Tag: The Walking Dead

Zombie Children

An Incomplete List of Zombie Children Found in Film

Zombie children are very rare in both films and television, and when you do encounter them, they tend to have (had) names, i.e. we met them when alive, and watched them turn. Maybe it’s because dead children are singularly upsetting, or maybe it’s because working with child actors is a pain in the ass. Kids can only be on set so many hours, then throw in however many hours in make-up, and they become an even bigger pain in the ass to shoot around. Either way, if a zombie child appears in a narrative, they tend to be freighted with meaning. You’re just not going to squander the shock value of young lives snuffed out and murderously reanimated. So I’m going to go through and document the zombie children I can think of, and see if we can’t say anything about death, childhood, and the nuclear family.

Before that, lemme get all wonky for a bit. I don’t particularly like getting into the weeds arguing about the taxonomy of a zombie (which is a lie because I’m about to do it at length). They’re made up creatures; the criteria aren’t going to be hard and fast. However, I think I should probably make some broad stabs at it, given how often I end up arguing with dudes on the Internet. Whether a zombie is technically alive or undead is less important for me than if that creature violently attacks people in mobs. So a blood-borne rage virus which renders a living person violently feral, like the one found in 28 Days Later, counts as a form of zombiism. By contrast, Claudia from Interview with a Vampire, while technically an undead child, is a calculating killer, and she has an emotional life beyond just killing. Just to make this complicated: sometimes there are zombies whose emotional states are the same as breathing humans, like Liv in iZombie or Murphy on Z Nation. They are always undead, not technically alive like a rage-zombie, and, unlike vampires, their bodies putrefy and decay. Often, technically alive zombies will be fully dead in a relatively short matter of time, as whatever fuels their murderous behavior renders them incapable of caring for themselves. The corruption of both appetite and flesh, a degradation of form and purpose, is ultimately what typifies a zombie, and that animating idea is more important than fast/slow, alive/dead, magic/science, or other nitpicky details.

An interesting edge case is the creatures in the Will Smith version of I Am Legend, which are zombie-like in their swarming murderous mobs, but then appear to be technically living, capable of emotional bonds, and can care for themselves (and others) in at least a rudimentary way. In the source material, the same-named novel by Richard Matheson, these creatures were referred to as vampires, which might be a better fit. They do look an awful lot like the vampires in The Strain or The Passage. I would argue that the arc of the film is uncovering the creatures’ true nature, from being seen as members of a mindless mob to creatures driven by more complex motivations than braaaaaains. Because of this, the film opens with all the earmarks of a zombie film: decaying urban landscapes, the living under siege, a nostalgia for the present. As Smith learns the people he’s been experimenting on are at least partially cognizant of themselves as people, the real horror sets in: he’s the real monster. Anyway, long story short: I’d include I Am Legend in a list of zombie movies, even if I think the creatures are bad zombies, because the film purposely invokes so many tropes of zombie narratives. Genre isn’t just defined by the actors in the story, but by the construction of the narrative itself.

Couple few caveats:

I think zombie babies are in a different category, narratively speaking, so I wouldn’t include them in this list. They are even rarer in film than zombie children. I can only think of three in film, two of which are in Zach Snyder movies: Dawn of the Dead, which is included in this list, and Army of the Dead, which is not. The third is in this dreadful rip-off of 28 Days Later called Solar Impact. (There’s also a zombie baby in the first episode of Z Nation, and the whole sequence is incredibly silly.) ETA: Another incredibly silly zombie baby is in Peter Jackson’s splatter-stick film, Dead Alive. I am also excluding adolescents — which are much more common — because when I say children, I mean pre-pubescent, not under the age of 18. Additionally, in the process of researching this post, I discovered at least four instances of zombified classrooms so I’ll round them up separately. Though I’m focusing on movies so they wouldn’t be included anyway, I’ve detailed all the child zombies in The Walking Dead here. Maybe that’s a lot of caveats, but it’s my list so I make the rules.

Night of the Living Dead (1969)

Karen Cooper

The very first OG undead child, the one who had chased me through my nightmares since I encountered her in my adolescence, is the one in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Harry and Helen Cooper, along with their daughter, Karen, take refuge in the same farmhouse in which the lead Ben, the catatonic Barbra, and a pair of young lovers are sheltering. The girl has been bitten, and her parents take her down to the basement to care for her. Ben and the girl’s dad are at loggerheads from the first: Ben is convinced the basement is a death-trap; Harry wants to hole up down there for the duration. 

I’d kind of forgotten the specifics of this whole sequence, so I recently watched it again. I was bolted by the scene where the zombie child overpowers her mother — not because she’s stronger than her, but because the mother can’t defend herself against her own flesh and blood. I also had forgotten that Romero’s zombies are tool-users: the girl stabs her mother over and over and over again, in a scene reminiscent of the shower scene in Psycho, before she settles in to feast on her corpse. After her father betrays Ben, he’s shot by him, and stumbles down to the basement. There, he encounters his zombie daughter, who finishes him off. Ben ends up having to dispatch the whole zombie family, one after the other, when he, against his better judgement, retreats to the basement.

I’ve said this a number of times, but I think it’s true: You can almost read the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead as a Freudian psychological structure: attic as superego, main floor as ego, and basement as id. It’s also a microcosm of the American body politic, as all of these archetypes bounce off each other and as their inevitable destruction bangs against the flimsy, permeable glass. That this family annihilation plays out, twice, in the id-based basement of the American subconscious is something indeed. Night of the Living Dead was written in the flux of the Vietnam war and the first American Civil Rights movement, and Karen’s reanimation is definitely a bellwether and a harbinger for the stressors that will bring down the myth of the American nuclear family.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Unnamed children

This follow-up to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead includes a couple unnamed zombie children who try to attack one of the characters in an airport charthouse. They are played by the niece and nephew of Tom Savini, the man behind the special effects, and appear to be in the film more because of that relationship than because the narrative specified zombie children. Which is to say: the kids are extras, not characters. They’re also not actors: imbd trivia claims they are the only zombies in Romero’s whole oeuvre who spontaneously run. Apparently the kids couldn’t be bothered with the undead shuffle. These kids are somewhat notable because they are extras. Other than a brief glimpse of a zombie child on The Walking Dead while Alexandria is being overrun, I can’t think of many other zombie children who are part of the background cast exclusively.

Night of the Comet (1984)

Unnamed boy

Honestly, I don’t really get why the zombie in this delightful 80s apocalypse is a zombie child. A comet passes over the earth, desiccating most of the population to red dust. If you’re shielded by steel, you’re fine, but if you’re only partially shielded, you will eventually desiccate. Before that, you’ll move from huge asshole to zombie. A pair of sisters and a trucker called Hector are the only people at first in the film who survive the comet un-zombified. The girls know their family is gone, but Hector was on the road when the comet came. So he goes home to see if anyone made it. While there, a zombie child semi-knocks on the door, and then chases Hector all over the house when Hector opens the door. It’s an odd sequence because it’s mostly played for comedy. Hector keeps making quips — stuff like “there goes the neighborhood!” or “you’re lucky I like kids!” — as the kid chases him around. Eventually Hector slams enough doors behind him, makes it out of the house, and escapes back to the overt plot, and the zombie kid is never mentioned again. Paradoxically, maybe it’s because Night of the Comet is closer to a comedy that they use a zombie kid here, because usually zombie kids are super upsetting. Hector isn’t in any serious physical danger due to the zombie kid, and can dispense with any anxiety about his immediate family without overtaxing the viewer with worry. Strange.

