work
contact
cv
I’m a Monster and So Are You
A Video Essay
Pandemics tend to disproportionately affect the already monstrous among us — the poor, the disfigured, the disabled. These communities are populous, vulnerable to global health crises and are often abandoned completely, especially when the crises only affect certain people. In the 80s, it was the HIV epidemic, a virus that disproportionately affects the LGBTQ community and people who inject drugs— the easily discarded, the undesirable, and the deviant. In the modern zombie movies, the zombie horde increases exponentially. Once one person is infected, it is only a matter of time before the horde is almost impossible to handle. The protagonists are racing against the clock — the rapidly growing amorphous, characterless blob of the living dead. Their clothes are tattered, dirty, perhaps they are wearing an apron or a name tag but their faces have chunks of flesh missing from them. Not only are they nameless and faceless, most of the zombies in these kinds of movies are turned off camera. So where do they come from?
Who are the zombies, really?
The zombie’s fealty has been redefined before — from slave, to flesh-eater, to horde — but what if the zombie fealty lied with his fellow zombie man? His community? If we went beyond the mindlessness and the cannibalism and embraced the covenant being a zombie entailed: being tethered to one another running feverishly, clumsily toward a common goal. That’s who the Tethered are in Jordan Peele’s Us. These zombies look more like us than any of their ancestors, they’re exactly like us in almost every way and they are fighting for their humanity, their right to be above-ground and lay their “Hands Across America.” Holding hands is not as revolutionary as Ken Kragen would have you believe but the point still stands. In all of these films, even in their most modern iterations, the zombies are the antagonists. But do they have to be?
What if the zombies were on our side?