Zombies Rise Up…In Protest

“Million-Zombie Stagger” Demands Dignity, Brains

By Rob Kutner

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Today the streets rang out with the sound of stomps, foot-scrapes…and a clarion moan for justice. Its source: one of the nation’s most beleaguered—and baseball-bat-whacked—communities: zombies.

In city after city, undead protesters assembled in numbers not seen since the historic Stagger on Washington, numbers which seem to have strangely doubled by the end of the event.

These protests were sparked by the premiere of HBO’s new series “The Last of Us,” a post-apocalyptic drama based on a hit video game. But for zombies (or as they prefer to be called, “Reanimated-Americans”), it’s just one more example of Hollywood’s repeated failures at representation. As with the films of George Romero and John Carpenter, and all 19 spinoffs of “The Walking Dead,” every single zombie in the new show is played by an actor who is living.

But now, the zombie community is not prepared to take this lying down in the grave. They are filled with both a weird oozing black goo and outrage, over how they’ve been portrayed in popular media for decades: always the dumb, sub-verbal villains with only one thing on their minds: minds.

This negative perception of zombies arguably dates back to the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818. But activists are fighting to overcome this one-sided view, with some even promoting the idea of “Jesus: The First Zombie.”

Contributing to zombies’ sense of injustice is what experts call “unlivable conditions for the unliving.” Every night and dawn, millions of zombie children flop down on the ground hungry—despite the tons of American brains that clearly go unused, judging from purchases of lottery tickets. Meanwhile, no tailor or dry cleaner will accept their business, despite a community-wide, crushing need for clothes-patching and drool-stain-removing.

At least that’s what it seems like the zombies want. Judge for yourself in this MEDIA PUB LIVE EXCLUSIVE coverage of the protests by clicking play below!