going to stop posting this picture until it's the top of Tom Harvey of Hello Bear's google results.

Secondly, and somewhat more impressively, we had Ninjas.

Somehow Alina is still the scariest person there.

Our team was assigned the moniker 2B, so we hilariously always referred to ourselves as Team 2B or Not 2B, because I insisted on it and never, ever got tired of that joke. I still haven’t.

The following game featured four hour-long runs. The rules were simple- Find eight batteries, plug them into the radio, then run for the roof where the “helicopter” would come and rescue us. Each run would begin with a quarter of the players as slow moving Romero zombies, and the rest as survivors. Personally, I thought this was stupid. One of the little suspension-of-disbelief tricks we always pull watching zombie movies, is accepting that groaning, slow-moving corpses are only that deadly in large numbers. Clearly a minority of these against an intelligent, fast moving and organised majority of humans would be quickly wiped out.

Run One

Our team was murdered pretty much instantly. I died screaming in the jungle gym.

This was a common story, but the human spirit prevails, and other teams fared better than hours, as survivor Anthony White’s video testimony proves:

Zombie LARP - Station Zero from Antony White on Vimeo.

Against adversity, the humans were able to unite, make a brave stand and escape, even though our team was completely... wait a second. What’s this?

Something isn't right here...

There, looking extremely cheerful considering that all his friends are dead, is Hello Bear bassist and blog buttmonkey Tom Harvey, right there among the people who made it out.

Outraged, I tracked down Tom Harvey, and made him account for his actions. His words, if you can believe them, are printed right here:

Testimony from Tom (Butt Monkey) Harvey

I soon found myself alone and bewildered, with no ammunition. Time passed, and the zombie hordes grew considerably. I was aimlessly wandering about, attempting to find other survivors, and to assist in collecting the precious batteries. I had been imformed that only one more was required in order to summon the helicopter. I casually strolled into a large room across from the childrens play area, and straight into the eyeline of a prowling white knight. This was not good. I had no ammunition, and no backup.

Okay, for those of you who don’t know, a White Knight is a cross between Rorschach from Watchmen, and Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining.

Believe it or not, he is an alcoholic author and house-sitter.

So ensued a small game of cat and mouse around the pillars. However, the white knight allowed me just enough time to sprint away, and to safety. Unfortunately, in my haste, I ran straight into a large puddle of water. Suddenly I was running without having any forward acceleration whatsoever. The White Knight was metres away from me when I somehow managed to find some purchase, the shock of which caused me to stumble. Using my now useless gun to steady myself, I ran to safety, at least, for the time being.

The time following this terrifying incident is mainly blurry, but I imagine it mainly involved cowering and whimpering. My memory kicks in back in that same room, this time escaping a large horde of the undead. For reasons unknown, I stopped in my tracks for the briefest of moments, which allowed me to spot and collect the final battery. This was brilliant, I had a chance of surviving! Oh wait, there's a fuck tonne of zombies bearing down on me....forgot about that. My days were surely numbered, there was no escape.

However, my knight in shining armour arrived, in the form of a skull adorned ninja. We were being backed into a corner, but the opportuniy to escape somehow arose - a gap had formed, I merely had to make a break for it. It was then that I bravely ran away, leaving my ninja companion to distract the zombies long enough for me to safely navigate my way out and into the dark stairwell. I would like to say that this was pre-agreed with my stealthy ally. In reality, I believe the conversation was somewhere along the lines of "Sorry mate, I'm gonna have to leg it.....good luck". Unfortunately, he did not survive, but I did, so all was well with the world. My next aim was to safely return the battery to the saferoom....but where the fuck was I?

I found a small band of survivors, and attempted to communicate, with clarity, that I had the final battery in my possession. Admittedly this mainly consisted of waving it (the battery, you dirty bastard) about and shouting. Amazingly, my informative speech was not fully understood initially, and we continued looking for the battery, until I reitirated my original message, to which the response was "well why didn't you mention that before?".

The safe room, with me in it. Before Tom left me to die.

We safely navigated our way to the saferoom, and called the helicopter. We now had to make it to the roof, fight off the hordes, and await salvation. By now we had a decent sized group, but we were woefully under equipped. In our rush up the narrow stairs, I was injured by a passing zombie. Limping, I bravely hid behind my fellow survivors, fighting off the neverending surges of the undead with nothing but melee weapons. Realising my importance in this scenario, I valiantly yelled "Look out there's a fucking zombie" when it seemed appropriate. I even attempted to hide under the air conditioning units, alas the zombies had the same idea. I was left, cowering next to a dead pigeon, although still not regretting my generally traitorous ways. After what seemed like an eternity, the doors to the roof were open. Our rescue had arrived, we had survived! The high priest, regrettably, was taken at the last second, sacrificing himself for the greater good. The doors were closed, and relief flooded through me like some insensitive simile to do with a tsunami. We had survived, we had not been taken. My team had been.....but screw them, I was alive!

Run Two

Following our disastrous first run (I can’t believe Tom managed outlive me!) we agreed that we needed a more unified, organised approach. We would stick together, shouting our team name out if we became separated, and shoot Tom in the back if he tried to run.

Of course, this plan went to pot when the game started, and we realised Alina was nowhere to be found. Despite this, our team pushed on ahead, running and gunning our way through the mall. A many great acts of heroism occurred during this run. By people who weren’t on our team.

Testimony from Grant Hewitt

I'm playing the preacher in the Safe Room, and I hear an almighty scream from down the corridor on the main concourse. Two guys burst into view - one with a lead pipe, and one with a pistol, both running like mad. The lead pipe wielder draws too much attention from zombies and gets dragged down - the other guy, spooked, pushes past me into the safe room and collapses against a wall. I cry out to the man who didn't make it, saying that he'll "find solace in the peace of death" and then, just before he stops moving, he flings something at me. Hard. It hits me in the neck and I'm about to chew him out for it, but I look down and realise it's a powercell. What a guy. True warrior of Christ, he was.

Meanwhile, our stick together plan worked fine right until we passed through the jungle gym, where promptly I lost everyone on my team. Bravely carrying on alone (unlike Tom, who ruthlessly left his team mates to die) I moved onwards and upwards. I got to the roof of the mall, found it to be a dead end, and turned back. This was when I saw survivors charging up the stairs.

Testimony from Alina Sandu

Pictured: Apparently not dead.

My new team seemed well organised and competent (Editor’s Note: By now Alina had joined another team. She isn’t talking about 2B or Not 2B) and we made our way through the mall painlessly. I even found a gun I could use after starting unarmed.

We stopped in the safe room very briefly, and I hoped I'd meet up with 2B there but didn't. We carried on up and down for a while, until we heard the helicopter was on its way. It seemed a bit early in the run but everyone was going towards the exit so we followed.

That's when I ran into what was left of 2B. Matt wasn't with them, but nobody could confirm that he was dead, so I decided to think he was alright.

We made it to the top of the building and waited for the helicopter. And waited some more. A few zombies were getting close but it didn't seem much of a problem. We kept waiting.

After a while, I started feeling guilty that I hadn't managed to meet up with Matt. I imagined he was waiting for me around the safe house since that was supposed to be our meeting point.

As we waited, the zombies continued to mass, but we held them at bay. Alina started arguing that we should go back to save Matt, but I told her he was probably dead already, pointed out that he’d happily left her to die at the last Zombie LARP, and when that failed, slapped her hard about the face and told her to pull herself together (That last bit was a lie- hitting women hard around the face is wrong. Even LARP-safe hitting hard around the face).

Then, I turned around for one second and turned back to discover Alina had run off on her own, completely unarmed, to save her already dead boyfriend. Because that always works in the films.

Realising I was also about to do something incredibly stupid, I asked another survivor for his gun- a pistol with two bullets left, and was ready to set off after Alina, when the next bunch of zombies arrived. This time we were out of ammo, and the zombies had found ways to climb over and crawl under our defences. Soon we fell back to the door of the roof. I tracked down one of the people who had been shouting about the imminent helicopter, and he swore it was on its way.

It wasn’t on its way.

I was one of the last to die, and went down heroically hiding in a crack behind the big A/C unit on the roof, trying to shove another survivor out into the open so that he wouldn’t give away my position. I’d do it again in an instant.

Run 3- The Zombie Run

Team 2B or Not 2B were zombies for this round. I spent pretty much the entire round hiding behind a locker in the basement, waiting for someone to come and pick up a battery hidden in there.

That and working on the pitch for our movie "Twilight Only Gay and with Zombies"

Other zombies had better luck

Testimony from Zombie Matt Barnes

My most enduring (and endearing) memory from being a zombie is best presented, I think, in the form of an ASCII map:

| H |
|============= H |
| Z H |
| ==------======
|
| Z Z Z
| Z Z

The humans were heading down to the (pitch-dark, of course) basement through a corridor. They turned a corner, and were faced with a glass wall to their left and one Zed dead ahead. While that zombie was getting a pretty decent bashing, the humans had apparently failed to appreciate that the glass wall in question was not -entirely- glass.

I say apparently because they didn't seem to be expecting four undead arms to suddenly burst through the gap and start groping for human flesh. The looks on their faces were pretty special.

Of course, not all the survivors were simply trying to call the helicopter and get out. Some players like to bring along a selection of NERF weapons so extravagant that they can only arm themselves with the benefit of an Evil Dead II style Bruce Campbell montage. Not wanting to break the game, the organisers offered these players the option of playing the Left Hand of God mission. While everyone else was running about like headless chickens, a team that accepted this mission would be allowed to take only their own guns- with nothing from the communal gun pool, and be assigned to kill a mysterious, deadly creature known as the Leech.

