WHAT MAKES ZOMBIES SO SCARY? MASS CONGREGATION

Big cities and towns have always been some of the go to settings for zombie related media and for good reason. The entire idea of zombies in the modern day is to compare them to people having zero thought and following a hive mind, so to speak, as they shuffle about their mindless days cannibalizing each other. And that’s especially true in larger cities where all people do is mill about, moving from one destination to the next in very large crowds, doing their daily routines to survive. We’ve seen zombie movies in malls, large cities where the zombies pile on top of each other to find their next meal of brains, and even across entire countries. So imagine the terror when those giant masses of zombies leave the cities and rove about the countryside.

That’s the world that Robert Kirkman presents with The Walking Dead

After the first volume of the comic and the first season of the TV show,

TWD abandons the city of Atlanta in favor of the backroads and boonies of the state, where there is nothing but trees, dirt roads and spatterings of civilizations for miles and miles and it is glorious. It’s unique in the way that it managed to capture and captivate audiences for several years, not only because of its human drama, but because of the terror and fear that the zombies are able to elicit through these unfamiliar settings. Of all of the iconic places that Robert Kirkman could have set his stellar zombie series, why did he choose Georgia and how did the state’s own history and topography contribute to that decision?

Outside of a few major cities, Georgia mostly consists of forests, grassy plains and swampsperfect places to stake claims for tiny towns and farmsteads, as was the style of its colonial period. This kind of geography works well for both survivors and the zombies themselves, with the survivors always having some new place to move to with the hopes that large crowd of zombies that seems to pop up every five episodes or so, doesn’t find or can’t penetrate the walls of the great fortifications that they build, like the Prison or Alexandria.

With approximately 10.91 million residents, Georgia’s heaviest population centers tend to be Atlanta and its greater area with pockets of people in places like Savannah or Augusta, both of which are two to three hours away from the capital by car. This leaves a lot of space for both humans and the undead to occupy without encountering each other for potentially months at a time, which explains why so many characters in the franchise have been able to set up outposts, farms and entire communities without the threat of zombies for a good long while.

The disparate nature of the state allows for the character drama to shine through, not only because of the crushing distance that there is between peoples own survival mentalities, but also because of how even the appearance of a single zombie can herald the appearance of the horde. It could also cause a sudden and unexpected death that continues to tear at the emotional stability of the group at a terrible time. But one of the few upsides to come from this, is the preparedness of certain groups the farther away from the city they are, at least up until the zombies also begin to fan out. The further away from Atlanta one gets, the more likely one is to encounter stores and supermarkets with hunting gear like what the Dixon brothers fancy. Because there’s very little hunting and fishing to be done in the urban areas, the outskirts of the city make great places to hole up for survival purposes in the long run because of the abundance of animals and farm space.

Filmed primarily in Senoia, Georgia’s Raleigh Studios (formerly Riverwood Studios), the town itself and other surrounding cities, The Walking Dead has done its part to put the state on the map as a prime location for many productions since its start in 2010. Prominent film and TV projects like Fried Green Tomatoes, The Fighting Temptations, and Pet Sematary II had been filmed there for years and the town itself is often dressed up to resemble the streets of New York and Chicago, but with The Walking Dead being explicitly stated as taking place in Georgia, there’s a degree of identity that is earned back by the state being able to portray itself in a reasonably accurate manner.

Areas such as Senoia’s Main Street, the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center, and even Driftwood Beach on Jekyll Island, Georgia, have all been utilized in some form or another throughout the TV show. Main Street has served as the home of many outdoor scenes and the town of Senoia itself has portrayed The Governor’s town of Woodbury and the walled city of Alexandria, which was set in Virginia. The real city of Woodbury, Georgia is located twenty four miles south of Senoia, but is still well represented by its neighboring town with its wide roads and quaint, home-like feel, despite the sinister nature of The Governor’s rule. The Cobb Center is used in the place of the real life CDC building for its exterior shots with the interiors being filmed in the Georgia World Congress Center. Because the CDC building is the home to many actual viruses, diseases and various secrets, it’s not likely to have anything actually filmed there, but it was important enough to the story to be represented by a place with just enough space to make it seem legitimate. Driftwood Beach was used to portray the community of Oceanside, Virginia in the show. While there is no real life counterpart to the community, it did its job in acting as one of the many coastal towns of the state itself!

