We’ve talked about this extremely popular ‘Humans vs. Zombies’ phenomenon before here on the ZRC blog; what started out as a sort of ‘fun’ collegiate event has grown into something almost resembling a social movement, all unfortunately dedicated around staging faux Zombie Apocalypse events for ‘fun’.

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, before these fake pre-enactments of the End of the World themselves became the topic of life imitating art, and so I give you ‘Zombie Tag’:

Dillon Hill enlists his group of childhood friends to play ‘Zombie Tag’ one last night before they go off to college and their separate ways. To make the evening special he hires a few zombies to give his friends a scare. Problems arise when the group is caught up in a plot to recover evidence against a crooked politician that Dillon’s father has hidden on their property. Dillon stages a zombie attack to fend off the bad guys while they protect each other and the evidence until help arrives.

Ah, the classic movie premise of ‘plot happens set against widely understood but unrelated cultural event X’.

We’re starting to get into Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon territory covering stuff like this for the ZRC though. This is a fictional depiction of a real life game that itself fictionalizes a scenario presented in other works of fiction. On the other hand, the remove from Zombie Rights is somewhat illusory, since the very nature and pervasive extent of these ‘games’ helps to reinforce and legitimize Anti-Zombie prejudice in the real world population, especially young people. Today they learn that it’s ok to stereotype Zombies and attack them with NERF weapons, tomorrow they might try real Zombies and real firearms.

Tragic, I know. That’s why we in the Movement need to make it socially unacceptable to play these harmful and hateful games by applying peaceful pressures and persuasion whenever possible. Playing tag WITH Zombies? Good and inclusive. Playing ‘Zombie Tag’? Negative and stereotyped.

Let’s all keep that in mind.

Tags: Social Justice

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, June 26th, 2011 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.