28 Days Later (2002)

Unnamed boy

Bike messenger Jim comes out of a coma alone in a trashed hospital and an empty London. He soon learns that a rage virus has swept through the population. Eventually, he and three other survivors strike out for the countryside, following a repeating broadcast promising a cure for infection. They stop at a diner outside of Manchester to refuel, and Jim’s traveling companions tell him not to go inside the diner. He does anyway, and encounters an infected boy, the only living person in a building heaped with corpses. We don’t see Jim kill the child, but he leaves the diner wiping off his baseball bat. As far as I’m aware, this is the only person — infected or not — which Jim kills before they reach the source of the broadcast, a manor house fortified by a rogue army unit.

That Jim has killed a child comes up in his confrontation with the leader of the soldiers, Major West. Rhetorically, West tries to morally equate Jim’s act of self-defense with West’s plan to force the women into sexual slavery. (I should really say girl and woman; Hannah is just a child herself.) Both are necessary for survival, in West’s schema: the killing of the boy because of his immediate threat, and the rape of a woman and girl for the perpetuation of the species. Narratively speaking, I believe it is important that Jim has gotten his hands dirty in this new rage-filled world. He could have easily made it to West’s grotesque fiefdom having left the violence to the others in his group. That the rage-zombie Jim killed was a child adds freight to the guilt he must feel, and somewhat short-circuits his ability to respond to West’s monstrous equation. I can easily see a stupider version of 28 Days Later, one without Jim’s encounter with the infected child, in which a righteous Jim delivers a Rick Grimes-style homily about maintaining one’s humanity in the wake of violent inhumanity or whatever, but that is thankfully not what happens.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Vivian

Now, in this Zack Snyder remake of Romero’s original movie — which was itself a sequel — there is a full on zombie child who, like in The Walking Dead, is the first zombie we see on screen. (For context: The Walking Dead’s first episode, which also features a zombie child as the first zombie we meet, was six years later in 2010.) We first meet Vivian, yet another pretty blonde white girl, when nurse Ana comes home after a long shift at the hospital, where there was a lot of weirdness going on in the background. Vivian shows off her rollerblading skills, and Ana praises her. We see Vivian again once Ana and her husband have gone to bed. Vivian creeps up the dark hallway, which wakes up the husband. When she steps into the light, her face is torn and you can see her teeth exposed (again, almost exactly like the first zombie on The Walking Dead.) The husband goes to help the girl, she tears his throat out, and Ana intervenes, throwing the girl into the hallway and slamming the door shut.

I think Snyder uses a child here for two reasons. First, I think the shock value of having a pretty blonde girl be the bloody introduction to the zombie apocalypse is pretty high. (And something The Walking Dead exploits further by having said child zombie summarily shot.) But then also, by having an undead child annihilate Ana’s husband, we are well and truly shoved out of the domestic sphere. Snyder is telling us this movie isn’t about the nuclear family, something he’ll underline again, gruesomely, when Luda and her baby zombify. I wouldn’t say Snyder’s remake captures much of the social commentary about consumerism of Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead, but there are still flashes of social commentary in moments like this. I don’t think, generally, Snyder is in control of his material, semiotically speaking, but he’s still capable of putting his grubby, pulpy fingers on the pulse of the moment.

Wicked Little Things (2006)

Mary, others

Look, I said I didn’t want to get into a big thing about the taxonomy of zombies, but the little undead shits in this film are really, really bad zombies. I think a dead giveaway is that they are referred to in-text as zombies, which actual zombies almost never are, paradoxically. Anyway, the set-up isn’t dissimilar from Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the most recent largely forgettable outing in the Ghostbusters franchise. A mom and her two kids — one in high school, the other younger — inherit a creepy-ass house in the middle of nowhere; supernatural tomfoolery ensues. In Wicked Little Things, it’s that a bunch of kids killed in a local mine during ye olde robber baron times come out at night to kill people and eat them. Turns out, the kids’ now deceased dad was related to a mining family, so the zombie kids won’t chomp the family, except maybe the mom because she’s not blood-related. The minor miners have been all stirred up because the descendant of the dick who ran the mine (and a dick himself) is trying to buy up all the land to build a ski lodge or whatever, and furthermore there’s some weird lease on the property that expires if all the descendants die or something, and … honestly, you can see where all of these Scooby Doings are going, down to the land-owning asshole getting chomped by some Victorian children.

Horror is a rule-bound genre. These kids are something like hungry ghosts crossed with zombies, and the film is never clear which which rule-set they operate under, other than what is narratively convenient. The younger kid in the family befriends one of the minor miners, a girl called Mary, in a trope found in ghost stories: Mary is dismissed as an “imaginary friend” until the grown-ups admit weird shit is happening, whereupon she imparts important exposition. The ghost kids are corporeal enough to eat guts occasionally — like a zombie — but then seem to blip in and out of existence because of the sun or the necessity of a jump scare. They are also able to be vanquished by the usual ghostbusting method of completing unfinished business, not by headshots. I found this film both incredibly frustrating and frustratingly predictable.

[REC] (2007)

Jennifer Carmen, Tristana Medeiros, & an unnamed boy

Spanish film [REC] and its sequels actually have scads of zombie children — and, indeed, a zombie child antagonist — which makes it something of an outlier. There’s two in the first film, which is a found-footage affair with an after-hours camera crew following a group of firefighters on a midnight call. The first we encounter, a girl called Jennifer, before she turns. In the initial interview by the late night tv crew, Jennifer’s mother explains she’s got tonsillitis, and that the family dog is at the vet with an undiagnosed illness. Eventually a health inspector explains the dog has an illness “like rabies” — which is why the building has been quarantined — just in time for Jennifer to turn and bite her mother’s face. (Zombie children attacking their mothers is something of a theme.)

The backstory is hella confusing, and it only gets more complicated, opaque, and unsatisfying as the series progresses, but: The source of the rabies-like illness is a girl named Tristana Medeiros, a Portuguese girl identified by the Vatican as being demon-possessed, and also maybe there’s an enzyme some Vatican agent identifies? She’s the last child zombie we encounter in the narrative, when the last two survivors make it up to the attic, where the priest has been keeping Tristana prisoner so he can experiment on her or something. There the survivors turn into not-survivors when they’re attacked by first a zombie boy and Tristana, who has turned into a massive monster. All of this is shot in night-vision and very upsetting.

The science/religion cross doesn’t make a lot of sense, and the overtly batshit Catholic iconography of the latter installments — especially [•REC]³: Génesis — gets hard to follow and stupid. I think there’s probably something in these films which, for Catholics and people in Catholic-majority communities, speaks to the ongoing child sexual abuse scandals perpetrated by the church. The abused child reanimates and destroys everything she can get her hands on in enclosed, domestic spaces, pitting families and neighbors against each other. The authorities are worse than unhelpful, and simultaneously abet the outbreak and cover it up. Nasty stuff.

Pontypool (2008)

Maureen & Colleen

The zombiism in Pontypool is a rage virus transmitted by language, and not the more classic Romero shambler. The events in this excellent film occur almost completely in the confines of a small town radio station. Disgraced shock jock Grant Mazzy and his beleaguered producer, Sidney Briar, field reports of escalating violence as it spreads, mouth to mouth, through the Ontario countryside. At one point early, a local music group called “Lawrence and the Arabians” — in full on brown face — shows up to sing a song or somesuch, which is the exact kind of folksy local color which Mazzy considers himself way too good for. (The Lawrence of the Arabians is none other than Tony Burgess, who wrote both the screenplay and the novel the film is based on.) The group also includes two children, who are identified in imdb as Maureen and Colleen, though I’m not certain their names are ever used in the film. Either way, they appear later in the film having succumbed to the language virus, and Mazzy and Sidney have to push past them to lock themselves in the relative safety of the utility closet slash break room.

