Anxiety and dread in Fear the Walking Dead

I’m already hooked on the new TV series--Fear the Walking Dead (the prequel to The Walking Dead)—after only two episodes. I’ve read that there will be six episodes this season; it’s already been renewed for a second season. Unlike The Walking Dead that takes place in Georgia, Fear the Walking Dead takes place in Los Angeles and depicts how the apocalyptic zombie plague got its start as a flu-like virus that spreads rapidly together with the anxiety and paranoia that accompany it. Anxiety and a sense of mounting dread pervade the show; it’s not hard to imagine similar feelings if a disease like the plague spread rapidly throughout a large city and wreaked havoc on its populace. How might we react to such a plague, that the authorities would not be able to fight effectively or adequately inform the public about? How would we protect ourselves and our families? How would we survive, and what would we prioritize?

We know what’s coming in the next few episodes, since this is a prequel; we know from The Walking Dead that it’s going to be impossible to stop the zombie apocalypse. A huge city like Los Angeles and a large high school are not the first places we might expect to be creepy in broad daylight, but in this show, they are downright creepy. You half expect a zombie to appear around every corner in the high school or in the dark passageways under the highway overpasses that abound in the city. An abandoned church also ups the ‘creep you out’ factor; not surprising since this is where the first episode begins—in an abandoned church frequented by drug addicts who squat there. When Nick (played by Frank Dillane) awakes from his drug-induced sleep, his girlfriend Gloria is no longer beside him and he goes looking for her inside the church. He hears screams and goes toward those sounds, thinking that Gloria might be in trouble. When he finds her, she is no longer the girlfriend he used to know, and what he sees shocks him into wanting to get sober. He hightails it out of the church and ends up in the hospital after getting hit by a car. When his hospital roommate dies (surely an eventual zombie, implied but not shown), he escapes the hospital amid all the commotion and gets in touch with his friend and drug dealer, Calvin, who sold him the drugs. He thinks maybe he has been given drugs laced with PCP. Russell doesn’t like what he hears, and decides to take Nick out because he is afraid he will go to the police. But in a twist of fate, Calvin ends up dead, shot by his own gun, and Nick ends up alive. In the meantime, Nick's mother and her boyfriend (Madison and Travis, played by Kim Dickens and Cliff Davis, respectively) are searching for him; they have gone to the church to see for themselves what it is he has described to them (Gloria’s murderous rampage), and when they see a large pool of blood on the floor of the church, they understand that something bad has happened there. They drive around the seedier sections of the city trying to find Nick, and eventually they do, at a tunnel entrance to a storm drain. When he tells them that he has killed Calvin, they go to the scene of the shooting, only to find that Calvin is gone. What ensues convinces them that something horrific is afoot, and that they need to take what is happening around them seriously. 

The characters are believable, and behave for the most part in ways I can relate to. Trying to get one’s family members together in one location when a catastrophe strikes, being separated from those you love while doing so, trying to understand what is happening around you when you have very little time to reflect, and trying to decide whether you should provide help to others or just protect yourself and your family. These are issues that most of us can relate to. It will be interesting to see where this show takes us. I can definitely envision enough material for one season; I have a harder time understanding what the second season will focus on. But so far so good; I’m looking forward to the third episode. I’ve got to wonder though, why so many people, myself included, are watching shows with apocalyptic themes; is it an acknowledgment of the fact that we really cannot control the world around us, much as we think we can? Nature (tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis), pandemics (infectious diseases) or even certain groups within society (terrorists, gangs, etc.) do what they do whenever and wherever they want, and we have little to no control over them. 

Watching the zombie world war unfold

World War Z. I saw this film the night it had its premiere in Oslo (July 11^th) at the Colosseum in Oslo. Packed theater. Lights go down. The film starts. Normal family life for the first ten minutes, with Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane, who used to work as an investigator for the United Nations, and who now seems to be a stay-at-home dad, making his kids pancakes for breakfast. And then they’re in their car, he and his wife and two children, stuck in traffic on a Philadelphia city street. Normal life ends right here. All hell breaks loose in Philadelphia in a scene that is guaranteed to make you feel like you’re climbing endlessly to the top of a roller coaster hill followed by an unpleasant ride down, only to start on the next climb. That’s how the film continues for almost two hours. An intense, relentless, horrific ride to the finish. The final five minutes of the film resemble the first ten minutes—family togetherness, in this case, a reunion. In between, you’ve got to be made of stone not to be affected by some of the scenes that pop out at you (literally, thanks to the 3-D): the stewardess-turned-zombie moving on from economy class to the front of the plane on the plane ride from and to hell after having been bitten by a stowaway zombie, as well as the scene in the WHO facility in Cardiff Wales, where the former head of the lab, now a zombie, tries to ‘understand’ what happened to his prey (Gerry) who has injected himself with a deadly pathogen in order to camouflage himself from the zombies. This zombie won’t attack Gerry because the pathogen makes the prey sick and the zombies can smell sickness which they avoid.