Many of the shows iconic locations are still standing and are either part of the many Walking Dead tours or are private residences like Hershel’s Farm. The farm is yet another location that runs near the town of Senoia and is owned by a local family, so there is very little chance of being able to peruse the location at ones own pace. The Prison that was featured in season 2 was actually a set made in Raleigh Studios, likely because it also would have been difficult to film in an actual prison without having to relocate its residents. Rick and Lori’s house in season one is yet another home located in Atlanta in a suburb called Grant Park and had been bought in 2017, likely also not happy with the amount of fanfare their home might get. And one of the last locations not filmed in Senoia might be the Atlanta Mission, which acted as the filming location for the iconic hospital scenes in the first episode of the show. The Mission has been a homeless shelter since its inception and still stands as one of the best that the city has to offer. There are always a few common questions that people have when it comes to zombie media; what caused the zombie apocalypse and will there ever be a cure?

Unfortunately in The Walking Dead, both of these questions remain fully unanswered. While the comics never visit Atlanta’s Center for Disease Control, the TV show does take its time to address what might seem to be a plot hole in regards to the efforts that some scientists might have been making when the apocalypse started. Despite how much hope the characters have in the beginning when they try to find answers or a cure at the CDC, they end up coming away with nothing other than the knowledge that they just have to survive and later on, they learn that they’re all infected.

Ghosts and hauntings are quite common in Georgia, though the filming locations in The Walking Dead don’t have much to report in that regard, but the larger state itself has a bevy of ghosts, ghouls and ghastly happenings to sell it as one of the most haunted places in the US. Near Grant Park lies Oakland Cemetery, home to the unmarked graves of many Confederate Soldiers, some of whom people have claimed to see wandering in the darkest hours of the night. The Ellis Hotel is another which saw the fiery deaths of 119 people despite being sold as “fireproof” in its planning. Some claim to still smell the smoke and hear the screams of the deceased and the unfortunate incident itself caused more places to exacerbated ordinances and codes to enforce fire safety in their buildings.

However, none of these minor hauntings compare to the sheer amount of specters and wraiths that occupy the entire city of Savannah, Georgia.

Savannah is one of the main destinations of both The Walking Dead video game by Telltale and the filming location for Season

8 of Fear the Walking Dead. Savannah’s ghost history is long and dates as far back as the founding of the city by James Edward Oglethorpe in 1733. While Oglethorpe himself was anti-slavery, he didn’t remain in the colony and soon after slaves started being sold there from South Carolina. The ghosts of slaves and their masters are fairly common sights in the city, and River Street might be one of the most prominent locations for them as it’s potentially double haunted. Built on top of Yamacraw tribal lands and furnished with the blood of slaves building the docks, River Street and the greater Savannah area are prime for sights of ghosts, the sounds of shackles and the haunting cries of the dead.

During the American Revolution, there was a Siege on Savannah in 1779 which killed 240 people, leaving the spirits of many Revolutionary soldiers to haunt the battlegrounds and cemeteries that dot the area. The mass amount of deaths don’t end there, however, as both plague and fire would go on to claim more lives over the course of the following decades. In 1796, not long after the war, a fire broke out in the city, 229 homes and other buildings were destroyed and, shockingly, only six people died as a result of the firefighting efforts. Another great flame would come years later in 1820, resulting in 500 buildings being burned.

Almost as if the spirits from both the dock slaves and the Yamacraw saw that they had not done enough, an outbreak of Yellow Fever spread throughout the city in the same month as the 1820 fire. Approximately 660 people lost their lives to the disease during this first epidemic, but it certainly wouldn’t end there. Both 1854 and 1876 saw repeats in outbreaks of Yellow Fever with body counts of 1,040 and 1,066 respectively. Thematically, it makes sense that The Walking Dead would make Savannah one of the first places to suffer a complete overtaking by the dead in their world. Historically, the populations of the city don’t fare well when it comes to disease spreading throughout their home.

While The Walking Dead never makes its way to or mentions Lake Lanier in any capacity, one would be remiss to never hear of any of the tales of terror and fear that surround its murky waters. During the 1800s, the late Reconstruction Era, the town of Oscarville was founded by working class black citizens. They thrived in the area and had a wonderful community until 1957 when the Army Corps of Engineers sought to increase the output of water to neighboring cities. They forced the original residents out and flooded the town over a number of years, not removing any of the structures and displacing graveyards. Since then, the supposedly cursed lake has resulted in the deaths of nearly 700 people and while that’s not a grand number, it is still fairly large and ominous considering Lake Lanier is tiny in comparison to other lakes and if there’s only one curse this writer believes in; it is definitely this one.