I don’t think these zombie kids perform a specific narrative function — not like a lot of the other named undead children in this list — but I do think they are purposefully in the narrative. I’ve read a fair amount of Burgess’s novels, and many of them deal with outbreaks of civic violence and “people suddenly being absolutely not what you think they are.” These stories are largely set in the tiny towns in rural Ontario where he lives, and this convulsive violence often occurs in those liminal spaces we pass through in our rote and somnambulant interactions with the quote-unquote community: a gas station at a crossroads, a parking lot outside a big box store, a diner. Kids are just there, because kids are always just there: in the back seat while mom pumps gas, hanging onto the cart while mom distractedly shops, or, in Pontypool, going along with dad’s dog-and-pony show to get on the local radio. Violence inevitably affects children, and that violence doesn’t necessarily have meaning; it just is. There are zombie kids in Pontypool because there are kids in the town of Pontypool; as above, so below.

Quarantine (2008)

Briana

Probably a little bit of a cheat, because Quarantine is the American remake of [REC], so I’ll just note the differences. Quarantine only has one zombie child, Briana (played by a tiny baby Joey King), who is basically the same character as Jennifer Carmen, down to attacking her own mother. The source of the illness is no longer Vatican demon possession, but a doomsday cult member (played by none other than Doug Jones!) stealing a genetically modified rabies virus and releasing it in the apartment building. This localization makes perfect sense to me, as Americans are much more millenarian and paranoid about the gumment and have a different relationship with the Catholic church than the Spanish.

Zombieland (2009)

An entire birthday party

We only see child zombies in Zombieland during Cincinnati’s enumeration of his rules, specifically number 4: seatbelts. They end up being a visual punchline more than anything (and, weirdly, the same visual punchlines as in a The Walking Dead webisode called “Torn Apart”): they’re children zombified during a child’s birthday party. A somewhat dowdy woman with bad hair jumps into her van and frantically rolls up the window while while zombies in party dresses bang on the windows. She peels out of this suburban subdivision overrun with child zombies while Jesse Eisenberg intones that one must repress all humanity to survive zombieland. (The bouncy house in the background is a nice touch, tbh.) When she’s clear of the child zombies, her attention is drawn to one of the dozens of beanie babies all over the dash, at which point she t-bones a truck and is launched through the window, which presumably kills her. It would probably be easy to overthink this because I don’t think there’s much to this other than the macabre humor of girls in princess dresses trying to kill you. I do think the woman’s characterization — such as it is, as it’s limited to dowdy clothes, a bad haircut, and a weird relationship with plushies — evinces a sort of mean-spiritedness which has made Zombieland not age all that well. Cincinnati’s incel vibes are impossible to ignore now, for example.

The Girl with All the Gifts (2014)

Melanie

This is one of the four movies that have classrooms full of zombies — the others being Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Little Monsters, and Cooties. I said I wasn’t going to include them here, but Melanie is such a distinct character that I’m making an exception for her. The film (based on the same-named novel by M. R. Carey) takes place 10-ish years after the zombie apocalypse has overtaken Britain. Like The Last of Us, the zombie pathogen is fungal in nature. In an installation outside of the main human settlement, the military is experimenting on a dozen or so zombie children they have captured out in the wild. Unlike children turned in the initial outbreak, these children are capable of instruction, and don’t pose a threat to regular people as long as the living remain slathered in a scent-blocker. These children are strapped down and wheeled into a classroom every day, presided over by the empathetic Miss Justineau.

The film largely focuses on the relationship between Miss Justineau and her zombie student, Melanie. (The film also reverses the racial dynamic that was in the book: Melanie is Black and Miss Justineau white, which I think is a more interesting dynamic, Pedagogy of the Oppressed-style.) After the installation is inevitably breached, Melanie, Justineau and a collection of soldierly types end up road tripping through a zombified Britain. They encounter even more zombie children who have clearly self-organized into a sort of community, but they lack language & anything but the most rudimentary culture. Melanie ends up annihilating the human race by making the zombie plague airborne, while preserving it through Miss Justineau, who ends up the instructor of an entirely new race of people.

When zombie stories include children, they can potentially comment on generational conflict — and zombie classrooms, doubly so. Looking at this film post-Brexit and Britain’s continuing self-sabotage, you can see all of that coming. Glenn Close’s character, the military general in charge of the installation, is absolutely furious that people like Melanie exist, and prioritizes destroying her over even self-preservation. Humanity is dead. Long live humanity.

What We Become (Original Danish title: Sorgenfri) (2015)

Maj

Unlike many zombie movies, What We Become focuses on a nuclear family, not a found family, and it largely takes place in the family home. The zombie apocalypse itself is a pretty slow burn: The dynamics between the family members and the larger community (most specifically, their neighbors) are very carefully detailed. (The nuclear family consists of parents Dino and Pernille, and their kids are Gustaf, who seems like he’s 17-18, and Maj, who’s probably around 10.) During this extended prelude, there are constant background events, which, for someone paying attention, presage the zombie apocalypse. An elderly neighbor disappears; the radio mentions a virus centered in their suburb. Interestingly, I’m not sure the family even sees a zombie before the military rolls in and forces everyone to quarantine in their homes. (The plastic sheeting reminded me strongly of [REC], with people trapped in their homes and subject to escalating civic violence.)

The beginning of What We Become is also its ending. The very first scene is a distraught Pernille whispering platitudes to someone offscreen: Everything is going to be alright; it’s all a dream, etc. She reacts to banging, “Dino, is that you?” We see this scene again with much more context at the very end of the film. Pernille has retreated to an attic bedroom. Her daughter, Maj, is dead; this is who she is cradling in her arms. Her husband Dino is indeed the one banging on the door, which he breaks down. He shoulders a rifle with a scope and tells her to move away from the girl. She refuses. Looking down, she sees Maj open her eyes. A moment of hope flashes on Pernille’s face before she’s bitten and killed by her daughter. Dino points the gun first at Maj, and then at himself, but he’s out of bullets. Maj attacks and kills him as well.

In the particulars, the demise of the child, her reanimation, and then deaths of the parents isn’t dissimilar from Karen Cooper and her parents in Night of the Living Dead. The key difference is that the focus of the film has been on this nuclear family though the whole film. The Coopers are emblematic of the American nuclear family on the rotten end of the 60s; Maj and her family are less emblems and more distinct characters.

Blood Quantum (2019)

Unnamed girl

As far as I know, Blood Quantum is the first and only First Nations zombie film. The action of the film takes place in and around the fictional Mi’kmaq reserve of Red Crow. In a telling metaphor, Native people are immune to the virus which causes zombiism, but they can still be torn apart by their white zombie neighbors. As graffiti scrawled on the doors of the refuge says: If they’re red, they’re dead. If they’re white, they bite. After an extended prologue which takes place in the days just as the outbreak is beginning, we skip forward to 6 months into the zombie apocalypse. The reserve is one of the very few places not overrun with the undead.

The film follows brothers — the fuckup Lysol and his earnest much younger brother Joseph. Joseph and his pregnant white girlfriend have been bringing people from the outside into the reserve, and in the scene establishing the new normal, they return with a middle-aged white guy carrying his daughter in a blanket. Lysol and Joseph get into it: Lysol doesn’t want any more mouths to feed, and points out the daughter is obviously infected. The father denies this, but Lysol pulls down the blanket she’s wrapped in to reveal a bite. Joseph and his girlfriend get high and mighty about helping people, and tensions run over into a scuffle, just in time for their father, Traylor (played by the wonderful Michael Greyeyes) to wade in and bust up the fight. Tribal members discuss what to do about the infected girl in their native language, which increasingly upsets the father, who begins shouting, “Speak English!” Meanwhile, the girl dies. The father is ushered into the reserve, but his daughter cannot be taken inside. Just as she begins to stir, Traylor spits her skull with an axe.