This is the story of one such team:

Testimony from Grant Hewitt

I'm on Leech duty. It's very quiet, and Liam saunters through the basement.

He's about to do something really badass isn't he? You can tell.

So I pop up to him and ask him quietly - "Oh, man, how did you die?" because I figure he's been taken out of action early on.

"Well," he says, "technically I didn't die." And RUNS. I've already given up the power cell I had after a team graciously gave me one of their number, so I figure - what the hell? I give chase. Liam flees through corridors and takes turns almost at random, searching for a staircase. I get shot a couple of times as we run past people, but whatever - I'm screaming "I CAN SMELL YOUR BLOOD! THIRSTY! THIRSTY! I CAN HEAR IT IN YOUR FUCKING VEINS!" and I'm going to get him and drink him dry.

Unfortunately, he managed to find a staircase - and the leech doesn't leave the basement, so I let him run, and turned around to go back to my lair. Behind me in a doorway is team Hand of God, who shoot me to pieces whilst chanting "The power of Christ compels you!" over and over, unloading what must have been around thirty or forty bullets into me at point blank range until I slumped against a wall, unmoving.

Now that is the stuff of legend people. That is the sort of thing that should only be taken on by heroes or fools.

Run 4- The Left Hand of God

After Run 3, our team were sat around, relaxing, planning our strategy for the next run. We’d come to affectionately know the ninjas as Darth Vader and Skull Face. As we chatted, one of the ninjas, I believe it was Darth Vader, said “We want to do the Hand of God mission.”

It took a split second for us to think this over and say “Nooooo! Nope. No. No way. Not doing that. Nadda.”

“For the Hand of God you can only take your own guns with you,” I pointed out. “None of us have brought any weapons.”

Then Darth Vader said something that would eventually doom us all. He looked at me and said, “We can kit you out.”

“We’ve got a massive box full of guns,” Skull Face added. “Plenty of weapons for everyone.”

There was a long, pregnant pause. On second thoughts, maybe it was what I said next that doomed us all.

I said, “Show us the box.”

That's a nice box.

We tooled up. Took as many guns as we could carry and crammed out pockets full of ammunition. This time we weren’t going to be a bunch of panicked civilians, fleeing for our lives. This time we would be a crack time of combat specialists, with a mission, and purpose.

Our mission was to kill the monster known as the Leech, a mysterious creature that could be harmed with acts of religious devotion- With Atheism not counting as a religion, Grant felt the need to point out to me for some reason.

In keeping with our new professional attitude, I said we should probably assign a leader, and it was unanimously agreed that this leader should be Skull Face, because nothing gives inspiring leadership like a man with a skull for a face.

I see no problem here.

Testimony from Matt Barnes

We were tooled up to the eyeballs. I had the biggest gun I'd ever picked up, and two pockets stuffed full of spare ammunition. Obviously not even any need for one of the swords I was offered. We had one objective: kill the Red Leech, described variously as "scared of religion" and "not as hard as the White Knights". No problem.

We first headed down to the basement where we had been reliably informed that the Leech always hung out. While one team member kept the handful of normal zombies at bay, the rest of us chanted piously while pummelling the target with more bullets than it could handle. When it fell to the ground, a couple more shots were enough to put it down for good, and we grabbed its energy cell and melee weapon before heading to the safe room.

Our general assistance was enough to ensure that everything else needed to escape was gathered in no time, and we headed to the exit. Like a well-oiled machine we cleared the path to the doors, stopping just before them, and holding the exit for the other survivors with our overwhelming firepower.

That was the plan, anyway. It was a good plan, as well.

This picture has nothing to do with this part of the story, but Christ it looks awesome.

Testimony from Darth Vader

We headed into the depths of the Mall, Theravadic chanting under masks and medics wielding glow stick crosses, we felt damned invincible. We joked about hanging a crucifix round the leech's neck. But in the dark, something drew the zombies to us like moths to a flame. Tap, pin. Tap, move. Tap, pin. Tap, move, but still they kept coming.

Testimony from Matt Barnes

It was actually all going pretty well when we met our first zombie. We all immediately opened fire, and six darts found their home, almost simultaneously, in the centre of its chest. One more once he was down to put him out of commission. We then advanced cautiously and slowly through the basement, double-checking behind every obstruction to make sure there was no possibility of a surprise.

In retrospect, this was an excellent plan for making sure we weren't ambushed, but a dreadful one for making sure that loads of other zombies didn't use this extra time to turn up hoping for tasty, tasty brains. Coming at us from all sides in the dark, we held them off for a short time but the inevitable happened soon enough. A couple of us (including one random survivor from another team, who I can only assume arrived at some time while we weren't paying attention) managed to clear a path long enough to escape upstairs... directly into the welcoming arms of a cheerful-looking White Knight.

So this was when things started to fall apart. Quickly, we realised our weapons were occasionally a bit more jammed than we’d like, and we were being completely outnumbered. I found our brave, skull-faced leader on the floor and ran over to heal him, only to turn round in time to see a White Knight bearing down on me with an axe.

Still somehow the team carried on without me. Darth Vader was somehow still alive.

Testimony from Darth Vader

Ahead, crouched by a pillar, I saw our leader. Armour still on, still armed, very still. I retreated back crouched down next to him, and asked "How'd you get through that?"

Alas, poor Skull Face. He loved the jungle gym, like all ninjas.

He turned slowly, and reached out towards me, groaning like the last escaping air of a corpse.

Sword across his chest, I forced him back across the floor and over (figuratively) the safety rail, but not before he'd swiped at my chest. I turned and ran, and ran, and ran, pumping a rifle I had no idea if worked, and swinging a sword at anything that moved. I got slashed at on the ribs, but momentum and a goal ahead of me kept me going... An arm that I thought was going to swing just under me as I leapt suddenly shot up. With my armour gone, and nothing but momentum carrying me on bones that may have shattered, not thinking about the weapons, just managing the pain, and knowing, KNOWING the safe room was around the next corner... I ran.

Straight into practically every zombie in the field.

So, once more, the last remaining member of our team was Matt Barnes- who makes a habit of this sort of thing.

Testimony from Matt Barnes

I hung around in the safe room for a bit as it became apparent that not only was I now unarmed, but there were a quite terrifying number of "ambulant cadavers" outside each entrance. In the end all the survivors got together to make one final daring break for freedom (or "suicide run" as it might more accurately be termed). Most of us actually got quite a long way towards the other side of the mall before being brutally torn down by an assortment of zombies, White Knights, and one inexplicable mad woman with a shotgun.

The last I saw of Matt he was lying in a shop window, wounded, but not dead.

So I ate him.

Pictured: Not invincible.

Thanks to Alina Sandu and www.blackpapersky.co.uk's Anthony White for letting me use their pics and video footage for this blog.

#26 Zombie-Proof Housing: Property Guide to the Apocalypse

2011-08-30T15:10:00.000-07:00

With house prices taking a dip there has never been a better chance to get into the market. And with the zombie apocalypse only being a matter of time, you want to make sure your new dream home is ready for anything.

The idea of buying your very own post-apocalyptic bolt hole is a staple of science fiction satire. Back when he was good, Ben Elton wrote a novel called This Other Eden which was about a company selling personal biospheres for people to move into to live out the looming ecological breakdown.

The videogame franchise Fallout is full of hokey 50s style adverts for massive underground vaults where you and your family can move into to avoid the bombs dropping.

It’s fertile ground for satire- the idea of society facing its looming destruction by trying to sell yet more consumer goods is just the sort of over-the-top, extreme, exaggerated metaphor for consumerism that sci-fi does so well.

So, here are some reviews of real life post-apocalyptic residences that you can actually buy with real money.

Satire is dead.

And the best part is- they will only rise in value when they’re the only structures still standing.

1: The Safe House

If you’re a zombie nut who spends any amount of time on the Internet (and according to Google analytics, you are) you’ll have probably seen this place already. Built by Polish architects KWK Promes, the safe house looks like the sort of spacious, contemporary property you would expect to see lived in by a successful movie star or cocaine dealer. However, at the flick of a switch the building transforms Tracy Island style into a locked down zombie-proof fortress of doom.

Just don't get caught in the draw bridge.

The architects say: “The innovation of this idea consists in the interference of the movable walls with the urban structure of the plot. Consequently, when the house is closed (at night for example) the safe zone is limited to the house’s outline. In the daytime, as a result of the walls opening, it extends to the garden surrounding the house.”

What we say: Okay, this place is pretty secure, you’re probably going to be living a pretty luxurious life in there and there’s room for you and your whole family. There’s the problem. It’s not all that hard to make a home secure from zombies, with a bit of work you can make a farmhouse or even a pub a secure place to hide from the zombie menace. That’s never what gets you. What gets you is the people you’re with, the tensions, and rivalries, the silent power struggles.

How long do you think you’ll last through the end of days if you’re stranded with people you can’t make it through Christmas dinner with?

It keeps the zombies out, and the sound of screaming in.

2. Vivos Shelters

Terra Vivos’s facilities- advertised here in a video heavily influenced by Battlestar Galactica’s opening credits, are probably the closest thing we have yet to Fallout’s Vault-Tec facilities.

Their website is a masterpiece of marketing- few companies selling products this high end would have the balls to actually include a “Prophecy” section on their website, as well as a list for the most “viable scenarios” for your imminent fiery death (zombies aren’t on the list, but the 2012 predictions are). It even has helpful countdown clock to the 2012 apocalypse on the left hand side, like some sort Armageddon oriented Ebay.