BY GRAVEYARD

WHAT IT’S ABOUT? THE SHOW AND THE VIDEO GAME

The Last of Us takes place in an alternate America, a fictionalized version of our present. 20 years ago there was an outbreak, which at that time, was from an unknown source. The world quickly collapsed, and the small number of survivors huddled together in ‘Quarantine Zones’. These, over time, became authoritarian hellscapes. The federal forces that were to keep the survivors safe, eventually became corrupted by their own power and lack of national leadership. They devolved into city states under martial law, where everyday citizens have to work for ration cards, which also function as currency. Outside these quarantine zones, the true face of the outbreak and its lasting effects are on display. Creatures roam the neighborhoods, homes, and cities of this new American wasteland, aggressively territorial to any normal humans who wander too close. Nowhere in the video games or tv show are the creatures called zombies, but they share many of the same mannerisms and are known as the infected. These infected are people who were exposed to a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus. This fungus is most notable in the real world by its ability to create zombies by infecting the brains of insects. The insects are then directed by the fungus to stray from the hive mind of the colony and venture to places that the insect would not normally go. The fungus is a parasite and drives the insect to find places that are best for the fungus to grow and spread its spores. In the game, the fungus mutated to be able to control the minds of people. This is only exposed to the player over time, as your character explores and find flyers, letters, and newspaper articles strewn throughout the game world. Over the course of the game, the collapse of the country and how it was possible become a bit clearer. In the show, it explains the collapse through flashback sequences that show the world’s supply of grain was infected by a mutated version of the fungus that was able to affect humans. Since this happened in one of the world’s busiest grain mills, it infected nearly every consumer product using these grains. By the time the fungus was detected, it had already been distributed all over the globe, and was already in homes. The story, for all intents and purposes, is the same in the game and the TV show. Joel, a hardened smuggler who braves the wasteland to find supplies to trade within the Quarantine zones, is asked to transport a young girl across the country. It soon becomes apparent that this young girl, Ellie, holds what may be the cure to the fungus, having been infected, but has not turned. Joel then builds a parental relationship with the young girl as they travel across the wasteland to deliver her to a group that may be able to use her gift to cure the world.

WHAT KIND OF ZOMBIE IS IT?

The infected of The Last of Us are more of a combination of voodoo and modern day zombies. In old movies and lore, plants or other natural items are able to control the mind of an individual if ingested. From that point on, they become the modern pop culture definition of zombies. There are several different varieties of infected that exist in The Last of Us. Runners are the first stage of being infected and are similar to the modern version of fast zombies. The next stage are the Stalkers. Stalkers are more akin to the idea of smart zombies. They stopped the immediate need of spreading the fungus as fast as possible and opted for a more planned attack and became more predator-like. The third stage are Clickers. Clickers have become blind and must find their prey by making clicking noises, hence the name, and and hunt more like a bat with echolocation.

The fourth stage are the Bloaters. Bloaters are slow moving and more like tanks, They are harder to take down and are akin to style and appearance to Nemesis from Resident Evil. Shamblers are a type of Bloater but were in a wet environment during the progression of stages. Their mouths are frozen in an open maw and therefore must spray the spores to spread the infection as biting is no longer an option. Finally, a cluster of the infected can form together into a hodgepodge of fungus and human parts. This is known as the Rat King, which is very Lovecraftian in its appearance. These stages do not necessarily go in order, and the larger and more dangerous versions are much rarer.

Overall, the Infected in The Last of Us takes very real inspiration from a parasitic fungus and also pays homage to the different types of zombies that have existed in lore, traditions, movies and other media. It asks us what can happen if a seemingly harmless fungus from our world mutates and humans become the next target. In typical zombie fashion, the infected are driven to bite uninfected people, but not to eat, but rather to grow and spread their spores. You can be infected from a single bite and there is no known cure.

The Inspiration Behind The Story

The original idea for the story that would become The Last of Us was from a school project that Writer/

Director Neil Druckmann participated in. The contest was to create and pitch a video game idea to horror director and zombie enthusiast George A. Romero. That idea was a mix of the protagonist partnership of the game ‘Ico’ with the zombie apocalypse that Romero was famous for. It included a grizzled cop that was protecting a young girl, but due to his heart condition, the focus would shift to the young girl. The idea was ultimately not chosen, but Neil held onto the idea. He attempted to make it into a comic series, but that too was turned down. Eventually landing at Naughty Dog studios, he pitched the idea as a game concept. The team at Naughty Dog took the idea and with Neil’s direction, created the basis for The Last of Us.

The original idea for the Cordyceps fungus was used after the team watched a BBC documentary about the effects on insects, and wondered what would happen if this ever mutated to work on humans. This mixed with the history of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and the paranoia and human barbarity that can happen when survival is at stake filled out the rest. Mix that with a healthy dose of Cormac McCarthy in his books and films ‘The Road’ and ‘No Country for Old Men’ and you have the inspiration and recipe to bring The Last of Us to life.