Blood Quantum is so very much about the colonial relationship, and the confrontation at the gates of the reserve throw a lot of complicated interrelations together. Lysol is increasingly violently retaliatory as the movie goes on, but in this situation, he’s absolutely not wrong about the need to be cautious about letting people in. Joseph’s white girlfriend huffs at him, “We’re supposed to be helping people!” which feels whiney and entitled in the moment. Interestingly, it’s the level-headed Traylor who shoots back, “We’re not supposed to be doing anything. We’re supposed to survive.” White refugees trying to get into a First Nation — which typically were placed in land unwanted by white people — is an ironic reversal. Building on that central irony, this scene layers irony on irony — everything from the white father demanding they speak English while requesting asylum in their nation, to the white refugees being referred to as “boat people.” Most zombie movies end on bummers, but Blood Quantum is much more open-ended bummer than most.

Zombi Child (2019)

There is not actually a zombie child in Zombi Child. I suspect it may be a translation problem, as this francophone film deals with the legacy of colonialism in France through the story of a Haitian man turned zombie in the 1960s intercut with a contemporary story of a Haitian girl going to a boarding school in France. Haiti is, of course, the source for the original zombie lore, a creature which functions more like a golem under the control of a sorcerer than the undead cannibalistic mobs we see from Romero on. Thought I should address the film, given the name and all.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)

Girl in the road, neighbor boy

I know that no one saw this reboot of films based on the Resident Evil video games — which heretofore have been closely associated with Milla Jovovich and Paul W. S. Anderson — but I thought it was ok. Too reliant on dark-o-vision which made most of the action muddy, but with way more fidelity to the video games, if that’s your bag. (I know some of the game fans were unhappy with the previous series because those movies take a lot of liberties.) Anyway, Welcome to Raccoon City follows the initial outbreak in the titular city due to Umbrella Corp’s fuckery. Claire Redfield returns home to Raccoon City to warn her rookie RCPD brother, Chris, about the Umbrella Corp’s evil experiments.

When the trucker she’s hitching a ride with decides to make a gross pass at her, his attention wanders and he hits a girl in the road with his truck. (I couldn’t quite clock her age; it’s possible this is a teenager.) While he and Claire are arguing about what to do about the body, the girl gets up and wanders into the forest, where she stands, just out of sight, being a creeper. On her way to her brother’s house, Claire has several weird encounters with townspeople doing stuff like bleeding from the eyes. This culminates in Claire seeing a mother and son next door to her brother’s who appear to be bleeding and loosing clumps of hair. Chris is like, whatever, I’m not interested in your conspiracy facts, and leaves her to go to work. Claire hears a noise, and discovers the boy looking real rough and hiding under Chris’s table. “Do you need help?” She asks. “You need help,” he responds, as his mother, in full on zombie mode, crashes through the glass door and attacks Claire.

When I rewatched, I was surprised how little screen time the second zombie child had — in my mind he was the one who attacked Claire, not his mom. It’s possible I got this sequence messed up with the one in Night of Comet, which has similar blocking. I admit this kid isn’t completely zombified yet, though he’s clearly well on his way. Both the child zombies in Raccoon City seem to be children for their uncanny creepy factor mostly. But the children are also emblematic of the moral depravity of Umbrella, and by extension, the entire town. The population of the orphanage where the Redfields were raised was a convenient source for disposable test subjects, and the unnaturalness of preying upon your own young comes to full concrete metaphor with the death and reanimation of the town.

So that’s what I’ve got! Judging from this list, the most common child zombie is a white girl who will kill her mother in the story. I don’t really have a theory as to why that is the case, though it may just be as simple as children are often with their mothers, and a white girl is the avatar for imperiled innocence. And hey, if you can think of other zombie children I missed, I’d be happy to add them.

The Last of Us: When You’re Lost in the Darkness

However many years ago (many), I diligently rounded up every The Walking Dead episode as it aired. It was in the doldrums of season 3, so I did a lot of bitching, but it was still a fun exercise. I know I’m super bad at follow-through when I assign myself homework, but I’m going to make a stab at it with HBO’s newest zombie show, The Last of Us. Already I’m off to a great start, because it’s been a solid week since the show premiered, and they’ve already aired episode two. But to begin my chatting about the first episode, I’m going to make some disclaimers and talk about zombie tv, ok? Ok.

The Last of Us, like The Walking Dead, is based on preexisting media, this time a video game instead of comics. I had read up to the second compendium with The Walking Dead — roughly when the prison is breached — but I don’t have that kind of background here. I’ve never played the game, so I don’t have any particular feelings about this casting choice or that. I do know that the usual suspects are mad about Black people existing and whatnot, but those types can dry up and blow away. I’m going to take the individual performances as they are, and not as some perfect 1:1 version of the video game. I totally get having things in your head if you’re familiar with a specific narrative, but that’s not where I’m coming from. Moreover, perfect fidelity to source material is not my metric for success. One of my favorite film adaptions of a book — and, coincidentally, another zombie narrative — is Pontypool, based on the novel Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess. The film uses only one of the intertwining plotlines in the novel — which are alluded to in brief, weird interludes — because an attempt to portray everything that happens would get diffuse quick. The narrative’s simplicity makes it a stronger film.

So. The opening of The Last of Us is very much what Colson Whitehead, in Zone One, described as the Last Night. It’s the last day of normalcy before the world falls away and everything changes. As the wry narrator in that novel observes: “At their core, Last Night stories were all the same: They came, we died, I started running.” Whitehead’s ironic dismissal is a sort of inversion of Chekhov’s old saw from Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The unhappy beginning of any zombie story is the same: they came, we died, etc. I say ironic, because however distanced the reader is by narrative bracketing or other literary tricksiness, those Last Night stories are individually, personally gutting. Every Last Night story is about someone losing everything, often violently. That zombie stories flatten this trauma to some snatched keys and a locked bathroom door speaks to the emotionally insulating power of the genre trope, something writers have to consciously write against.

We first meet Joel and his daughter Sarah on the morning of his birthday. Sarah’s got all the poise of a child who’s had to keep things together because her parents won’t — or can’t. The mother is absent — I presume dead because there are still pictures of her in the house — and Joel seems to work too much. He promises he’ll be back in time for them to celebrate his birthday, but this is inevitably not the case. We then follow Sarah through her day: she goes downtown to fix a watch with (unknown) special significance; she visits with the neighbors she finds affectionately annoying. During these mundane tasks, there’s this thrum of disquiet. The wife of the man who fixes her watch hustles her out of the store, telling Sarah to get home before she hurriedly closes up. In one of the more unsettling scenes in the pilot, the catatonic grandma at her neighbors’ goes through unnatural facial contortions, but we only see this out of focus behind Sarah’s turned back. Sirens blare in the distance constantly.

This opening does such a good job of showing a normal that is just on the edge. Sarah keeps listening too long at things in the distance, or seeming watchful in moments that aren’t overtly wrong. A nice detail: when her father eventually turns up, he remarks that she finally locked the door, something she apparently never does. A lot of Last Night narratives don’t linger much in the moments Before. A good example would be Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, which has the heroine witness the bloody murder and reanimation of her husband in the first minutes, then never much fusses with her grief; indeed, I don’t believe he’s mentioned again. But The Last of Us almost gives us an Obituary, in Whitehead’s taxonomy of Last Night narratives: a tale told to the intimate, with a full accounting of the loss. The other two possible modes are the Silhouette, for those to whom no connection was felt, and the Anecdote, suitable for large groups and the more long-term of the short-term traveling companions. (These distinctions will come in handy when talking about how Ellie and Joel interact, later.)