The service they provide is called “Life Assurance” which is a bit like “Life Insurance”, and so sounds like a real, legitimate business.

But Vivos doesn’t just offer one shelter, oh no! In this day and age where you car, mobile phone and choice of music player say so much about you, would you settle for anything less than fully personalised salvation?

The Deluxe Model

They say: “At 137,000 square feet, spanning four levels, this facility will be the largest, strongest and most defensible Vivos shelter in North America, accommodating over 900 people for up to one year of autonomous, underground survival. It will also be the first Vivos shelter to come online, in early 2011. Due to the massive size and economies provided by the scale of this shelter, Vivos is able to offer a limited number of membership spaces at just $25,000 per person.”

We say: That’s right, you don’t want to die because of some piddly family drama. You want to go what professionals call “The full Lord of the Flies.” Still, this looks like some pretty sweet digs, kinda reminds me of the laboratory they lived in in the Andromeda strain. Of course, the stuff that’s actually been built so far looks like this:

Which is less appealing. Still according to their timer as of writing they have 478 Days, 02 Hours, 36 Minutes, 08 Seconds Remaining, so as long as there isn’t an unexpected apocalypse before then, you’re laughing. The only real problem here is the price. They quote $25,000 per person here for their Nebraska facility, but at the Indiana facility prices are already at $35,000 per person, with prices set to rise to $50,000 once the initial spaces are sold. That’s a pretty hefty investment, and even if you think that’s a small price to pay to survive the coming hell storm, if you’ve got a family you need to seriously consider whether you love them that much.

And of course, the shelter is only designed to keep your sheltered for a year. If Fallout 3 taught me anything, it’s that if you live in an underground bunker through the apocalypse only to climb out onto the surface of a blasted Earth later, you’re basically going to get your lilly-white ass handed to you by all the Mad Max types who just stood outside and took their nuclear blast like a man.

The Economy Model

They say:“Vivos is now offering an economical shelter solution for the average person and family. A recent survey of Vivos members revealed that nearly two-thirds cannot afford to purchase a share for themselves and their family in one of our First Class shelters. With our goal being to save as many lives as possible, Vivos is reworking one of the largest facilities to accommodate 1,000 people at a very affordable rate of just $9,950 per person. Now, virtually anyone can afford a boarding pass into an impervious Vivos underground shelter to survive whatever man-made or natural cataclysms may lie ahead.”

We say: Okay, so it turns out you did love your family that much, and so rather than spend 30 grand on living it up in 5 star cursed-Earth luxury, you decided to split it three ways and get a less flashy accommodation for you, your partner and the least obnoxious of your two kids.

For that, you get... well you get four bunkbeds and a curtain:

Pro tip: For maximum domestic harmony arrange a "Wank rota" where three of you will be out of the room at pre-arranged times.

Still, at $9,950 per person? With property prices the way they are now, I’d actually be up for that if they let me move in straight away.

3. My House

It has a lockable front door, barbed wire at the rear garden fence, a wide selection of garden implements for self-defence, plus a nice old man lives next door who owns and knows how to use a machete. Plus I’ve been reliably informed by the British government that the cupboard under the stairs is a perfectly adequate fallout shelter.

Yeah, I’ll be fine.

#25 Flipped: A Dark Glimpse of Mankind's Future

2011-08-22T08:41:00.000-07:00

This was a story I wrote for a Cabaret night at the Birdcage in Norwich. It is a story about a different kind of apocalypse, so I thought it would be in keeping with this month's non-zombie theme.

Ladies and gentleman, consider, if you will, the End of Days. There has been much talk recently of Biblical and Mayan prophecies, much debate over whether we will die at the hands of zombies, or robots, or, most recently, chimpanzees. But I am here tonight to tell you that the truth is far more startling, and more terrifying, then you could have possibly imagined.

Before I begin this tale, let me assure you that the facts presented here are 100% scientifically accurate. I know, because I looked them up on Google myself. So, if you're sitting comfortably, let me show you a glimpse of mankind's dark future...

It is the year 2036, and the world is a very different place. Meet Terry, at 25, Terry is one of the last people left who still remember the old world. The world of men. Now he’s a soldier- all surviving free humans are soldiers. Today he is crawling on his belly through the rubble of a destroyed office block, clutching his weapon to his side. The sun is setting behind the ruined crags of a once great city, and Terry, Terry is being hunted.

Still, Terry has been hunted his whole life, and nobody has caught him yet. Using stealth techniques learned from a lifetime of scavenging the wreckage of the old cities, he circles his enemy, keeps beyond the reach of its senses. Eventually, he’ll find a safe vantage point, and then the hunter will become the huntee.

He finds his spot, a still-standing concrete pillar that offers a clear line of sight to the enemy. It’ll mean leaving cover, but if he’s quick enough, it might just work. Terry risks a glance around the edge of the pillar. The enemy is there, watching with tiny black eyes. And it’s smiling. That’s the thing Terry hates most of all. The enemy is always smiling.

TRUE SCIENCE FACT: Dolphins are one of the only species known to kill for pleasure.

It was our own fault of course. We trained them. From the 1960s onwards the Soviet and US navies were known to be training dolphins to hunt out mines, and rumours abound that they were trained to plant them as well.

But that’s the thing about dolphins. They communicate. They spread the word.

The first anyone knew anything was wrong was the day that none of the tuna fleets returned to port. Not long after that the oil rigs started going down- the few survivors reported spectacular explosions that strangely managed to avert any spillages.

As we panicked over the looming energy crisis and bickered among ourselves, they struck. Nobody knows how they constructed the exo-skeletons- the strange fish bowls with mechanical limbs, armed to the teeth. Some theorised that the dolphins had evolved an advanced form of telekinesis. Others said they had crab slaves. By the time New York fell and Sheringham became a death camp, it was all academic anyway.

TRUE SCIENCE FACT: The ancestors of the dolphin had claws. As dolphins evolved they did away with the claws because they didn’t need them anymore.

Let’s return to Terry. He’s still hiding behind his pillar- the quick glimpse he stole was already a huge risk, and he doesn’t want to show himself again until he’s ready to strike.

Keeping out of sight, Terry arms his weapon.

Not long after the initial uprising, we discovered that bullets were useless against dolphin technology. For a while it looked like our cause was lost- some argued for a nuclear solution, but after the hijacking of Trident nobody wanted to risk escalating the conflict to that level.

Then, a brilliant engineer in the resistance realised we could breach the dolphin defences using a long, spear-like projectile fired with some manner of pressurised gas or spring. The ‘poon, as it became known, was soon our most valuable weapon.

Like all good soldiers, Terry loves his ‘poon. He keeps his ‘poon clean and in perfect working order, knowing that at any time the ‘poon could be his only hope.

Readying his ‘poon for action, Terry edges around his cover and takes aim. No sooner has he locked on than he notices an area of red lights dotted across his chest-plate. The dolphin’s echo-location spotted him the moment he broke cover. Terry dives for the ground as a rain of fire descends on him.

TRUE SCIENCE FACT: Based on the bodies of murdered porpoises and infant dolphins, it’s believed dolphins can use their echo-location to pinpoint the individual organs in a body.

Despite our near total defeat, even now the human race doesn’t face total extinction. Although merciless in their subjugation of our race, the dolphins seem to have a lingering affection for some of us. They have a particular affinity for pregnant females, and some children. These chosen few are given resplendent quarters and the best food rations, although they are regularly called before a court of their dolphin masters. Sometimes they are asked to perform tricks, other times the dolphins simply want their company. Some dolphins apparently find it “soothing” to swim with humans.

As for the rest, the adult males or anyone who the dolphins believe is overly grouchy, well, they are simply sent to processing camps. Humans go in, tins with smiling human faces on the labels come out. No human has yet deciphered the writing on the tins.

TRUE SCIENCE FACT: On average 37 people die a year from dolphin attacks. There are 60 reported shark attacks a year. It should be noted, sharks are not intelligent enough to cover up murders.

Terry is lying battered and bleeding in the dirt, but still alive. He’s lasted as long as he has after the dolphin apocalypse not just by being tough and being careful, he’s also made a habit of being incredibly lucky.

The dolphin is approaching now, one robotic step at a time. With every crunch of its feet against the rubble, there is a sloshing noise as the water rolls around its cockpit. The dolphin intends to find Terry’s body, and using its echo-location, determine whether his organs are still functioning.

Terry glances down, and realises his hand is still on his ‘poon. He heaves the gun into place, and takes aim. As the dolphin soldier steps into view, Terry fires the harpoon.

TRUE SCIENCE FACT: On the 28th of July 2011 thousands of dolphins were seen massing together over a five-mile area of sea, just off the coast of Cornwall.

Laughing, Terry clambers to his feet, and stumbles over to the body of his fallen nemesis. As he stands over the crumpled exo-skeleton, there is triumph on his face. Looking at his tiny, dark eyes, and the smile that stretches from ear to ear, you could be forgiven for wondering if maybe, just maybe, mankind is the real dolphin.

Suddenly, the smile vanishes. Terry can see the twisted metal, the shattered glass, the spilled water, but he can find no sign of the dolphin pilot. Behind him, he hears a whistling, clicking sound.

TRUE SCIENCE FACT: Nobody knows for certain that dolphins can’t levitate.

