By Sophie Young | Photos by Armie Chardiet
I’m wearing the wrong clothes for zombie hunting—a realization I make much too late, hauling ass down a stairwell, fleeing from four zombies I should have killed immediately. My stiff, high-waisted jeans aren’t providing the mobility I need to avoid falling face first on hard linoleum, but I’ve got one thing: speed. I skip the last step, launch toward the exit doors, and just when I think I’m home free, a zombie smacks me in the shoulder. Dead.
Humans vs. Zombies at Penn, or HvZ, is a game that seems simple enough: survive until a well-timed (imaginary) helicopter rescue takes you away from a building swarming with the undead. But there are other problems today. The helicopter? Broken. The humans have to collect and defend its missing parts hidden about the building, only allowed to pick them up at certain time points. When I die, we still have twenty-some minutes before the first collection.
And then consider the zombies chasing me: they’re not dead. They are highly intelligent, very much alive adults working together as a team (if they know what’s good for them) to take down their enemies. They’re not like the walkers on The Walking Dead either. These zombies sprint like Usain Bolt going for gold. The humans’ one saving grace is that the zombies don’t have Nerf guns and have to tag you to turn you. However, getting shot doesn’t kill them for good. A punctured zombie is “stunned” and has to count down for 30 seconds in a stairwell before rejoining the game.
“Canonically, the best way to think about it is, you know, you put a bullet through a zombie, it’s going to kill the zombie. But there are a whole lot more zombies coming soon,” explains Chapin Lenthall-Cleary, a Penn senior who designed the current games and has been running HvZ since last fall.
We’re setting up in an under-utilized lounge for physics students in everybody’s least favorite building to have a class: the David Rittenhouse Laboratory (DRL). If it feels like a brutalist cinder block bunker meant to keep the government’s secrets, it’s because it kind of is. DRL was built during a time when physics was pretty synonymous with the military, and the building’s design intentionally obscures what’s going on inside. What better place for an apocalypse? What better place to hide?
As he talks, Chapin unboxes countless Nerf guns (sawed-off shotguns, pistols, semi-automatic rifles, machine guns, and more), buckets of ammo, and duct tape holsters, bandoliers, and satchels. He lays everything out on the tables until the room resembles the stuff of a twelve-year-old boy’s dream birthday party.
“You have one life, and you need to get it right if you want to survive,” says Chapin while feeding small gray-tipped darts into the magazine of his automatic gun. “There’s hope that you can actually make it, which, in the history of our games, humans have only won twice out of a lot of games. So, it can happen, but it’s not the norm.”
Since I was 10, I’ve been obsessed with zombie apocalypses and the zombie media: The Walking Dead, The Last of Us, World War Z, Zombieland, you name it. Instead of planning out my future wedding, I planned how I would survive in a world overrun with cannibalistic monsters. And I wasn’t alone in this fascination: since the birth of the zombie apocalypse genre with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, the undead have only grown in popularity. At its peak The Walking Dead’s season 5 (2014) premiered to 17.29 million viewers. This year, The Last of Us, a show about depressed, Southern Pedro Pascal delivering a young girl who may be the key to curing the zombie apocalypse across the country, had a total audience of 30.4 million—the most watched series on HBO since Game of Thrones. I, of course, was one of those viewers.
Dr. Murali Balaji is a journalist and professor at the Annenberg School for Communication who teaches a course called “Media, The Apocalypse, and the Undead” and edited “Thinking Dead: What the Zombie Apocalypse Means,” a collection of essays by scholars about why our society has become so enamored with zombie apocalypses.
In Dr. Balaji’s view, zombie media is often a stand-in for our own anxieties.
He looks back to 1968 and Night of the Living Dead, which came out during a time of social unrest post the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy: “You’re looking at America’s own anxieties around race, class, and gender that were taking place at the time…Zombies, in many ways, have represented the other we fear, because we dehumanize our others, whoever they are.”
When I first started watching zombie movies as a kid with World War Z (what babysitter let me watch that unsupervised?), I wasn’t experiencing anxieties around race, class, or gender. But I was an anxious kid by nature. I often managed to make any problem, no matter how small, feel catastrophic and life-ending. So you’d think a zombie apocalypse would fit the bill of things I’d feel absolutely unprepared for and terrified about. But I wasn’t. I felt quite the opposite, actually.
“This will sound perhaps cliche, but there’s a lot about the world that is very complex and often not particularly fair. Here the pretend stakes are high but, you know, you’re gonna win or die based upon your own skill or cleverness,” Chapin tells me while I rummage through a massive storage bin filled to the brim with Nerf guns.