The day winds down quietly. They have cake and fall asleep in front of the tv watching a movie borrowed from the neighbors. This peaceful tableau is interrupted by a call from Joel’s brother, Tommy. Tommy’s gotten himself thrown in jail in Houston for assaulting someone, and Joel goes to bail him out, leaving a sleeping Sarah. She wakes up later to the sound of helicopters and distant booms. When she goes next door to investigate why their dog is out, she finds a blood-soaked kitchen with grandma feasting on her daughter’s body. Joel and Tommy return and order her into the truck, at which point they race off, trying to get out of the city. In their mad dash out of the city, there’s all manner of unsettling shit going on, but just over there, and then you’re past it. When Sarah is eventually killed — you can see this coming a mile away — it’s at the hands of a soldier, not one of the “clickers” (as the zombies here are styled.) He clearly gets orders to kill the two civilians over his walkie, shooting at them as they run away. This sets the themes for the rest of the episode: the government cannot be trusted, and only people working through mutual aid and community organizing are going to get anything done.

The narrative skips ahead 20 years; the location is now Boston. We don’t immediately catch up with Joel. Instead, we follow an unkempt and dirty child as he makes his way through the wreckage of modernity. I immediately got all excited because I’ve been working on a catalogue of zombified children, and this kid seemed stumbling and glazed enough to register as infected, if not a full-blown zombie. He’s allowed into the Boston FEDRA QZ (Federal Disaster Response Agency and Quarantine Zone, respectively) but strapped down to a wheelchair, The Girl with All the Gifts style. A woman speaks gently to him while he’s given a shot. We catch up with Joel after this sequence: He’s loading bodies into a pyre when a woman working alongside him balks at putting a child in the fire. It’s the boy from earlier; he must have been euthanized. I suspected that was what happened, but now I know, and without a lot of arm-wheeling. There’s a lot of nicely compact storytelling going on without a lot of fuss, like government-style posters on the wall which explain how the location of bite relates to infection time, or the fact that government is now conducted on scraps of paper and a stamp.

We follow Joel through his day. He lines up work for the next, talks to a guard who turns a blind eye to his smuggling, and tries to contact his brother, who is apparently the other half of the supply chain. Tommy’s been radio silence for longer than usual, and it’s making him and his girlfriend Tess nervous. Along the way we get a good cross-section of life in the QZ. The FEDRA administration of the QZ is apparently dystopian enough to have an organized resistance against them, a group called the Fireflies. When a deal of Joel’s falls through, he ends up grudgingly agreeing to take a young girl to a Firefly location outside of the QZ, at which point he’ll have what he needs to find his brother. This marks Bella Ramsey’s entrance into the narrative. I sincerely love a foul-mouthed sass, and Ellie’s character is that plus some. The Fireflies believe she’s important, though the not so hidden football is that they believe she’s the key to a cure. (There will be more on this later.)

On their way out of the QZ, they come in conflict with the guard Joel is friendly with. This confrontation was similar enough to Joel’s run-in with the soldier who murdered his daughter to trigger a pretty healthy rage response. He ends up beating the guard to death, while Ellie looks on in horrified wonder. Everyone completely does their jobs here, especially Ramsey, who manages to convey a lot of complex emotion. Joel’s violence on her behalf registers almost as a form of affection: he is willing to kill to protect her. I’ve often said that violence nurtures domesticity in zombie narratives, often paradoxically, and that’s not always or often a good thing. Largely this takes the form of white men murdering folk because of some high-handed ideal which crumbles the minute you look past the soundbite (pun intended). But here it’s much more nuanced than most. Ellie and Joel both have their motivations, which ultimately lock together. He’s still grieving a daughter; she’s never had a parent, let alone baseline affection from the adults around her. They don’t lock together here in the first episode — that would give short shrift to their very real trauma — but you can see how they might.

All in all, I was well pleased with the beginnings of this story. My kid, who is a video game nerd, was a little dismissive when I asked him if he’d watched this. “The video game is trying to be a movie,” he said, “so it makes sense the adaption would work.” While that definitely gave me food for thought about the aims of both genre and medium, it didn’t crimp my enjoyment. Inevitably, the take-home is that mushrooms are fucked up, a sentiment I can get behind.

Zombie Children in The Walking Dead

ETA: At the very end of this list, I say out loud: there’s no way there’s going to be a zombie child in the last whatever dozen episodes left until the end of the series. So of course, there was just one in episode 5 of the 11th season, “Out of the Ashes”. Lol, assholes. I’ll add that in later.

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I started trying to enumerate child zombies in movies when I watched the second Resident Evil movie, which has a whole classroom full of zombie kids swarm and then drag off one of the characters. I was so surprised by this: I couldn’t think of many movies that have a single child zombie, let alone a whole freaking classroom full of them. (Since then, I’ve identified two other films with classrooms full of zombie children: Cooties and The Girl With All the Gifts. It only makes sense that pedagogy intersects with zombified children when you think about it.) I started writing a post about undead children in film, but when I hit The Walking Dead, the post started getting unmanageable. So in the interests of sensible essay length, I’ve rounded up the instances of zombie children in The Walking Dead here instead.

I do think it’s notable that there are only a handful of zombie children in the entire 11 year run of The Walking Dead. Certainly, some of this has to do with what a pain in the ass working around the restrictions placed on child actors can be. Imagine a kid has to sit for 2 hours of makeup, how much time is even left in front of the camera? If someone is going to write a zombie child, it’s going to be to a specific purpose, otherwise why deal with the bother. Still feels a little weird there are so few, and none since the 6th season. Below is my list of zombie children we encounter in The Walking Dead, in chronological order.

NB: I have excluded teenagers from this list (which would bring the count up by another maybe 8-10) because I feel like an adolescent is a different thing than a straight up child, both practically and metaphorically. Likewise, I wouldn’t have included any undead babies, but there isn’t a single one in the entire run, so I didn’t have to worry about it. I’ve included two children who die in-narrative but don’t zombify because I think their story intersects with the themes you see with other undead children.

Unnamed child, “Days Gone By”

Though the series ends up having very, very few child zombies in its 11 year run, the very first zombie we encounter in the entire series is a child zombie. The cold open follows a man in a sheriff’s uniform and car pulling up to a highway gas station. (This is Rick Grimes, but we don’t know him yet.) He walks through stalled cars and the detritus of human habitation towards the gas pumps, where there is a sign hanging that says “No Gas.” He hears the patter of footsteps, and bends down to look under one of the cars. Little feet in grimy bunny slippers walk along, and we see a hand come down and pick up a teddy bear. “Little girl,” the man says, over and over, telling her he can help her. She has her back to him, and long blonde hair like the original zombie child, Karen from Night of the Living Dead. When she turns around, it becomes clear she’s dead, her lips torn away to reveal the silver braces on her teeth. She growls and starts towards him; he shoots her into her second death. She lands on her back and the camera cranes up over her now lifeless body in the grass.