The film has some similarities to other films/TV series in this genre: 28 Days Later (the fast-moving zombies, how quickly people ‘turn’ after having been bitten, and the apartment hallway scene where they climb the stairs to flee the zombies), Resident Evil (the suspenseful lab/facility scenes), The Walking Dead (the dimly-lit corridor scenes with zombies waiting to attack just around the corner), and a few others. But it’s on its own when it comes to some specific scenes: zombies swarming and piling up on each other like insects in order to scale the huge wall in Israel erected to keep them out, and the unbelievable plane scene come to mind. I think what sets this film apart is the relentlessness of the zombie hordes and the sheer numbers of zombies. Cities are overrun in minutes. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. There is no time to hatch a plot, to follow it through. Panic ensues immediately among the crowds of people trying to flee. You’ve got to think on your feet, and if you don’t keep moving, as Gerry points out, you’re dead. Meaning you’re a zombie.

There are some implausible scenarios. One of them is when the plane crashes in the mountains of Wales and Gerry awakens and finds himself wounded and dripping blood. The female Israeli soldier he’s traveling with, Segen (played by Daniella Kertesz), who has had her arm hacked off by Gerry after having been bit by a zombie, has also survived. For a brief second, it looks as though she may transform. But she doesn’t. They both walk the distance it takes for them to reach the WHO research facility in Cardiff that is their intended destination. But my question is--why wasn’t there a horde of zombies attracted to the site of the plane crash? The zombies are apparently attracted by noise, and wouldn’t a crashing plane make a lot of noise? The other is when Gerry and Segen are walking very slowly through town on their way to the WHO facility, her supporting him since he is having problems walking. Where are the zombies? Or is Cardiff a zombie-free zone? It’s not made clear, or if it was, I missed it. They had ample time to reach the facility, something that seems rather out of tune with the rest of the film. Additionally, Gerry is losing blood fast, something the zombies would definitely register.

Once inside the facility though, they meet a team of scientists who are very skeptical to their presence; they want to know why they’ve come. Gerry explains his theory about using pathogens to camouflage the living from the ‘undead’, and they agree that his theory is worth testing. However, there are zombies wandering the halls of the wing of the lab building where the pathogens are stored; they are rather sluggish due to the lack of prey. They became zombies because the lead researcher accidentally infected himself with the blood of a zombie. And that led to his attacking other staff members; the uninfected managed to seal off this wing to keep the undead out.  

I’m halfway through the book of the same name by Max Brooks. I’d have to describe the tone of the book in much the same way—relentless and creepy, but the relentlessness and creepiness are spread out over many pages and the story unfolds gradually through the voices of the different people interviewed, who inform about what they have witnessed in a matter-of-fact tone. The book and the film are very different in this respect, as there is no ‘main’ character like Gerry in the book. But the ever-increasing paranoia and the shocking events are similar; the paranoia is perhaps more pronounced in the book than in the film. And at least with the book, I can put it down when I’ve had enough for an evening. Unless you close your eyes in the theater, it’s hard to escape what’s going on. At certain points, I had to remind myself that it was a film, to breathe normally. It occurred to me that World War Z is not a film for the kiddies or the weak of heart (just like roller coaster rides generally). I know I needed a few days to calm down after having seen it. I wonder if Brad Pitt let his kids watch this one?

A new favorite TV show

I am enjoying (if I can really use that word) watching the new season of The Walking Dead on Fox Crime on Thursday evenings. Perhaps a better way to say it is that I am enjoying being scared and jolted by the twists and turns and scares of the new season. We are about a week behind in Europe compared to the USA. The new episodes (Seed and Sick thus far) contained a lot more exciting action now that Rick and his motley group of survivors have arrived at the prison and made it their home. The ‘walkers’ inhabit certain areas of the prison and need to be dispatched if the group is to live there. Some of those attack scenes were pretty intense; we’re talking a high zombie dispatch rate and a group of survivors who were literally dead-set on taking the prison for themselves. But to spice things up even more, there were also surviving prisoners who were intent on keeping their prison for themselves, which made for a tense conflict in this week’s episode with unfortunate outcomes for some of those prisoners. Rick and his group don’t waste too much time talking; it’s kill or be killed.

