You’d Be One of Them in an Hour

My zombie survival plan involves a crossbow, a fortified farmhouse, and the comfortable assumption that I’d be one of the competent ones—resourceful, calm under pressure, the type who figures out the water supply situation before everyone else starts arguing. It’s a pleasant fiction. Most zombie narratives are built on exactly that kind of pleasant fiction.

Perished, a short film that premiered at SXSW, has no patience for it. It drops you into the middle of a global outbreak and makes the argument—fairly convincingly—that the realistic version of events goes like this: you get infected. Not after a heroic last stand. Not after saving anyone. Just quickly, randomly, the way most catastrophes actually work. No sawed-off shotgun. No rescued anyone.

The film is unromantic in the best possible way—blunt about the math of survival when the infected outnumber everyone else by an obscene margin. It sticks around longer than its runtime, mostly because it lands on the thing that zombie fiction usually sprints away from: the overwhelming probability that you and I are the expendable extras, not the protagonists.