In fact, an apocalypse could allow people to have a greater ability to forge their own future, assuming they survive. This is what attracted me the most to zombies as a kid: the idea that life could be cut and dry (well, a bloody cut and dry). I wouldn’t have to worry about the little things, only the big apocalyptic picture. As Chapin claims, “People are often limited in the control they have over their own lives, limited in a way to find meaning. And, well, it’s a heck of a lot more interesting life if you wake up and go kill zombies.”
In my first game, five HvZ newbies and I group up, laughing and plotting while we search for a good place to camp out while we wait for the zombies. We talk of all the ways we’ll mow the undead down when they come, who will hide behind the hospital-white walls to jump out at unsuspecting zombies. We choose the middle of the hallway on the third floor as the perfect starting point and believe ourselves ready.
At the first sign of zombies, all our plans, all our bravado, go out the window. We don’t have a lock on our vulnerable angles and no one is guarding our back properly. No one has good aim. So we scatter, cursing and retreating into the stairwell. You know this part—I’m tagged running into the second floor hallway.
The rest of the humans lose about forty minutes into a game planned to last two hours. Those that survive the longest break off into a trio and barricade themselves inside a common room, only to be overpowered by a horde of zombies successfully breaking through.
All this is to say I spend what could have been the crowning achievement of all my apocalypse viewership and mental prep work not surviving as a human, but chasing down other humans as a zombie. Shockingly enough, I’m not mad. A little disappointed and frustrated, sure, but pretty eagerly taking to my zombie role. I want to keep playing, even after dying. Most importantly, I want to try again. This has to be a sentiment shared by most of the group; despite how little the humans win, people come to play every Saturday. As of writing this, there are 94 members of the Discord server where game announcements take place. People really want to play apocalypse.
Why? Well, it’s fun: there’s teamwork, socialization, great cardio (I’ve never sweat more in my life). But that doesn’t necessarily explain the fascination or drive to play week after week after week.
To Chapin, HvZ represents a sort of escape. Penn students are seemingly always buried in classes, clubs, jobs, social engagements, and more every week, supposedly for our professional betterment. We need to be doing work that leads to more work, that will lead to the work we’re meant to do in the not-so-distant future. As any older generation loves to tell Gen-Z, “you will be the change-makers.”
Coming to HvZ on Saturdays evenings instead of studying or partying can feel like a breath of fresh, zombified air. Players can be immersed in a non-academic space and do battle with a clear enemy with clear goals. It’s not a resume builder, but not everything has to be. It’s distinctly anti-pre-professional.
While we’re fighting each other, the building is actively in use by students making their way to dimly lit offices tucked into DRL’s many corners. But when you play, you forget school exists. There is only shooting zombies, watching your back, trying to stay alive, trying to defeat humans. Non-players disrupt that world.
Twenty minutes or so into my second game, I’m stalking down a hallway with a human squad. Chapin has assigned me and another girl wielding a massive rapid-fire gun with two magazines forming an X-shape on the top to guard the rear. It’s all quiet. And then, a sneaker squeaks out of our line of sight, just beyond a fork in the hallway. The zombies. Two of the more self-sacrificing types sprint for us while we mow them down. The others duck into the shallow doorways, flattening themselves to escape the bullets. In the middle of all of this, a man who is clearly not a zombie nor a zombie killer suddenly turns the corner.
“Stop shooting!” Chapin shouts. Everyone ceases fire. The zombies still. Some of us nod at this unexpected guest, some people sheepishly grin, and others look almost frozen in the game. The lines between HvZ reality and Penn life blur. At this moment, the “other” is not the zombie, but the real world.
When we think about zombie apocalypses, we think about zombies. But a lot of the intrigue in this media is in how living people react in a post-society world when there are limited punitive structural systems in place.
Take the Quarantine Zones in The Last of Us, for example. QZs are where survivors have the best chance to eke out a life in the apocalypse, but health care is virtually non-existent and education is strictly controlled. The average viewer might think, well that’s not fair. The civilians are just trying to survive. But outside the QZs, there are raiders, rapists, slavers, and cannibals (the living kind) roaming around with no law system to stop them. Thinking about all that, the QZ military starts to seem a little justified.