There’s definitely an element of shock value to this scene, not in small part because it depicts a severe transgression: thou shalt not murder children on screen. However, I think this whole scene would run very, very differently if the child were anything other than a blonde white girl. Small town cops have a long history of facilitating the lynching of Black children, from Emmett Till, who was 14, to Tamir Rice, who was 12. The fact that Rick had to shoot down a pretty white blonde girl shows you exactly how out of balance the world has become. On the one hand, The Walking Dead does a pretty terrible job of addressing race overtly — for example, Merle Dixon’s racist monologues are so on the nose as to be embarrassing, and only partially redeemed by Michael Rooker’s expert delivery. On the other, in scenes like the first one, they know exactly what their choices mean to an American audience. Oh my god, you killed Karen.

Maybe this is something of a sidebar, but the scene directly after Rick kills the child opens with Rick’s deputy partner Shane delivering what he describes as a sermon on the perfidy of women. He describes his irritation with a woman in his life who apparently doesn’t turn off lights when she leaves the room. (Is this a stereotype of women? I feel like I’ve never heard that before.) He then disquisitions about how this makes her a hypocrite when she becomes upset about global warming. He relates to Rick all the bon mots he would have delivered had he not respected women so much or somesuch. Rick politely refuses to engage, but then seconds later, castigates his wife Lori for criticizing him in front of their kid. “The difference between men and women? I would never say anything that cruel to her, and certainly not in front of Carl.” This is probably outside the purview of this essay, but there is a lot to unpack here i/r/t gender roles, children, etc.

Palmer children, “Torn Apart” webisode

These zombie children are almost a sight gag — they are wearing party hats when they leap out and devour their neighbor — but contextually, there is some commentary on domesticity going on. We are first introduced to them (we can hear them banging upstairs) when a man breaks into his neighbor, Mike Palmer’s house to find a gun. The neighbor appears and threatens the interloper Andrew with a gun, then asks him what he’s looking for. “Guns,” says the man, at which point the neighbor delivers a sneering monologue about how Andrew always looked down on him, but who needs real America’s guns now, eh? Mike also explained that it is his birthday, and he already had to kill his wife, but couldn’t bring himself to shoot the kids. He counts out the bullets — one for the dog, two for the kids, one for me, etc — then turns the gun over to the man, who shoots him. By counting out the bullets like that, Mike implies Andrew should put the kids down as well. We eventually see the kids when Andrew returns to find the neighbor’s car keys. They attack and kill him, meaning he obviously didn’t carry out the neighbor’s dying wish.

Andrew is part of a little domestic melodrama going on next door, which includes him, his ex-wife, their children, and his current wife. Though he and his ex-wife have a chilly peace, he’s overbearing with the kids, shouting them down with little reason. Mom accuses him of being out of touch because he’s a weekend-and-holidays parent. The step-mom dies, reanimates, and tries to murder her step-kids, at which point his ex-wife and the mother of the children puts an ax in her skull, telling the step-mom to “stay away from my family.” All of this is incredibly on the nose. Divorce and remarriage are existential threats to the children. Absent fathers shirk their responsibilities to their own demise.

Honestly though, I don’t want to overstate, because there is a lot of morbid humor in a deadbeat dad getting attacked by birthday-behatted kiddies. In the end, the mom sacrifices herself so her kids can live, and eventually becomes the first zombie Rick Grimes encounters (but the second we see on screen), the so-called bicycle zombie in the park.

Sophia Peletier, “Pretty Much Dead Already”

Carol’s pretty blonde daughter, Sophia, provides all of the motivation for The Walking Dead’s annoying second season. She’s chased off in the first episode by walkers in a herd that passes them by on the highway. The group goes after her, and are taken to Hershel’s farm once Carl, Rick’s 12 year old kid, is shot by accident. (I only mention this because it feels like a parallelism: Rick’s son is imperiled at the same time Carol’s daughter is in missing, making danger to children something of a theme.) Hershel is high-handed and superior through the whole season, delivering sermonettes on the humanity of the walkers and asserting his land rights whenever someone says something that bothers him. I get it, on a level. We’re living through a brutal pandemic, and many, many people are making public health into a private rights issue, which is part of what Hershel is doing here.

In the last third of the season, it is revealed that Hershel has been keeping Sophia (and a whole passel of other walkers) in the barn on the property. Rick even knows that Hershel has been keeping walkers in the barn, and no one thinks to check for Sophia. After Rick and Hershel show up with walkers controlled with dog-catchers’ poles, Shane begins ranting angrily about the profound lack of reality driving both Rick and Hershel’s actions. (One of the more annoying parts of season 2 is that mostly, Shane isn’t wrong.) Shane kills the collared walkers before he knocks the lock off the barn and lets all the walkers out. Rick’s group shoots all the emerging walkers while the people too soft to enact violence — Hershel. Lori, Carl, etc — cower and cry. Once all the walkers are dead, they hear a growl from the barn and an undead Sophia emerges. Carol tries to run to her, but is held in place by Daryl. Rick raises his gun, in a parallel with the first season, and shoots the zombified Sophia.

I know this is the expediencies of television, but I literally do not understand why anyone ever gives Hershel the time of day after this disaster. He kept zombie Sophia in the barn for the entire season, while everyone was worried sick looking for her. He knew they were looking for a girl and couldn’t be arsed to check. (Additionally, because of his insistence that the undead are just sick, his daughter Beth is nearly killed by her zombified mother at the beginning of the next episode.) This is a disastrous lack of reality, and Hershel’s delusions have moved from passively dangerous to actively so. After the barn massacre, Hershel flounces, telling Rick’s group to get off his land, and it’s only after his farm is burnt to the ground that he seems to appreciate Rick (or more specifically, Shane) might have been right.

But it doesn’t take long for show to begin justifying his bullshit. Maybe it’s just American middle class theology, which he often spews: He’s the godamn paterfamilias, the head of the family, and all of his choices are the right ones because he’s the only one with the right to choice in the first place. By the time he dies a season or two hence, he’s the moral mouthpiece and kindly patriarch, which is a pretty appalling choice, if you think about it even a little. He kept a woman’s dead child in a barn, and then told her to get off his land once that was discovered. Fuck Hershel.

Penny Blake, “Say the Word” & “Made to Suffer”

Bucking precedent, Penny Blake, the undead daughter of the 3rd and 4th season antagonist The Governor, is a brown-haired white girl. We first meet Penny in a 3rd season cold open: The Governor is brushing the hair of a girl. We never quite see her face, and can hear a soft wheezing. The girl is quiet until hairbrush snags on her hear, tearing a chunk of hair and skin off her head. Then she starts struggling, and it becomes apparent that she is undead. The Governor restrains her, putting a bag over her head, then cuddles with the struggling, growling walker. He tells her that daddy still loves her, then puts her back in the closet crawlspace with some irritation when she won’t settle. (We get this sequence of events in a later episode, with the added detail that he’s been feeding her human flesh, which is one of my least favorite zombie tropes.)

Much of the third season is spent drawing parallels between Rick and the Governor in regards to their leadership styles, so it’s of note that the next scene after Penny’s introduction is the horrible aftermath of Judith’s birth and Lori’s death. It’s Daryl who steps up to direct the group in what needs to be done, while Rick is first catatonic, then runs off into the prison with an ax, presumably to kill every walker he can find. The Governor obviously lost his daughter, and instead of grieving her death, he keeps her murderous corpse in the walls of the house. (I have this thing about houses as embodiments of the psyche, so that tracks.) Rick lost his wife, and instead of caring for his daughter (or son, come to that), he hauls off on a murderous rampage.

