The Zombie Fantasy

We’ve all built the same zombie apocalypse story in our heads. You’ve absorbed it from a hundred films, shows, books, games. In your version, you’re the exceptional one—not the first to die or the one who cracks under pressure, but the one who makes it because you’re fundamentally different. Smarter. Faster. Ready in a way the crowd isn’t. You move through the ruins with a weapon and a purpose and someone at your side.

The fantasy assumes time. It assumes you’ll learn as you go, adapt, make the clever choices that separate the survivors from the rest. It assumes you’ll understand what’s happening before it’s too late.

Reality doesn’t give you that much. You’d be infected before you understood what was happening. Maybe hours if luck breaks your way. More likely minutes. No slow burn, no proving ground, no moment where you finally get to show everyone how capable you really are. Just the moment before and after.

A short film called Perished came across my watch-list recently—it premiered at SXSW a while back. It doesn’t play the fantasy game. It just drops you into a collapse that moves faster than anyone can react to. No time for strategy, no moments where you’re in control of anything. Just the brute arithmetic of proximity and chance. It was brutal in a way that the entertainment usually isn’t: not because of what happens, but because there’s no time to be human about it anymore.

I think we tell ourselves the zombie apocalypse fantasy because we need to believe that in a truly broken world, our competence would finally matter. That if everything else fell away, we’d be left with just ourselves and the chance to prove we were right about ourselves all along.

But that’s not what Perished shows you. It shows you that catastrophe doesn’t care about your potential or your self-image. It doesn’t build narratives around your capability. It just ends things, and you don’t get to narrate your way through it.

Maybe that’s why we keep coming back to the story anyway. Not because we believe the fantasy anymore, but because we need something to believe in that feels more manageable than the real answer.