I have been online to read about what people are saying about the new season, and a lot of the reviews are quite positive, precisely because there promises to be a lot more excitement during this season. There is less talk and more action, and many of the characters have gotten much tougher. It’s a welcome change from last season which moved slowly and relied on countless numbers of conversations to drive it forward. Not that slow or talky is bad, just that action is more exciting, and that is one of the reasons I tune into a show like this.

The last time I actually looked forward to watching a TV show each week was when The X-Files was on the air. Some of their episodes were completely spooky with assorted creatures and monsters (e.g. Home stands out) and the creep factor was quite high. But I sat and watched them all and dealt with being scared. The Walking Dead is different in that the humans are always under attack by the same type of monster—zombies. So the survivors have learned how to take them out and have become good at doing so. But at the same time viewers are being scared, they are also being comforted, because they know that ultimately the survivors will be able to take care of themselves. That doesn’t mean that favorite characters won’t die off; I’m sure they will as the season progresses, but it’s anyone’s guess as to who they will be. In the meantime, I'm going to sit back and enjoy the ride--it promises to be a memorable one. 

On Twitter: from Zombie Pandemics to the Northern Lights

I continue to do part-time consultant work for the university science library and enjoy it. It's pretty cool to get paid for a job that is actually a lot of fun--maintaining and updating their Facebook and Twitter pages and helping to promote their events (lectures and conferences). It's also pretty amazing what's out there on Twitter. Twitter is a world of its own, and very unlike Facebook, because if you want to keep a professional profile, you can. So I also have a personal Twitter profile now, but have decided to use it to promote scientific and health issues of interest to me. So besides updates from research journals, popular science journals and the like, I also follow the New York Times and a host of different health and charity organizations. And of course it's very interesting the type of people who end up following you, based on your word usage. Your Twitter comments are actually like 'tag bites'. I recently promoted an event for the library that will take place in mid-November--'Pimp your research'--a lecture by the world-renowned bee researcher Gro Amdam, followed by a discussion about how to and whether to make your research sexier. Wouldn't you know it, but the next day, I had three new women following me on Twitter, all of whom were working in the porn industry. It's easy to block these types of people, but it amuses me that your word usage has such an immediate effect. We are being profiled all the time as long as we're online and actively using internet, and anyone who believes otherwise, just doesn't get it or doesn't want to.

This week I have so far stumbled upon two interesting links on Twitter that I want to share with you. The first one is from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia--the city now known for The Walking Dead. The CDC has now published an interesting pamphlet in comic strip form just in time for Halloween, entitled "Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic". It's actually quite a clever way of educating people on how to prepare for any type of disaster. You can check it out here: http://www.cdc.gov/phpr/documents/11_225700_A_Zombie_Final.pdf

The other interesting link had to do with the beautiful displays of the Northern Lights in the USA on Monday; folks in the Midwest and even in the Deep South were treated to spectacular light shows courtesy of Mother Nature. The point is that this type of happening is rare, and was due to an intense geomagnetic storm. National Geographic has made available some gorgeous shots of these Northern Lights, and you can see them here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/10/pictures/111025-northern-lights-aurora-borealis-united-states-south/?source=link_tw20111025news-aurora#/northern-lights-aurora-borealis-reach-south-united-states-michigan-trees_42517_600x450.jpg   All in all, pretty amazing, and I sure wish I had been there to see them!

Information at our fingertips, all the time if we want it. What a brave new world we live in, and it's mostly within the past ten years that the information highway has grown by leaps and bounds. I remember when I was preparing two lectures in connection with my doctoral defense in 1999; I had to physically walk into the medical library with a list of the articles I needed to be printed out, and the librarians found them for me, or requested them from other libraries, and then printed them out and mailed them to me. In some cases, this could take days or even a week if the journals were not on hand. Nowadays, I can find the articles myself online, print them out at work or at home, and if our library doesn't subscribe to the journal, I can order a copy through the library online and they will fax it to me within a day of my order. Overall, if I need fifty articles, I can find at least ninety-five percent of them myself without help. That's progress. The libraries have adapted to the changes, and now that I do consulting work for a university library, I see just how far they've come. They haven't stuck their heads in the sand and ignored the world around them; they are information providers for the digital age, and if you haven't stuck your head inside a library for a while, I suggest you take a trip to one and check out the changes for yourself. The books are still there, but so are PCs, Macs, iPads, Kindles, digital projectors, SmartBoards and more computers, all ready for use, all offering instant connection to the information highway, which, if used ethically and wisely, is a real time-saver and an endless source of knowledge, even knowledge you didn't set out to find originally.