Sidebar: There is also something of a zombie kids fakeout later in the episode, when Daryl and Maggie look for formula in an abandoned nursery school. I fully expected zombie kids to pop out the whole time, but the only thing that did was an opossum. (Which Daryl shoots and then says, “Dinner.” Maggie deadpans, “You’re not putting that in my bag.”) Another setup for a zombie child happens with Daryl, Denise, and Rosita are scavenging in an apothecary in the 6th season episode, “Twice as Far.” Denise finds a zombie with a cast next to a pack and play. She runs a flashlight over the wall, where the word HUSH is written over and over. When the flashlight settles on a stationary tub, a toddler sized shoe sticks out of bloody water. It probably would have made sense for this dead toddler to be a walker, but this scene is already disturbing enough, thanks.

The Governor’s zombie daughter meets her eventual, final demise when Michonne discovers Penny. First she thinks Penny is a live child he’s imprisoned, but when it becomes clear Penny is dead — and honestly, wouldn’t Penny reek — she goes to kill her. The Governor intervenes, begging for mercy. It’s probably the most nakedly emotional we ever see the Governor; he is in real anguish. Michonne kills her anyway, which results in a pretty brutal fight scene, during which his fish tanks full of heads are destroyed as well. I don’t think there’s much deeper going on here, other than the Governor’s ties to his past (and therefore his humanity) have been well and truly severed.

The death of another ersatz daughter — this time the girl Meghan Chamblers — also marks the Governor’s severance from humanity, later in the 4th season. After his first assault on the prison is unsuccessful — and he murders a fair number of the Woodbury residents — he ends up in the wilds alone for a time. Eventually he finds the Chambler family hiding out in an apartment building: two sisters, their father, and one of the sisters’ daughter. After bonding with the child and beginning a relationship with her mother, the Governor begins to amass the power and structure necessary to wage another assault on the prison.

The child ends up being his justification for his ruthless megalomania, while also checking his worst impulses: he can’t be too overtly evil or his found family will bolt. His girlfriend appears with a dead Meghan in her arms — Meghan was killed by a buried walker — just in time to see him hacking Hershel’s head off with Michonne’s sword. His unrestrained violence makes him incapable of keeping a family, which is his overt motive for the violence, in a sort of ouroboros. (Obviously, this is so much window-dressing; the Governor is just a psycho.) Which is kinda interesting, because TWD very often implies the exact opposite: Rick is constantly enacting ethically dodgy violent expedience in the name of community or domestic safety, up to, and including, sneak attacking a rival group as a preemptive strike and murdering people in their beds.

Lizzie and Mika Samuels, “The Grove”

Alright, technically, neither Lizzie nor Mika zombify in the course of the narrative, but the dangers of domesticity and fears of and for children are all over their story. Lizzie and Mika are, again, pretty blonde girls who join the group while they are living in the prison. Lizzie is 12 and either a budding sociopath or emotionally damaged by living through the zombie apocalypse (or why not both?) She has developed dangerous and alarming beliefs about the nature of the undead — that they are her friends, that she can hear them speak, that they are just like the living — which she then acts on in increasingly bloody ways. When she was introduced, she’s naming walkers, and when Carl admonishes her to knock it off, saying they kill people, she retorts that people kill people and they still have names.

After the prison falls, Carol and Tyreese end up on the road together with a little found family of Lizzie, Mika, and baby Judith. After finding a pecan farm with a well-stocked farmhouse, they decide to rest for a bit. It’s a sanctuary and relief from their time alone on the road. Tyreese and Carol discuss maybe staying indefinitely while Lizzie spirals more and more into her delusions. She feeds a downed walker, almost allowing him to bite her; she had a complete meltdown and tantrum when Carol kills a walker whom she was “playing” with. Late in the episode, Tyreese and Carol are horrified to discover Lizzie standing over a dead Mika, bloody knife in her hands. She tells them she’s going to show them that walkers are friendly when her sister reanimates. She also implies she’s going to murder the baby Judith, who is lying on a blanket behind her. Carol and Tyreese talk her down, and Tyreese takes her and Judith inside while Carol does the needful with Mika’s corpse.

That night, Carol and Tyreese have a heartbroken conversation about what they’re going to do about Lizzie. She clearly can’t be allowed to be around an infant, but she’s also dangerous indirectly: they realize she was the one mutilating animals and feeding the walkers back in the prison, which eventually lead to walkers breaching the fences. (Tyreese also thinks she must have been the one who killed his girlfriend, but of course that was Carol, who has been keeping that from him.) Though I don’t think anyone voices this out loud, they decide she will have to be killed. Carol takes her out, tells her to “look at the flowers” — which was a self-soothing method she and her sister used — and then shoots her in the back of the head.

This is obviously a different Carol than the one who watched Rick kill her zombie daughter back in season two, and a very different Carol to the one who submitted to an abusive husband in season one. She’s a harder, more violently expedient Carol. She was the one back in the prison who was teaching the children survival skills over the objections of parents who wanted to shield them from the violence in the world. Carol believes that her daughter might have lived if she’d known how to wield a knife, which is why she teaches the community kids how to do so. That one of her students then uses those knife skills to kill another child feels like an unfair irony. It almost seems like a narrative punishment that Carol feels compelled to murder a little girl who looks a lot like her own dead daughter.

There is a similar situation in the comics — one where an older sibling kills a younger one — but it is handled very differently. The adults lock up the kid and then spent the night arguing about what should be done. While they are incapacitated by indecision, Carl sneaks into the place the kid is held and kills the kid himself. Comics’ Carl makes the hard choices he believes the older generation is incapable of, and the episode shows the disconnect between the generation being raised in the zombie apocalypse, and the one whose instincts belong to a different world entirely. That sort of generational gloss isn’t in evidence in Lizzie’s story: it’s more about Carol’s role as a parental figure to children. Since the prison, Carol uses violence to protect domesticity. In “The Grove”, that violence finally turns inward, destroying the very thing it was supposed to preserve.

Noah’s brother, “What Happened and What’s Going On”

This the first and only Black child zombie in The Walking Dead’s run. He is one of Noah’s younger twin brothers whom Tyreese encounters and is bitten by when they return to Noah’s gated community. Little backstory: the group encountered Noah while Beth was being held by former Atlanta PD who have taken over a hospital. When he’s sprung from that situation, Noah tells the group that his family lives in a gated neighborhood not far from the hospital — or they did a year before he was incarcerated. When they arrive back at his neighborhood, Noah is horrified to discover the community is overrun. Tyreese tries to comfort him, but Noah runs directly into his old house.

Tyreese follows and ends up in one of Noah’s brothers’ bedrooms, where one of the brothers is disemboweled and dead on the bed. He’s distracted by a photo of the two boys sitting on a porch swing when the other, undead brother attacks and bites him. He reflexively kills the boy, then sinks down with his back to wall and goes into shock. Much of the rest of the episode shows Tyreese hallucinating various dead characters from the show: Beth, Bob, and, notably, the Samuels sisters as friendly voices, the Governor and Martin (one of the Terminus bad guys) as the voice of regret and recrimination.

The Walking Dead doesn’t much go in for overtly symbolic arthouse stylings, but much of this episode, especially anything having to do with Tyreese, is very much in the mode of a dream sequence, down to an atypically impressionistic cold open. Tyreese has been having a crisis of violence for the last while, reluctant to enact the violence that life in the zombie apocalypse seems to require. In his vision, Martin and the Governor keep telling him that his reticence to kill has instead gotten people killed, while Bob espouses a more cheerfully fatalistic philosophy: everything has happened as it should. The girls tell him that “it’s better now”, which I take to mean, it’s ok that we’re dead and that you’re going to die.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of all this, especially with Lizzie Samuels on the side of happy fatalism. The Walking Dead often severely punishes its characters who eschew violence, and this seems like the most symbolically overt example of that. Tyreese doesn’t want to kill, which is what’s necessary to protect the people he loves. As a consequence, he is killed by a reanimated family member, a child and representation of the promise of domesticity.