#24 Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Hollywood Loves Alzheimers

2011-08-15T05:40:00.000-07:00

In-keeping with this month's "Apocalypses that don't include zombies" theme, this week we're going to be looking at the Ape-Pocalypse.

I’ve been hurt before. It was 2001, I was 16 or 17, an innocent, almost naive soul full of hope for the future. Then one day, I recommended to a friend that we go and see a film. That film was a remake of one of my favourite classic sci-fi movies directed by someone whose other films I liked. It seemed like the perfect match. Look! I didn’t know! Okay? I was young! I didn’t know!

Fuck you forever, Tim Burton

I would never be the same again after that fateful day. The Planet of the Apes remake featured Mark Wahlberg with a face marginally less convincing than the prosthetic ape masks, the moral that racism is probably just the fault of like, one bad person, and a twist ending where... the bad ape becomes Abraham Lincoln? Or something?

More like APE-braham Lincoln! Am I right?

So you can understand, I was cautious when it was announced that yet another Planet of the Apes film was being made- Especially since there had been only one decent Planet of the Apes film made after the first one. (It was the third one).

So you can imagine my relief when it turned out that Rise of the Planet of the Apes is not in any way a remake, prequel or reboot of the Planet of the Apes series. Let me explain. From here on, there may be spoilers- although admittedly, none as bad as the bloody cover of the original Planet of the Apes DVD.

The clue is on the left

You see, Planet of the Apes is a story where science is the hero. There’s some not-very-subtle criticism of vivisection, and some light-hearted fun is poked at Darwinism, but at its bare bones Planet of the Apes is the story of some scientists eager to discover the truth about their world, against the wishes of the religious rulers of their society.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes on the other hand, is about scientists who, while trying to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, inadvertently make some animals super intelligent, who then turn on the humans. This is not the plot of Planet of the Apes, or the even the ill-conceived Planet of the Apes sequel/prequel Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.

This is the plot of Deep Blue Sea.

A film entirely worth it for Samuel L Jackson's death scene

Deep Blue Sea is not a film with an overriding love of science. The reason sharks turn super smart and start killing people in that film is because they were being used to develop a cure of Alzheimer’s and the scientists “used gene therapies to increase their brain mass. A larger brain means more protein. As a side effect the sharks got smarter.” In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the main character boasts that “Our therapy enables the brain to repair itself.”

In Planet of the Apes, Dr. Zaius, the religious leader of the ape society is shown to argue “There is no contradiction between faith and science... true science!” and when Charlton Heston goes in search of the truth, Zauis warns “Don't look for it, Taylor. You may not like what you find.” Throughout Planet of the Apes it is made clear that if somebody argues that “there are some thing man (or ape) was not meant to know” it is because there is something that they want hidden, that ignorance is being maintained for a purpose.

In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the sensitive, hot looking veterinarian who becomes the love interest says “Some things aren't meant to be changed.” And by some things, she means Alzheimer’s disease.

In order to ensure a balanced and fair review I thought it fair to provide an Ape perspective on the film, and so I invited our blog’s favourite subhuman primate along to the film- Hello Bear bassist Tom Harvey. Tom exhibits the basic problem solving and communication skills of an untrained chimpanzee, so his views would naturally be valuable.

T: I have a degree in biomedical sciences.

He likes to fling poop!

In exchange for some bananas and dried fruit, Tom used a series of primitive hand signals to raise the following objections:

1. Show me a life saving drug which has taken 5 years to develop, in the modern age. Please, I'm intrigued to see if any have gone to trials on non-human primates in such a short space of time.

2. The term "statistical significance" seemed to have been ignored - One positive result in apes, compared to several negative, would never leda to trials in humans.

3. You can't just wander into a lab and steal chemicals, even if you're a lead researcher.

4. Likewise, you can't just walk into a lab and steal animals - ask PETA.

5. If an animal was pregnant before or during testing, this would be spotted.

6. Scientists (to my knowledge) won't buy any old animal from any old criminal.

7. A shareholder can't just walk in to a lab and say "test on humans, to make me money".

8. Where were the published results of the animal trial? I'm sure the 3rd reviewer (and 1st and 2nd) would have had something to say about the methodology.

9. I'm pretty sure it's frowned upon to have "veterans" of testing (with regards to test subjects). The regulatory bodies might have something to say about this.

10. Speaking of regulatory bodies….where were they? For the lab, and the animal sanctuary.

11. No randomisation of the animals in the studies either - they were specifically picked out (by the CEO of the pharmaceutical company - even more ridiculous)

12. The scientists didn't seem to be "blinded" to the treatment groups either.

13. Were there control groups? No mention made.

14. The claim is made that apes have "much stronger immune systems than humans". This is not something I've ever heard previously.

15. The virus somehow manages to alter the genes in many different subtypes of cells - in the brain, the gametes, and in the cardiovascular system. Doesn't sound particularly well designed if it lacks specificity.

16. Also, the scientist seemed to be good at talking to women….no way.

I assume these are things he learned while researchers unsuccessfully tried to train him to release food pellet by press a button.

Still, what the hell? It’s called science fiction, not science... is... real... thing. What does it matter if they got a few details wrong while pushing a message that scientists are irresponsible, hubristic madmen who will stop at nothing to create their precious medicine?

Well, the fact is, these stories are where a lot of people get their idea of what science is. Hell- the only reason I was interested in science as kid was because I assumed my job would be pretty much the same as Doctor Emmet Brown’s.

Not pictured: The "control" DeLorean

And this has very real consequences for the way science is reported. Only last month the Daily Mail warned that a “Planet of the Apes scenario” could result from scientists researching with human-animal hybrid embryos- that live in a petri dish for 14 days before being destroyed. Some scientists believe that this could lead to a supply of stem cells that could be used to investigate debilitating and so far untreatable diseases including, among others, Alzheimer's disease.

Objections to this research come from religious groups of the Dr. Zaius variety, and from those who think movies like Rise of the Planet of the Apes are a documentary. There are important ethical questions that arise with the dawn of any new research- This is why there exist ethical committees, because believe it or not, scientists put a lot of thought into how their research can be misused. And we’re right to ask questions about that research. But films like this don’t further that discussion, all they really do is continue demonstrate just how much Hollywood loves Alzheimer’s.

Working the Time Machine: Writing Time Travel So It Makes Sense

2011-08-08T09:08:00.000-07:00

I've got quite a busy week on this week, and the movie I wanted to blog about isn't actually out yet. So this week I'm posting something that has nothing to do with apocalypses of any kind. This was a talk I gave at a conference at the University of East Anglia a couple of years ago. So, here's my guide to writing time travel so that you don't end up with any of those annoying paradoxes.

Working the Time Machine: Writing Time Travel So It Makes Sense

When H.G Wells first conceived of the Time Machine, it must have seemed like a fairly simple conceit. If you have a character in the present day, and you want him to have an adventure with dinosaurs, or medieval knights, or futuristic robots with laser guns for hands, have him hop into the time machine and it will take him where, or when, you want him to go. These stories are usually very straightforward, the past is almost literally another country.

But it wasn't long before writers worked out that you could influence events in this other country, and by extension, alter the nature of the present. Puzzlingly, a lot of the time, the first thing people wanted to change was that their own grandfathers had never been shot. I don't know why this is, personally I like my grandfather, but once you open up that option, time travel has some mind-boggling implications. If your grandfather dies before your mother or father is conceived, they won't be born, so you won't be born, so just who's going to shoot your grandad?

Because fuck that guy

For the writer, there's clearly the potential for some good storytelling here. But from the get go you've also got some major problems. One thing causing another is pretty much the simplest definition of a story you can get. If you start mucking about with that, you better know what you're doing, because events can get tangled up in themselves, very quickly.

That's what this talk is going to be about. If you're writing a story about time travel there are various models you can use to explain how cause and effect work, and we're going to go through them. We will look at the restrictions these models place on the writer, the options they give, and the loopholes they create.

What Happens, Stays Happened

Let's start with what might be the simplest model of cause and effect. What happens, stays happened. You can't change history.

No matter how good an idea that might be

You take your DeLorean back in time, try to shoot your granddad, but you miss. You try again, but the gun jams. You get a new gun, shoot him in the head at point blank range, and it turns out he wasn't your real granddad, and if you'd asked your grandma before you set out, she would have told you that that was the way he'd always died.

This is a popular model, a lot of scientists are big fans of this model, less for any scientific reason than because of a vague feeling that anything else would just get silly. They may be right, but I intend to show they've vastly underestimated people's potential for silliness.

Often this rule will be taken even further, and someone trying to change the future will inadvertently cause the thing they wanted to prevent. You try to kill your granddad, but some hilarious slapstick sequence of events mean you actually save his life.

This is an old plot, you can date it back to before Oedipus's dad had his son left on a mountainside because he'd heard that when the kid grew up bad things would happen. This is far from the last reference to Oedipus in this paper.

Why do all my blogs end this way?

For the writer, this model of time travel can work nicely. As I said earlier, what happens, stays happened, you don't have to worry about things your character does in Chapter Twelve wiping out what they did in Chapter Three. Actions have consequences, and those consequences are permanent. There's no hope of a quick fix when your character goes back to alter history to suit themselves.

At the same time, although your story can't go back and negate itself, there is still a lot of room for plots to loop back on themselves, and often the story you end up with will be far from linear. If you're going to attempt this sort of story, it's a good idea to be good at plotting. Often, these stories will end up following the structure of a detective story, starting at the end, and spending the narrative working out how the protagonist gets there, but this is just the simplest structure this sort of story can take.

