We end where we begin ladies and gentlemen. We’ve seen every type of Zombie you could imagine, we’ve traveled the world in search of love and beauty and the undead. We have even spent more time than most of you might have liked looking at Zombie’s as a philosophical concept. Now we are back to brass tacks, how do you survive the Zombie Apocalypse?

Well, my friend, if you have learned nothing else from this story it should be that it all depends on what type of Zombies we are talking about. Will you run into a tried and true shambler, looking to feast on your brains or will you end up being confronted by one of the myriad of pseudo-Zombies with powers and abilities far beyond those of the “normal undead”?

It’s hard to tell, so all you can do is to gather as much information as you can and be prepared for anything.

I can’t tell you when the swarm of virus-enhanced flesh will descend upon your town but I can say that at least now you will be armed with the information you’ll need to spend the rest of your natural life wandering friendless and alone through the barren, blasted Wasteland that was once your life.

I wasn’t sure whether to call this “Zombie Fashion” or “Fashion Zombies” because it deals with both.

First, take a look at the Zink gallery where artist Fumie Sasabuchi has put together a collection of Zombie inspired fashions. I don’t know much about fashion, but I do know the walking dead when I see them and this collection is a fantastic look at some couture shamblers.

Next on the agenda is the song is this video from The Aquabats which harkens back to Zombies as a cultural metaphor. You can try to unravel the societal significance for yourself but like I told you earlier, what is significantly more important is that it gives me an excuse to show you another music video.

We’re approaching the end of this story, so I thought I would take another look at philos . . .

Fine, fine, even though I tried to find another 50 page document on the validity of the Philosophical Zombie concept, I couldn’t so instead I decided to do an interlude. This is a clip from the classic Canadian sketch comedy show Kids in the Hall.

It illustrates a point that will become absolutely critical to you when you are wandering bleary-eyed through the Wastes: Zombies don’t run.

As we talked about earlier, Zombies have spent much of their time in popular culture acting as metaphors for stories that are just better told through hordes of brain-eating miscreants. I wanted to let you in on some of the subtext found in Zombie films.

To start, take a look at IFC’s incomplete guide to Zombie metaphors in films. You’ll learn a lot about the place that the undead have in our history, like this little gem,

Dead of Night (1974)
Directed by Bob Clark

Almost a decade before Clark made a mainstream name for himself with “Porky’s” and “A Christmas Story,” he turned out this rough but wickedly effective indie horror film equating zombism with Vietnam vet trauma. The Brooks family hasn’t heard from soldier son Andy for long enough that his father and sister suspect the worst; it’s only his devoted mother who keeps the faith with a fervor that borders on madness. Her conviction that her son is alive seems to actually pull him from the grave — he arrives in the dead of night, having hitchhiked to the house, and, given that we witnessed Andy’s death in the jungle before the opening credits, it’s clear nothing good is in store. Andy’s changed — he’s monotone, unresponsive and spends most of his time staring at nothing from a rocking chair on the porch. Oh, and he’s picked up an addiction — he needs injections of fresh blood to keep himself from rotting. Dread builds over the course of the film, but so does a sense of tragedy; everyone is unable to understand that Andy has been (literally, in his case) to hell, and can only respond with frustration that he’s not the same.

There are about 6 more just like this for you to ruminate on. Next, let’s turn our attention to Scene-Stealer and their mediation on the role that Zombies have in our lives,

Zombies are the lowest examples of the lower class. They shuffle forward in a hideous lurch; their brains are turned to mush; they moan and groan, producing no intelligible speech; and are driven by one simple, base desire—to eat human flesh. Nevertheless, they seem to overpower their faster, supposedly smarter foes in the human race due to their sheer numbers alone.

There is a truth to all of this. It seems amazing that in almost every scenario that involves Zombie’s loosing their cages, these slow, staggering piles of half-rotted flesh manage to consume and overpower the supposedly more intelligent humans around them. This is because humanity tends to run flailing in every direction during the start of the plague.

I normally save the lessons for when we look at Zombie films, but this time I’ll throw in a bonus: don’t panic. Sure, there might be an army of flesh-gobbling sociopaths knocking at your door, but in the beginning, there are only a couple of them. The trick to surviving the Zombie Apocalypse is to stop it before it starts and to keep as many living, breathing human beings alive as you can manage. A little bit of self-control will go a long way towards the preservation of humanity.