Dr. Balaji cites moral relativism—what he calls “the name of the game in any of these texts.” Actions cannot be universally interpreted as good or bad and are dependent on the culture that produces them. “It’s the way human beings respond to that adversity that is the heart of [zombie media]. How they turn on one another, the depravity of human beings when pushed to their limit, and more importantly, the choices we make to guide our self interest,” he says.
In HvZ, there isn’t any human depravity, but your mindset changes when you play. My first game, one of the players I was stocking up Nerf bullets with joked that the vibes of some of the veteran players in the room was almost militant. There is certainly a point in the game that it starts to feel a lot less like a game and more like a real challenge.
I think, in a way, the question of the morality behind zombie apocalypses is also what drew me in. Here is a world where governmental systems have failed and are not to be trusted. Here is a world where people are also not to be trusted, but you know you must work with them in order to survive. Here is a world where people form their own truth. In an apocalyptic world, what would my moral system be? It’s easy to say I’d stay true to myself, be good to others. But would any of us really? Maybe zombie media is a way to rationalize our fears about the behavior of other people, or even ourselves.
Dr. Balaji gives the example of the COVID-19 pandemic, when The Walking Dead was one of the most streamed TV shows of 2020. “People were rewatching season one of The Walking Dead, people were watching Zombie B-movies from the 1980s and 1990s, all because they wanted to find some connection to what they were experiencing,” he says.
I was one of those many watchers and could find my fear of being infected directly reflected in that zombie text: the news of a virus breaking out, nationwide lockdowns—it held a similar feeling. In this way, zombie apocalypse media may allow us to process the complex situations that are out of our control and understand how we and others respond to trauma, especially when we feel the systems in place to protect us are not quite doing so.
If we cannot trust institutions to look out for us, we have to trust each other.
A little over an hour into my second game, I am still alive, and so is my team. It becomes clear that we have a good chance of winning, the third human victory since HvZ began last fall. All we have to do is hold the flag point where we have gathered almost all the helicopter parts. As in any good zombie movie, right when the heroes find the scientist with a cure, right when the escape car arrives, there’s a slip-up. A few of the humans, bored with standing around waiting for the zombies to charge us, are goofing around, chatting instead of staying trained on the nearby stairwell where part of the horde lurks.
A push by the zombies nearly takes us down and two humans are killed. But unlike the first game when we scattered, this team remains strong, remains a team. Two humans kneel against the walls, picking off the more ambitious zombies. Those of us carrying semi-automatics lay down sweeping fire against the horde. And we push them back. We win the countdown; off to the helicopter.
“I think human beings are social animals. And the reality is we’re naturally inclined to be collaborative…People don’t think through the consequences of that short term [self-motivated] thinking when long term, humans who collaborate end up surviving,” says Dr. Balaji.
For a long time, I thought of surviving zombie apocalypses as individual ventures, and worlds in which to test your own personal merit. How would I survive? Where would I go? But the thing is, individualism in an apocalypse wouldn’t get me far. In the first game when I took off by myself, I died in thirty seconds flat.
HvZ is a community. A zombie-fighting, eccentric community, sure, but one that has each other’s backs. People tend to learn that lesson in their very first games. Trust in each other.
Recently, the DRL building manager notified Chapin that HvZ is now barred from DRL. This does not mean the end of the games: “The DRL building manager has the authority to stop us playing in DRL, scumbag move though that is, but not to shut down the games,” says Chapin. Still, the fate of HvZ hangs in the balance.
In zombie media, when systems of power tell citizens to follow certain rules, those rules often fail to provide any feeling of safety. “There is a sense that the chaos of zombie epidemics can only be solved through the overthrow or uprooting of current hierarchies,” says Dr. Balaji.
While the DRL building manager isn’t necessarily some big evil-doing, apocalyptic government or corporation, they are part of a system of power threatening the livelihood of HvZ. But the new (possibly temporary) rule hasn’t scared people off. There is a counterculture inherent in HvZ. The more it’s threatened, the more interest there is, the more passion. Chapin and others in HvZ are appealing the rule through the Office of University Life. And even if they do get officially squashed in DRL, HvZ will simply move elsewhere. The games go on.
I couldn’t attend the games every weekend even if I wanted to. This isn’t really the apocalypse; I’m in college. I have midterms, papers, research, and other ways I need to spend my Saturday evenings. And even in an apocalypse, it can’t be killing zombies all the time. Somehow, you have to thrive. But when I can make time, there’s a Nerf gun waiting for me. And when the horde comes, you know where I’ll be.
If you’re interested in playing Humans vs Zombies, you can join their Discord server or their Groupme.
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