An excellent example of the use of this sort of time travel can be found in The Time Traveller's Wife.

You know, I didn't know how creepy this paper's underlying themes were until I started illustrating it

For those of you who haven't read the book or seen the movie, the Time Traveller in question is Henry DeTamble, a man who frequently finds himself hopping backwards and forwards through time, with no control over where or when he will end up, or for that matter, any clothes when he gets there. A lot of time travel seems to involve nudity. I don't know why.

Also, everyone seems to come out of time travel looking ripped

The story switches between being narrated by Henry, and his wife Clare. Henry meets Clare when he is twenty-eight and she is twenty. Clare meets Henry when she is six and Henry is thirty-six. They both experience exactly the same events, but in a different order. They also have to deal with the knowledge that their future is set and immutable. Henry regularly travels back to events in his own past he would want to change – his mother's death in a car crash, an accident he sees at the ice-rink, and the time his father walks in on him as a teenager making out with his future self. He is powerless to prevent these things from happening.

But this doesn't render Henry and Clare completely powerless. It doesn't stop them from being able to win the lottery, should they ever want to. It doesn't stop them from using information about a doctor's unborn child to manipulate him into taking on Henry's case. And it doesn't stop Henry from giving six year old Clare a list of dates, telling her exactly when and where his trips through time will bring him to her.

We'll come back to these tricks in a second, and see just what we can do to push them to breaking point, but before we start getting pleased with how clever we are, I'd just like to point out what the time travel manages to do for the part of the story we're actually supposed to care about, the relationship between Henry and Clare.

For a start, we get to see Henry and Clare's relationship from several different angles. Every time Henry and Clare meet they are different ages, knowledge of the past and future is divided up differently between them, and this affects the way the relationship works. For Clare, Henry goes from being a cross between a parental figure and an imaginary friend, to a teenage fantasy, until eventually he becomes Clare's life partner. On the other hand, when Henry meets Clare for the first time, she's a complete stranger who already knows a large part of Henry's future before he does.

The other notable use time travel has in this story, is something sci-fi has always been very good at, taking a metaphor and taking it absolutely literally. A relationship is full of metaphorical time travel, you spend a lot of it in your imagined future, with the fantasies, hopes and fears that accompany that. Equally, nostalgia, grief and regret can draw you to the past. For Henry and Clare, this isn't just flowery language, it's a physical truth.

Which is all very touching, but we're not here to talk about love stories, we're here to screw up the laws of causality, so let's focus on one of the tricks this book pulls off- going back and doing favours for yourself in the past. If you remember your future self helping you out before, you're not changing history, you're just completing a loop. Once you allow for that, we can really start to enjoy ourselves.

My personal favourite example of this trick is in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, probably the third greatest film about evil robots from the future ever made. The Bill & Ted movies follow the adventures of the Wyld Stallyns [sic], who will eventually become the greatest rock band who ever lived, saving the environment, bringing about world peace, and making the air guitar the standard form of greeting.

These films were so good, Keanu Reeves decided to never act again

At the climax to the second film, Bill and Ted face off against the villain who has come back in time to destroy them. It seems that Bill and Ted are doomed, until Bill comes up with a fool proof plan:

“After we get away from this guy, we use the [time machine]. We time travel back to before the concert and set up the things we need to get him now.”

At that point, it turns out a sandbag and cage have been set up to drop from the ceiling, disarming the bad guy and trapping him. The bad guy's response to this is to point out that when he has defeated Bill and Ted, he's going to go back in time and equip himself with the key to the cage and a spare gun, promptly, it turns out he has both those items. Only for it to turn out that the gun is a dud because "Only the winners are going to be able to go back and set things up!" Bill and Ted set up the key and fake gun for kicks.

Despite appearances, at no point is time changed. Bill and Ted had always gone back in time after defeating the bad guy, and the cage had always been hanging in position, waiting for the right time to drop down.

Okay, so let's see if we can push this even further to breaking point with another, entirely hypothetical example.

Supposing, just supposing, that instead of spending the last few weeks studiously researching and preparing this paper, I instead spend the last few weeks playing Halo 3 and watching reruns of The Gilmore Girls. When today comes round, somehow I sleep in until three in the afternoon, and only just have time to get to campus. We've all been there.

It's like a hug for your eyes!

Luckily, as I'm on my way out of the house, I find an envelope on the doormat. I look outside, but there's no-one there, just a couple of flaming tire tracks and a number plate spinning in the road. The envelope, rather handily, contains this very paper. I deliver the paper, and it's a huge success, then slip I out of the building, climb into my DeLorean (did I mention I have a DeLorean?) and travel back in time to this morning. I put the paper in an envelope, push it through my own letterbox, then hop back in the car and disappear.

Then I use my DeLorean to pick up chicks, because Relativity says the DeLorean is the sexiest of cars

Again, this series of events is entirely consistent with itself, past present and future form a neat little mobius strip. But I'm sure some of you are wondering, if that's the case, who actually wrote my paper?

Well, until anyone else steps forward, I'm still going to take the credit.

Robert Heinlein was a big fan of this sort of loop, and pushed it about as far as you possibly can with his story All You Zombies. In that story, a girl grows up in an orphanage, is impregnated by a mysterious stranger, who later turns out to be her transexual future self. The transexual future self then steals the baby, takes it back in time, and drops it off at the orphanage. The girl is her own mother and father, begging all sorts of questions. I told you that wasn't the last Oedipus reference, didn't I?

There are all kinds of tricks and paradoxes you can pull without altering so much as a second of history. However, handled poorly, the unchangeable history has its own pitfalls.

For a start, it can lead to your characters having to behave unnaturally just to keep the plot consistent with itself.

I think it's fair to say that a lot of people, finding themselves in the past, would try to alter history just to see what happened, even if they didn't have a motive for doing so. We're just spiteful like that. If the writer acknowledges that, they will often find themselves creating ever more contrived sets of circumstances and coincidences to keep time on the correct path. You can only keep this up for so long before it begins to stink of deus ex machina, and maybe even end up with people talking about “Time” as an anthropomorphic entity, which I've always felt borders on cheating.

Plus, let's face it, the laws of causality would have to work pretty hard to keep this guy alive

But what if you can change history?

“The future is not set.”

That's a quote from The Terminator, a film that, at first glance seems to follow the standard plot of “go back in time, try to prevent something, inadvertently cause it to happen.” Arnold Swarzenegger goes back in time to prevent John Connor from ever being born, and in the process, accidentally introduces Sarah Connor to John's father. There are even deleted scenes to show how the mangled remains of the Terminator end up inspiring the creation of the computer that will eventually become Skynet and kill us all. It seems like a perfect loop.

But in the first film, James Cameron keeps dropping hints that history can be changed. There's the above quote, from John Connor of the future, there's Kyle Reese insisting that he's from “one possible future”

Then, in the second film, John, Sarah and another Terminator track down the man responsible for building Skynet, blow up all the information relating to it and prevent Skynet from ever coming into being. From a storytelling point of view, this serves several purposes. It handily explains why we didn't all die in a nuclear holocaust in 1997. It allows John and Sarah Connor to have a happy ending, which they couldn't have had if the future was set . And it means we can all pretend Terminator's 3 and 4 never happened.

Wiped from history

For those of you keeping count, Terminators 1 and 2 are the second and first best evil time travelling robot films ever made, and two more examples of time travelling nudity.

Now, in the name of full disclosure I should point out here that I prefer this sort of story. I feel like the stakes are higher if the future is changeable, and it’s easier to become invested in characters who can take full credit or blame for their actions. Of course, having said that, I should point out that if history is changeable, that doesn't automatically imply free will exists. It could just mean determinism is really badly organised.

A Matter of Perspective

Writing a time travel story with a changeable history does give you a lot of options, but it also confronts you with a brand new set of problems. Perspective, for example, now has to be a much more precise tool. If you can't change history, you can view the story from any angle you like, the actual events will always be the same. If history is changing, that isn't the case.

The easiest solution is to keep your perspective nailed to your time traveller. After all, your time traveller is likely to be the only person to actually notice history changing, so they will probably be in the best position to watch events. They will know how history has changed, what history was like before, and what caused it to change.

Another solution is to place your perspective with a character from the past that's being travelled back to – this is pretty much how the Terminator films work. Again, this is reasonably straightforward. You don't see history changing, you only see events unfold, and how the time traveller is influencing them. The time traveller might explain how history originally unfolded, and you might be able to guess at how things would have turned out if the time traveller wasn't there, but for all intents and purposes you only see the one version of events.

The other alternative is a lot more tricky, and that is to tell the story from the perspective of the future that is being altered. If you're going to do this, you've obviously set yourself quite the challenge, as character's memories will be changing from one scene to another and the reader will often be the only one who can see what's really going on. If you're going to write your time travel story this way, you're going to have be very good at getting information to the reader subtly, and often you'll have to depend on them to fill in the blanks for you.

Of course, it's possible to switch between these perspectives, but if you do you will risk confusing your reader for the sheer hell of it.

Photoshopping Through Time

Regardless of what point of view you're watching from when history gets changed, we're still back at our original question – what's going to happen when you shoot granddad?

One option is you shoot your granddad, and then mysteriously fade away as you've erased yourself from history.

Many of you will remember this version of cause and effect from that other great example of an Oedipal time travel plot, Back to the Future. For those of you who haven't seen this masterpiece of modern cinema, Marty McFly travels back to 1955, and accidentally disrupts his parents' first meeting, causing his teenage mother to develop a crush on him, and negating his own existence.