This is my favorite documentary describing life after the Zombie Apocalypse. Why because I believe that every story has two sides, even the Apocalypse and what American Zombie shows us are the problems faced by high-functioning Zombies in a world set against them.

You might not know this, especially if you are sitting in a bunker fending off the legions of the damned with a pump-action Remington, but a small percentage of Zombies come back from the dead not too much different than they left.

This documentary by Grace Lee and John Solomon chronicles their story. We even get to visit a festival where high-functioning Zombies can cut loose and really be themselves.

While I try to keep an open mind about these things, I still can’t help but think there is something going on here. Maybe I’m just being paranoid.

I know all the kids these days with their Play Boxes and Wiistations might think Urban Dead isn’t “hip” because it’s mostly text based, but they would be missing out on a clever and fun web-based, multiplayer Zombie game.

You play the role of a survivor in a world overrun by shamblers and it is your job to, you guessed it, survive. There are tons of items to pick up, tons of story to unlock and tons of corpses to decapitate. For anyone looking for a Zombie simulator with a little more heart and a little less flash, Urban Dead is where all the cool kids are.

Occasionally sites are just filled with too much goodness to properly summarize, this is one of them. Undead Games has a vast collection of, well, games about Zombies along with fan fiction, images and events all related to better understanding the rotting piles of decaying human flesh who will soon be roaming the street consuming the innocent.

If you are looking for a bit of a diversion from running, screaming through the streets this could be just the ticket (for as long as the power holds out).

If you need help picking out a Zombie game to spend some time with, take a look at this clip.

The Onion has always been my primary source for news. Not only does it give us clear, lucid insights into the nation’s political landscape but it is one of the few news sources to take the threat of cataclysm at the hands of murderous, voodoo-powered man beasts seriously.

No where else would they cover a story like this one, explaining the criminal lack of Zombie preparation that Pittsburgh is facing,

PITTSBURGH—A zombie-preparedness study, commissioned by Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy and released Monday, indicates that the city could easily succumb to a devastating zombie attack. Insufficient emergency-management-personnel training and poorly conceived undead-defense measures have left the city at great risk for all-out destruction at the hands of the living dead, according to the Zombie Preparedness Institute.

It’s critical to recognize that without appropriate emergency preparedness that we are all destined to spend the rest of our short, miserable lives as a side-dish at an all-night undead buffet. It stuns me that the mainstream news networks seem to be complete unaware of the threat that we face right now.

Read through this piece and watch as ONN discusses just how prepared any of us are to survive the coming Apocalypse.

Jillian McDonald is an artist who originally became known for creating a series of performance art pieces around her obsession with Billy Bob Thorton. She has since moved onto what she is calling her “Zombie Loop,” which is a series of art projects that was described by the New York Times in 2006 like this,

‘Zombie Loop,’ the first piece in her ‘Horror Cycle,’ is a two-video projection installation that Mr. Roberts filmed this summer on a deserted Wisconsin country road. In it Ms. Mcdonald plays two roles: a white-garbed ingénue who flees, squealing, and the reanimated rotting corpse who staggers forward relentlessly in pursuit. At the end of each loop the figures switch places.

In ‘Zombie Portraits’ she and nine friends morph into zombies in stages, in a lumpish fashion that suggests B-movie stop-motion animation. (Excerpts from the zombie projects can be seen at jillianmcdonald.net.) As with the digital editing, she researched her special-effects makeup techniques on the Internet. ‘I’m a big fan of learning things on the Web,’ she said.

Jillian also put on an all night Zombie experience called “Zombies in Condoland.” She describes it as “not a zombiewalk,” but invited everyone out to Toronto’s Nuit Blanche to participate. You can take a look at clips from the event above and see more of Jillian’s work on her website.

In most descriptions of the Zombie Apocalypse, the push that leads us into the Wastes come in the form of a virus or voodoo or something normal like that. In The Cell, author Stephen King decided to present a different scenario by introducing us to The Pulse.

What is The Pulse? Well, that’s a big part of what the book is about, but the crux is that it travels through cell phones turning normal people into mindless, telepathically linked killing machines. While this is not technically a Zombie book (the monsters aren’t dead), it does have all the earmarks of one – rage-filled, shambling killing machines; a motley crew of survivors; strongly prevalent, underlying social commentary. It has it all including co-dedications to George Romero and horror writer Richard Matheson.

If you are looking for a different way of looking at the end of civilization, or maybe you’re just afraid of what cell phones are pumping into your brain, take a look at this book.