In the spirit of Halloween

During the weekend I happened to be up late and decided to see what was on television. I stumbled across the new horror series that has been racking up rave reviews in the USA—The Walking Dead. The first season is being shown late at night here in Norway on the cable station Fox Crime; I understand that six episodes comprise the first season, and that the second season premiered in the USA last night. I have only managed to see two episodes of the first season so far, but what I’ve seen is fairly convincing. This is a cut above your average horror series. The zombies are very realistic and the entire show has such a realistic feel to it that you could almost imagine such a thing happening—a virus wiping out huge segments of the population and then the dead coming back to life as flesh-eating zombies. The episode I watched last night was the final one of the first season—when the CDC in Atlanta self-destructs after the generators lose power due to lack of fuel, taking the one scientist who decides to stay and end his life there with it. But before it is destroyed, this scientist shows the group of survivors who travel together the 3-D brain scans of his wife before she died of the virus, and how the virus spread through her brain, killing her. It was interesting to see the ‘live’ brain scans—the neural circuits in the brain flashing and then the virus spreading through the brain, causing the circuits to stop firing. Then, after some hours, some light started to glow in his dead wife’s brain stem, but nowhere else in the brain, allowing her to rise again as a zombie, at which point he shot her through the brain. I have to ask myself—why at my age do I still enjoy being scared by this type of show? Why do I still watch this type of horror? I find myself being scared in the same way as I was when I was a teenager. I know none of it is real, that it probably could never happen quite in this way, although an apocalypse of some sort could of course occur. That was more than realistically portrayed in Corman McCarthy’s book The Road, which I found to be quite a harrowing read. For that reason, I did not watch the film based on the book and which starred Viggo Mortensen, mostly because it all seemed so hopeless and dark beyond words. Perhaps the difference between it and The Walking Dead is that there seems to be some hope in the latter, if only in that the survivors can in fact take out the zombies, who are slow-moving and easy to kill. But they are ugly and scary-looking and the show is definitely not for children or the faint-hearted. I found myself thinking of I Am Legend with Will Smith and The Omega Man with Charlton Heston as well, also films where viruses led to scenarios quite similar to those in The Walking Dead—survivors battling virus-infected monsters and vampires respectively. Both of these films are based on the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend, which is excellent.

Zombie and vampire movies continue to fascinate us, as is evidenced by how well most of them do at the box office. They scare us—and we seem to like being scared. Monsters scare us, the monsters of our childhood, the ones hiding in the closet or under the bed. The dark scares us, and it seems to be an instinctive response—we cannot see in the dark and that by itself leads to fear, because we are vulnerable in the dark. I remember that feeling as a child. What lies behind the door? What is in the closet? What is under my bed if I look down or if my foot sticks out from under the covers? What will get me if I am not protected? What if I look out the window and a monster stares back at me from the darkness? That is why the scenes of the monsters overrunning New York City in I Am Legend were terrifying. They were strong, vicious predators and nothing seemed to stop them. They hid indoors by day and came out at night. Imagine a society where that was the case—howling screeching monsters running amok in the night. 28 Days Later was another such film that created the same feelings; especially the one scene in the tunnel where the car with uninfected survivors won’t start and you can hear the infected mob bearing down upon them. Will they escape, and what happens if they don’t? We know the answer but we watch anyway to make sure they get away. Because some of them have to escape the horrible fate that awaits them—some of them have to live. We have to know that it is possible to survive, otherwise what is the point of watching?  

Halloween is soon upon us. Each year the USA (and now many European countries ironically enough) celebrates this strange holiday—a combination of pagan and Christian influences. Halloween is not originally an American holiday. The idea of Halloween with masks and costumes is in fact quite ancient, originating with the Celtic festival of Samhain, which marked the end of summer (information culled from different websites). The Celts (who were spread out over much of Western Europe) believed that demons and ghosts of the dead returned to earth during harvest time (before the winter months) due to the fact that the gates between life and death were more ‘open’ at this time of year. These other-world visitors were dangerous because they could cause trouble with the harvest and food stores for the winter months, so it was necessary to appease them. The Celts thus wore costumes and masks during Samhain to ward off demons and ghosts, sacrificed animals and burned crops to their gods in bonfires built by their priests (the Druids) who could control the supernatural energy present at this time of year. We thus have Halloween in our blood, so to speak. Despite the Christian influences that eventually overtook Halloween, the original pagan celebration is a part of our heritage. The fear of the supernatural world, of demons, ghosts, vampires and monsters, is as old as time. Fire could protect, darkness was danger. We would prefer not to be visited by ghosts and demons; we would do what we could to prevent that. In our ‘civilized’ age, we don’t believe that ghosts, demons, vampires and monsters walk the earth, but the superstitious part of us is tenacious and not easy to get rid of no matter how ‘civilized’ we are. Perhaps that is one explanation for our fascination with the darkness, with the unknown, with monsters. As much as we like to pretend that we don’t get scared, the reality is something else again.