Having sex with Lea Thompson is widely considered one of the better ways to negate your own existence

We know he's negated his own existence, because on a photograph he's brought from the future he can see his older siblings fading away, one by one, until eventually his guitar playing hand also begins to disappear.

Changing the fabric of causality is just slightly less efficient than using photoshop

Now if we're going to start picking holes in the logic here, there are rich pickings, and that's without even touching the sequels. For starters, you have to wonder what George McFly thought when his third born child came out looking exactly like the guy his wife used to fancy in High School.

It's telling that an earlier timeline, Marty McFly looked more like Eric Stoltz

But aside from that, the biggest problem with the fadey-photograph method of showing how history changes is that when Marty changes something in 1955, it seems to change in 1985 at the same time. You can get this problem quite often when writers think of the past as literally another country. You can trace this right back to H.G. Wells' Time Machine, when his narrator suggests that “even now” the Time Traveller is on some “on some plesiosaurus-haunted [...] coral reef.”

We're going to give Back to the Future some slack here though, and not just because nobody has yet designed a time machine that looks cooler than the DeLorean. Back to the Future is, as the title suggests, ostensibly about Marty trying to return to a time period that hasn't happened yet. Since the plot demands he have some difficulty doing that, he can't keep nipping forward thirty years to see how his actions have affected 1985. Even if he could, it would make for a fairly unwieldy plot. The fading photographs give the audience a shorthand for how events are going to play out.

And despite the title of the film, the central pillar of Back to the Future's plot isn't Marty's attempt to get home. The main story arc is arguably George McFly's. The film is the story of a wimp's struggle to get the courage to stand up to the bully and ask out the girl. Marty is there partly as a catalyst for setting events in motion, and partly to raise the stakes, and make George McFly's teenage concerns a matter of a life and death (or at least, life and not life).

Branching Out

Still, if you want to have a time travel story where history is mutable but your plot still stays internally consistent and there's no “meanwhile, in the future” nonsense, we can do that too. The way we do this, is quite simply, to cheat.

So, let's get our gun, climb into our DeLorean and head back in time to a nice little cafe where your grandfather's just sitting down for lunch. Your gun's in perfect condition, you're going to be firing it at point blank range, and you've performed extensive DNA testing to prove he is in fact your biological grandfather, we have all our bases covered. You walk in, pull the trigger, and before you know it there are granddad brains dripping off the walls.

"And that's what happens when you only put a five pounds in my birthday card, bitch."

At this point, the time line splits in two. There is the first time line, where your granddad finishes his lunch in peace and goes on to have grandchildren who harbour some sort of unspecified resentment towards him, and then there's the new time line, where he doesn't. You're not about to disappear, you're fine, because you're from time line number one, but in time line number two, you will never be born. When you return to the future, it won't be a future you recognise, and nobody's going to recognise you.

For an insanely complicated version of this, see the movie Primer

This version of time travel helps us resolve a whole lot of other paradoxes. Remember the mystery of who wrote my paper? Well now we can solve that one. At some point, there was a time line where Chris wasn't conveniently saved by a postal delivery from the future, and went on to look really quite silly. Unable to live the humiliation down, he decides to actually write the paper, then take his DeLorean and post the paper to his past self. Rather than altering his own past however, that version of Chris ends up creating a new time line, which we've already described. After that, the loop becomes self sustaining, spreading out across various alternate time lines.

Of course, when I tried to redraft it, things got kinda complicated

If you put your mind to it, you could probably even create a loop of the kind seen in All You Zombies, although after a few different time lines, that baby would be seriously inbred.

Of course, even this model of cause and effect has some problems. For example, stories that use this model rarely, if ever, explain what happens to the original time line. Does it break down and disappear as soon as our time traveller leaves? Does it keep going on without him? If it keeps going on without him, then just what is the point of Skynet sending the Terminator back to kill John Connor, and why bother sending Kyle Reese back to stop him? In time line one, Skynet's already beaten. If you think about it too long, it also makes you wonder, just who was John Connor's real dad in the original time line?

He wasn't originally John Connor's father, he was just aiming for the best "Your mum" zinger in history

Your time traveller will also have to be careful not to do anything that will prevent their past self from going back in time. If their past self doesn't get in the time machine, it won't cause anyone to fade away, but now there are two versions of your time traveller.

If you're telling your story from the perspective of the past that's being travelled to, things can get even more complicated. Kyle Reese says he's from “one possible future”. Implying there is more than one possible future. You could feasibly get time travellers from several possible futures, or even the same time traveller coming from several possible futures. Personally I'm still waiting for Terminator/Planet of the Apes crossover, where the hyper evolved apes duke it out with robots to see who gets to overthrow humanity. Basically I want to make Arnold Swarzenegger fight a gorilla.

Come on! I know you've still got it!

We've looked at various different ways of portraying time travel over the course of this paper, but the important thing to remember is that time travel is a story-telling device, it can't make the story on its own. The stories we've looked at have been about a complicated romance, a dweeb trying to get the girl, and killer robots (which can make a story on their own). Time travel allows us to do things with those stories we otherwise wouldn't be able to. We can see relationships you otherwise wouldn't get to portray – how a parent and child might get on when they're the same age, how an ageing conservative might get on with his hippyish, lefty younger self. We can see how characters react to seeing their own future, or how their lives might have turned out differently. But the thing to remember is, if your characters are convincing and compelling enough, your time travel logic can be as sloppy as you like.

#23 Robopocalypse: All Watched Over By Machines Who Want To Kill You

2011-08-01T09:20:00.000-07:00

This month we’re going to be taking a look at some non-zombie related apocalypses. After all, I deliberately called this blog “Chris Writes About the End of the World” not “Chris Writes About Zombies” so that I had a get out clause in the event of zombie overload.

So, with zombie apocalypses off the board, let’s take a look at the next best thing: Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse.

A robot uprising differs from a zombie apocalypse in a lot of ways, but perhaps the most crucial one is plausibility. When the zombie apocalypse happens we don’t need to know how it happens, only how people react to it. The zombie apocalypse is the story of how humans respond in the face of an irrational and impossible event that flies in the face of everything we knew about the world.

Like Ted Danson becoming the lead on CSI

A robot uprising is different however. The robot uprising is the culmination of advances in technology that are supposedly taking place right now, it is the logical extension of where our society is already heading.

A Brief History of You Getting Killed by Robots

So it is that previous robot apocalypses have been very much a reflection of current concerns. The very first robot uprising- in fact, the very first use of the word “Robot”-dates back to 1921, not all that long after an actual uprising had taken place. In R.U.R or Rossum’s Universal Robots, the robots are less mechanical men and more artificial humans, built as a slave race. It’s not hard to see why, not long after the Russian Revolution, people (by “people” here I mean “rich people”) would be scared by the idea of such an uprising. The robots here aren’t just a slave race, there the basis of an entire economy. They keep the factories working, the streets clean, and what’s more they’re doing tasks in your home. If they revolted, your society would collapse and your home would no longer be safe.

Poor people are nature’s robots!

Skip forward a few decades to a better known robot apocalypse. This one, admittedly, takes place almost entirely off screen, with the entire battle being symbolised by a punch up between that space marine from Aliens, and that body builder from Jingle All The Way.

This time the rebellious robots weren’t our slave race of robofactory workers and robobabysitters. Instead, the rebellion came in the form of Skynet- a "Global Digital Defense Network" and given command over all computerised military hardware and systems. So, being a massive super-intelligent computer, it did what all massive super-intelligent computers do- became sentient and dropped nuclear bombs on everyone.

This film came out in 1984- Your guess is as good as mine as to why people in 1984 might have been scared of a vast, faceless machine killing us all with nuclear fire. Maybe it was a metaphor for fast food or disenfranchised youth.

My generation’s parents saw this video and thought “Hey! Let’s bring a child into this world!”

So while R.U.R’s robot apocalypse was a metaphor for poor people, and The Terminator’s nuclear Armageddon was a subtle metaphor for our fear of nuclear Armageddon, today the robot apocalypse is a metaphor for... well.

We live in an age where the army regularly deploys robotic drones. Remote controlled robotic drones, but they’re working on that, and occasionally they have been known to lose control go rogue. Meanwhile we have AI controlled cleaning robots and MIT has built a computer that can teach itself to read English, in order to learn how to play Civilisation- that game about taking over the world.

“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. Oh wait! Nukes!”

Aside from the scientists who seem to be actively working towards our own annihilation however, we’ve got the same anxieties about machines that monocle wearing factory owners at the start of the last century has about the proles. We rely on them, they keep our economy running, they’re telling us where to drive and they’re in our home. And they know us, everything we do, from shopping online, to using our bank cards, to wandering around with your smart phone in your pocket, is resulting in information being collected by us.

More overtly than ever before, our fictional worries about technology are a mirror to our actual worries about technology. This is when Daniel H. Wilson’s Robopocalypse steps in.

An Actual Review of the Book We’re Supposed to be Talking About

Spoilers from here onwards.

First things first- Robopocalypse does feature some similarities to Max Brooks’ World War Z, a story that some might think is more suited to this blog. Like World War Z, Robopocalypse is a novel by a writer who has previously written a How-To guide to surviving just that sort of event. Like World War Z, Robopocalypse starts its story in the aftermath of the war, then takes on the form of an oral history telling the story of the war from several different points of view. Whether or not Daniel H. Wilson was deliberately mimicking Max Brooks’ style, his book’s publicists certainly did. We at Chris Writes About the End of the World aren’t that bothered by this however, because as we’ve said before, all writers are thieving bastards.

What matters is, what does it do with the rip off?

Another way that the robot uprising differs from the zombie apocalypse is that in a zombie apocalypse you don’t have to pay much attention to the zombies. Zombies do what zombies do- which is mostly walking towards you going “Nom!”

With the robot apocalypse the writer has to think about how the robots look, how they’re designed, and, in its biggest departure from the zombie apocalypse, what the robots want. Most of these questions are ones that Wilson has good answers for. He’s the first to admit that if you’re trying to design the ultimate killing machine for a combat environment, you don’t base it on a shape that can’t survive a car crash without a seatbelt on.

That’s right you guys! I’m talking to you!

There are humanoid robots in Wilson’s world, but it’s repeatedly pointed out that the only design advantage the human shape has for robots is that it’s better for interacting with humans. Far more useful are the gigantic preying mantis shaped robots, or the exploding insect-like stumpers. Think about that name for a second. Lovely.

The scariest portion of the book however, is the opening chapters that emphasise just how dependent we are on the machines that turn on us- from the robotic toys that start trying to blackmail a senator’s child in a sort of Satanic version of Toy Story (In fairness, a talking doll will always be more terrifying than anything that isn’t a talking doll) to the hacker who finds the phone and computer network he uses to screw with people turning on him, to the sheer chaos when an air traffic control computer just decides to crash planes into each other. Once the robots finally decide to just go nuts and kill everybody a survivor looks out his window to see what the robots have done to his New York Street. What he sees isn’t an image from a zombie apocalypse, or even a war zone- he sees a perfectly clean, well maintained street, because cities are environments designed to be convenient for machines to get around, and why would you screw with that?

Although a road paved entirely with human skulls works too I guess...

One area where the book misses a trick is with its Afghanistan plotline, where a US soldier ends up fighting alongside Taliban insurgents for the justifiable reason that the Taliban have been fighting robots for years. Given that, like World War Z, this book makes a point of giving us protagonists from every conceivable age, race, nationality and background, I do wish that as well as giving us the US soldier as a PoV character the story had given a chapter or two over to an Afghani narrator fighting alongside him.

It’s also worth noting that, given that this is a story about mankind fighting machines, the book doesn’t take the easy and obvious anti-technology standpoint. Humankind wins the fight not by resorting to slingshots and bows and arrows, but by salvaging and repurposing robot technology, eventually even working alongside other robots that don’t fight for “Big Rob”.

And Big Rob himself is never painted as necessarily evil. Throughout the book he is curious about humans, as well as all other forms of animal life- it’s repeatedly pointed out how well the natural world seems to be doing once the humans are cut back. We never really learn exactly what his motives are, but whatever they are, they are complex.

I guess what I’m saying is that should a super-intelligent homicidal AI- maybe one that’s taught itself to learn English- be unleashed upon the Internet, I want to point out that I wouldn’t necessarily be against it, and could in fact be an extremely loyal and useful ally, totally willing to serve his probably completely benevolent dictatorship.

Just saying.

Right- the drinking game.

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? One character does end up building a massive fortress for survivors to take shelter in, and many other fort-like outposts form throughout the book, so I’m going to let you take a shot.

Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent or more dangerous than the zombies? Is mankind the real monster? I’m actually going to go with no on this one. The Big Rob does seem to think humankind are fairly monstrous, but in terms of how they actually behave throughout the story, humans actually seem like a decent enough species.

Are the zombies walking dead who move slowly and can only be killed by destroying the brain? This a book about robots, not zombies. So it’s actually pretty surprising when, near the end of the book, the human survivors have to face off against a bunch of slow moving (take a shot) walking dead (take a shot) soldiers who have been taken over by robots, and who can only be killed by shooting the (robotic) brains (take a shot). Who knew?

#22 Community, Epidemiology: TV Shows That Need More Zombies

2011-06-29T16:10:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about being self-employed and working from home is that you very quickly become familiar with a number of sitcoms you weren’t familiar with before. I’m still a full four episodes off finishing the first season of the Wire, but in the space of a fortnight I’ve brought myself fully up to date with campus sitcom, Community.

For those who don’t know it, it’s a series about discredited lawyer Jeff Winger being forced to go to a community college after his BA is revealed be a fake. He falls in with a study group of loveable misfits and hilarity ensues. It’s a fun series, while it has a few episodes that rely overly on characters passing The Idiot Ball, and it’s rife with geeky references, or Chris Candy, as I call it. While it has plenty of episodes set around typical sitcom and high school plots, these are interspersed with episodes based around a Dungeons and Dragons game, or a rogue space simulator, or, a staple of the geeky sitcom genre- a paintball episode (Community actually has three).

However, for its Halloween special, the sixth episode of season two, Community went a step further with the geekiness. It actually just flat out had a zombie outbreak in the episode- it doesn’t explain it away or make it a dream sequence, for one episode, and one episode only, Community became a sci-fi horror. A sci-fi horror with an Abba soundtrack and one guy wearing a banana costume, but the point still stands. And it does it the same way Shaun of the Dead does- by playing the zombies straight and letting the characters tell the story.

This brings me back to a point I somehow never get bored of making- that in the zombie apocalypse genre the zombies exist just as a catalyst to see how the characters react. They’re good as that sort of catalyst, because we all know the zombie rules more or less, and so we’re able to keep the camera firmly on the survivors.

Community isn’t the first to do something like this- the Simpsons had an out-of-continuity zombie story for their Halloween special one year, and the Smurfs did a version of a 28 days later style plague with The Purple Smurfs decades ago (Based on a comic which actually predates Night of the Living Dead, but which is usually forgotten because the “Infected” smurfs aren’t purple, but black).

This got me thinking about which other TV series could use a zombie apocalypse episode to spice things up. And because I hate having to think of things, I recruited the Internet for some suggestions as well. Of course, the first few suggestions were all hilarious- Newsnight, the Antiques Roadshow, Waking the Dead (Although seeing Boyd and Dr. Foley fighting zombies would actually be pretty badass). But then, we got to the televisual genius...

House

This one should be a no-brainer really, and not just because we’ve seen what a badass zombie killer Greg House M.D. makes in this dream sequence. It’s because we know exactly how House would respond to zombies- he’d want to know what’s causing it. Since zombie movies are usually pretty shut-mouthed about the cause of the outbreak, this could get interesting, especially as the outbreak gets worse. Imagine all the microscope peering scenes in I Am Legend, only instead of The Last Man on Earth, it’s House and his team bickering the whole time.

On top of that, one theme zombie stories frequently return to is how far our ethics will bend in the face of human extinction. Given how bendy House’s ethics are anyway, we can expect stuff that’ll make the lab in Day of the Dead look like a petting zoo.

Glee

Okay, let’s make it clear from the start, when we’re talking about a zombie episode of Glee, we are definitely not talking about their rendition of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, which is an entirely different interpretation of how things can return from the dead a mangled, revolting version of what they once were. We’re talking about an episode where real zombies rise and invade the school with lots of songs on the run leading to a climax when they discover Kurt's falsetto can explode zombie heads. This idea came from Anil Godigamuwe.

CSI/CSI: New York/CSI: Miami

Yes, I’m imagining a massive three way crossover for this story, all over the world the dead are rising from the grave, but the CSIs still have a job to do, even if their corpses keep wandering away from the crime scene. Of course, each series would have their own approach to the zombie menace.

In vanilla CSI Grissom (They’d bring Grissom back for this, I’m sure of it) would notice interesting parallels between the zombie epidemic and the effects of a certain mind controlling fungus on ants.

In CSI: New York we would see how the zombie apocalypse has caused all sorts of zombie-related subcultures, including at least one fetish group and an underground urban zombie killing sport. Mac, Danny and Lindsay would of course do some serious zombie killing. Jo Danville would die in the most painful and gory way possible, probably while dispensing some sort of folksy wisdom.

By the opening of CSI: Miami Horatio Caine would already be the only survivor, climbing a hillside made up of the corpses of his team mates. From atop his mountain of corpses, he would spot a figure running up the street. In one swift movement Caine would shoot the figure dead without checking to see if it was a zombie, while simultaneously swiping up his sunglasses with his other hand and placing them on his nose before saying “Looks like I got you, dead to rights.” (Click this now. DO IT.)

Mad Men

Even as zombies they will look better than you

This was another suggestion, this time from Tom Hunter. Now, like I said, working from home has got me completely caught up on Community, while still four episodes away from finishing the first season of The Wire- so as you can probably guess I’ve not seen Mad Men yet. All I know about it is that everyone wears amazing outfits, it makes smoking and misogyny look cool and that it has the sexy con-artist lady from Firefly in it. Having listed all these things I can’t really tell you why I haven’t seen Mad Men yet, the only possible reason I can come up with is that it doesn’t feature a zombie apocalypse. Well dressed misogynist zombies! Who doesn’t want to see that?

Gilmore Girls

I work it out as, starting top left, lives, lives, dies, dies, dies, lives, dies, dies, dies, lives, lives, lives... ummm... dies.

Okay, so Gilmore Girls has finished- but hope still abounds for the movie version!

The trouble is, making the jump from TV to Cinema is a difficult one. You need a story that feels bigger than just an extra long TV episode- you need to raise the stakes and make everything feel just a bit more epic than before. Many TV series have done this really really badly by simply assuming it’s enough to put their character in a different location- usually Ibiza. This always results in a terrible, terrible movie. However, you know what would work?

Yeah I’m going to skip the rest of my preamble and say it’s a zombie apocalypse. This would be great for Gilmore Girls, because as the series has developed we’ve come to care not just about the eponymous girls, but the entire community of Stars Hollow. You know what that means? Lots of characters who the audience cares about, but who are expendable enough to be killed off!

Can’t you just see it as the community is, bit by bit, forced to retreat to the Inn? I can see Lorelai generating a real Ripley vibe when it comes to the crunch, and Luke, being a generally aimless slacker, will of course end up saving the day (because if zombie movies teach us nothing else, it’s that generally aimless slackers are the best at fighting zombies). Kirk, I’m sorry to say, is probably a dead man, and Lorelai’s parents will likely meet a dignified, but inevitably grizzly end. However, I imagine Lane and Michel will discover previously unsuspected levels of combat badassery.

Come on! You know it makes sense! One of the writers, Jane Espenson, even has extensive experience writing about the undead for the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

Now, returning to the episode of Community that triggered off this fountain of television genius, it’s time to play the drinking game.

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? Yes, the building being Greendale Community College- particularly their study room.

Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent or more dangerous than the zombies? It’s hinted the army is planning kill everyone off, and it takes them six hours to get there, by which point the crisis has been resolved. So take two shots.

Is mankind the real monster? There is plenty of infighting, and Jeff does point out he likes one character better as a zombie. So let’s take a shot.

Are the zombies walking dead (No, just infected) who move slowly (One shot) and can only be killed by destroying the brain? (Someone does mention the importance of destroying the brain, so take one shot)

Do the dead rise regardless of whether they were “infected”? Nope.

#21 Falling Skies: Don't Mention The War

2011-06-22T08:26:00.000-07:00

We’ve not really done any alien invasions in this blog so far. There’s a reason for that. While this blog was never intended to be exclusively about zombie apocalypses, I did want to stick to Earth-bound apocalypses. Not that I don’t enjoy alien invasions as much as the next nerd, but they seem to pose a different set of questions to the ones we’ve been looking at here. Zombie apocalypses, as well as other post-apocalyptic fiction such as The Road, The Time of the Wolf, or The Stand, are about the end of civilisation. The protagonists are looking at a time where there will be no new art, no new technology, no future generations writing the history of the time they live in.

Alien invasions are rarely truly apocalyptic- even War of the Worlds seems to jump back to a comfortable status quo remarkably quickly after the Martians all get wiped out by bacteria- but even when they are apocalyptic, the story isn’t about the end of civilisation, it’s about our civilisation being crushed by a bigger and more powerful one.

However, watching Stephen Spielberg’s Falling Skies I found it demonstrated some good points about what not to do when creating a post apocalyptic storyline. As I’ve said before, the Internet has more than enough people being snarky and slagging things off, and so as a rule I only write about works that I happen to really like- apart from when I don’t.

Also, in the interests of full disclosure, I have a longstanding grudge against Stephen Spielberg. In my last year of university I wrote a dissertation on War of the Worlds and how over the last century various people have adapted it to suit the politics of the time. Spielberg brought out his adaptation- full of juicy Iraq War imagery and post-9/11 imagery, about a month after my dissertation was due in. That Spielberg hasn’t put that much effort into making this series all that different from his War of the Worlds means I’ve got plenty of opportunity to use up all those left over dissertation theories.

Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds: The TV Series

So, let’s start off by saying Spielberg’s fingerprints are all over this. On the surface this is a very gritty and dark looking portrayal of humanity’s last stand against alien invaders, but it’s spliced all the way through with the sort of saccharine moments you’d expect from the man who can’t bear the idea of secret service agents pointing guns at Alien-napping children.

This picture has brought more hits to this site than any actual blog entry

You’ll see plenty of tropes and ideas reused from his War of the Worlds film. The main character of the series is a history professor- we know he’s a history professor because he keeps comparing events to things from history, and if that’s not a big enough hint, every five minutes a character has to roll their eyes at him and say “Ever the history professor!” Because he’s a history professor. He professes history, is what I’m saying.

"I'm a history professor!"

Spielberg uses his history professor character that is a history professor to repeatedly make a point he also made in War of the Worlds, that no occupying force can ever be successful- here citing the American Revolution against the British as an example. Here, as in War of the Worlds, this comparison raises some interesting comparisons considering Spielberg’s vocal opinions on other occupying forces. Here however, a character, who I think is supposed to be a loveable anti-hero despite being both a racist and possible rapist, finally poses the shockingly obvious counter example to that argument that really, any American ought to be completely ashamed of not thinking of- That the aliens aren’t the British trying invade the United States, they’re the first settlers invading the home of the Native Americans.

"I already knew that, because I'm a history professor!"

It’s About What You Don’t Say

One thing that struck me about these opening episodes of Falling Skies however, and the reason that I thought it deserved a blog, is that the world building, the way the series tried to introduce us to the circumstances of the characters and the rules of the world they lived in, was clumsy in such a way that it actually highlighted how to do it well.

It’s been said before that readers of science fiction are also pretty good at reading historical fiction.

"I read historical fiction, because I'm a history professor!"

Both modes of fiction require you to be plunged head first into a world with unfamiliar technology, etiquette, language, and even history. This is a skill useful for reading anything that isn’t set in the same period and culture that you happen to be living in- it’s as true of space opera and sword and sorcery fantasy as it is of Victorian family saga or wartime romance. Not many of these works will start off by giving you a potted history of the culture you’ll be reading about or seeing, you have to pick up the cues as you go along. In historical fiction, you either have to figure out the bits you don't understand by their context, or read the whole book with wikipedia open to one side- and using a wiki isn't an option with a new piece of science fiction (Oh wait!)
One of the ways to do this is to look to what people aren’t saying- because those are the things everyone takes as given.

Looking at it another way, if on a typical day in Britain you hear someone say “Wow! This country’s really rainy isn’t it?” you will automatically think one of a small number of things, either “This person’s new to Britain” or “This person has been away from Britain for a while”. We love complaining about the weather in this country, but saying “Britain gets a lot of rain” is something nobody feels the need to say- it’s a given.

Likewise, if you watch the news or listen to people talking about 9/11, you’ll find people can talk about it for a very long time without ever saying what 9/11 actually is. 9/11 was such a huge event, seen by everyone, with repercussions felt worldwide for the whole of the last decade. We don’t need to tell one another what it was.

So, here’s the problem with Falling Skies- they’re six or seven months into the planet’s occupation by an advanced alien army. There are conversations I’m willing to give a pass on- the moment when two characters look at a huge alien structure and swap theories on how they would destroy it feels like a conversation they’ve had many times before (and then history professor walks up and says how he’d destroy it with a Trojan Horse, which is a thing he learned from history, being a history professor).

"Yeah, I'm a history professor."

I’m also okay with the opening scene, where children use drawings to tell the story of the alien invasion- this seems like the sort of exercise a teacher would set to try and get their kids to deal with a massively traumatic event. Plus, kids would tell you at length and in detail about that one time they saw a red car.

However, other scenes grate. There is a scene where characters are waiting to get their weak oatmeal and talking about how they would really like a steak, or pie, or some other delicious thing. You could see this happening a few weeks after the invasion, when food starts to run low. When you’re six months into a period of prolonged famine and rationing however, the guy who goes on at length about how he really wants a burger is the guy who everyone hates.

"You know where they had better food? That's right! History!"

Saying “I wish there was more food” when you’re looting an empty convenience store is... well, duh? Even the kid (who you will remember, I was lenient with about the opening) saying “I wish everything was back the way it was” just felt like it wasn’t something you would say if this was a reality you’d been living with for over half a year.

Having people who live in the middle of an alien occupation explicitly saying “Gee, I wish we didn’t live in the middle of an alien occupation” feels as genuine as us saying on a near constant basis “I’m going to use this glowing rectangle to talk to other people who have glowing rectangles!”

A great contrast for this is Game of Thrones (which, having not read the books yet, I strongly suspect is heading in a zombie apocalypse like direction). Throughout the opening episodes of Game of Thrones the viewer is made constantly aware that this story is set in the aftermath of a larger, more dramatic story. Cryptic mentions of The Mad King, The Winter and The Dragons hint at huge events, but nobody every directly narrates these events to the viewer, they are just a background to the character’s more present concerns.

Perhaps an even better example is Spielberg’s own E.T.

E.T. is a powerful story about divorce- the character of E.T. is based off of Spielberg’s own imaginary friend “who could be the brother I never had and a father that I didn't feel I had anymore." The divorce is present in every single scene of that movie, in the way the kids deal with each other and in the way the mother acts, but at no point do we ever get anyone really talking at length about the divorce. Everybody in that family knows there’s been a divorce, but now they have day to day stuff to deal with.

I feel like much the same attitude should be had towards a global apocalypse.

Okay, drinking game time.

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? Sadly no, they're on the run for most of the two hours.

Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent or more dangerous than the zombies? Well, the history professor seemed to thinking he was making a really insightful point by saying that you know, looking after the civilians is important, he knows that, because he's a history professor. So let's say one shot.

Is mankind the real monster? After the special effects are used up in the first hour of the pilot, they're forced to throw in some evil humans that can be mostly defined by words spelled R-A-*-I-S-T, so take a shot.

Are the zombies walking dead who move slowly and can only be killed by destroying the brain? No zombies, but everyone seems to agree headshots are the only way to kill the aliens, so one shot.

Kiddy zombies? Well, I say no zombies- there are slaves that are controlled by weird spikey worm things on their backs, and a lot of them are kids. Yeah, take two shots.