Unnamed child, “No Way Out”

In this 6th season episode, one in which the city of Alexandria is overrun with walkers, we catch a glimpse of a single child zombie within the horde. It’s possible this lone undead child is the son or nephew of someone on set, like the two zombie children in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead are related to Tom Savini, the effects person. This one zombie child is just part of a mob of walkers, and we know literally nothing else about him. However, given the context, this kid might be more deliberately placed than just crowd scene background. The child Sam sees the zombie child right in the middle of a freakout about the “monsters”, a freakout which ultimately gets him, his older brother, and his mother killed.

Backing up a bit: the Alexandrians have been split up by the invading horde, and Rick and a few others are trapped in Jessie’s house. Jessie is the mother of Sam and Ron, who are about 10 and 16. Sam’s most important on-screen relationship, outside of his immediate family, is with Carol. Sam takes to her early on in her sojourn in Alexandria because she is the source of cookies in her guise as dumb housewife Carol. (Carol’s ability to code-switch, especially in this period, is impressive. She’ll go from ditzy lady to stone cold killer in a second.) But when he follows her into places he’s (and she’s) not supposed to be, what he gets is brutal truths Carol. She clearly doesn’t want to get involved in the life of another child, and she’s constantly trying to run him off while almost reflexively caring for him.

It’s probably also pertinent to mention that both Carol and Jessie have both experienced domestic abuse: Carol in the past, while Jessie’s is ongoing. Carol doesn’t believe she’d still be alive if her abusive husband were as well. She advocates that Jessie’s husband be killed — it’s the only way, in this hard world, to deal with that situation — not in small part because of the effect of the abuse on Sam. After some serious machinations, Rick indeed does kill Sam’s abusive father, which isn’t the thing that puts Sam over the edge. It’s when one of the Wolves breaks into the house and tries to murder his mom (in the kitchen, and in a crazy harrowing fight scene) that he really spirals into his anxiety.

By the 6th season, before the city is overrun, Sam has confined himself to the second floor of the house, unable to function even within the family structure. He leaves food to rot and draws endless pictures of the undead and the dying. “Nothing changes up here,” he tells his mom when she tries to lure him downstairs with cookies. The changelessness of the second floor is broken when Rick carries a bitten and dying Deanna, the community’s leader, up to one of the spare bedrooms. The walls of the city have been breached, and walkers fill the streets. Sam’s mom, Jessie, steps away from their ministrations to Deanna, but she’s harried and barely containing her frustration with Sam’s anxiety. “Just pretend you’re somebody who’s not scared,” she says, and then turns back to the more pressing crisis.

Because here’s the thing: often children hide their crises from their parents out of shame or fear, and at the same time parents are sometimes too caught up with the trouble in front of them to identify and head off the trouble quietly brewing. Jessie knew there was something wrong with Sam, something potentially serious, but there was always more going on around them that required attention, plus his was a quiet, unassuming kind of wrong. Sure, telling Sam he should pretend to be someone else probably isn’t best practices, but by the time the zombies are scratching at the door, she’s out of options.

The group decide to smear themselves in walker guts and slip camouflaged by death through the overrun streets. Sam is terrified, but Jessie talks him into it. They make it all the way to a sheltered clump of trees, where they regroup for their next push through the horde. The minister, Gabriel, is going to take baby Judith to the church, and the rest of the group is headed for the armory. Rick wants to send Sam with Gabriel to the church, but Sam objects: I can do it, he says, entreating his mother to stay with her. Both Jessie and Sam want Sam to be able to handle this so strongly that Jessie capitulates, and everyone head off, hands linked.

But force of will can’t overcome such deep seated anxiety. In the middle of the zombie horde, Sam melts down. He hears Carol in his head telling him the monsters are coming for him, and stops in his tracks. His mother and Rick try to get him to move, come on, Sam, you can do it. When he looks into the zombie horde, he sees a zombie child, about his age, walking within the throng. At this point Sam begins keening, and the zombies close in, surrounding and biting him. In short order, both his mother and older brother are dead. The family is gone in the span of a minute. (Carl manages to get himself shot, again, like when Sophia disappeared.)

The undead child, in this context, ends up being an avatar of Sam’s anxiety. It is his greatest fear made manifest, right before it is truly made manifest. It’s also the ultimate dramatic irony: he was so afraid of become a walker that he did things that made him into a walker. That he hears Carol’s voice when he sees the undead kid ties Carol, again, to the death of a child, though I legitimately do not understand why it’s Carol Sam hears. Sure, ok, she threatened him a season ago, but she’s not why he’s broken from reality. He was abused by his father and was witness to a brutal attack on his mother by a stranger. Of course he’s paralyzed by anxiety. (And I’ve got to say, poor fucking Carol, because they do this again to her when her adopted son dies at the hands of the Whisperers.)

This undead child is the last zombie kid we ever see on The Walking Dead unless, of course, there’s another in the last half of the 11th season, though I doubt that given the further restrictions of Covid on filming. I think it’s interesting that this last zombie kid may or may not be real: he’s more of a psychological manifestation than a concrete actor in the narrative, and pretty subtle for all that. The Walking Dead has done psychological woo dream sequences before — Rick talked to a dead Lori on the guilty-conscience-ma-phone for a whole season, Tyreese hallucinated his dead friends while dying, etc — but they tend to be pretty loud and obvious. Too bad they learned subtlety just in time to never use it again.

ETA: Jasmine and Bobby, “The World Before” & “What We Become”

This one is a little oblique, but bear with me. I rewatched the episodes with Virgil recently because he appears in the last half of the last season, and I couldn’t remember what his deal was. In season 10, he encounters Michonne and some others in a library, where he rescues one of their number from a walker and then runs off. The Oceansiders capture him creeping round trying to steal a boat; he and Michonne have a tense convo; they decide to sail for his island. Once there, they (but mostly Michonne) clear a building of walkers. In the end, they find a room full of hanged walkers, suspended and wheeling their feet uselessly in the air. Virgil comes into the room, picks a shoe off the floor, and replaces it onto the foot of one of the hanged walkers. This is his family, dead and reanimated, hanging from the ceiling. We don’t see what happens, but it’s implied that Michonne puts them down, and then they bury them.

It turns out that Virgil is a nutter, having imprisoned the other members of the island community once he accidentally lead to the deaths of his family. We’re never given the ages of his children, but from dialogue cues, I get the sense the daughter is young, maybe prepubescent. Even less is known about his son. Michonne spends much of the episode hallucinating the road not taken, one where she lets Andrea die and ends up as Negan’s right hand. There’s a way in which this hanged family is also a manifestation of the dangers of getting too hard, too self-interested. There’s something gruesomely ethereal about the way Virgil’s family wheels and sways above the ground, like Dante’s Forest of Suicides. Recall that Dante uses the Roman poet Virgil as his guide through hell in Inferno. Here, another Virgil guides Michonne through horrors.

Unnamed child, “Out of the Ashes”

Whelp, I was wrong about there being no zombie children in the last season of The Walking Dead. The fifth episode, “Out of the Ashes” deals with children a lot, both obliquely and obviously. The cold open is a dream sequence in which Aaron tries to protect his daughter, Gracie, from a number of villains from seasons previous: whisperers, Wolves, walkers, maybe even a Savior or two. (Aaron adopted Gracie after our people, the ostensible good guys, killed her parents in a sneak attack on the Saviors.) The walls are breached, which leads to a discussion about how they don’t have the tools to effectively fix the fence. Aaron & Co head back to Alexandria to scavenge any supplies. There they find assorted Whisperers who have been looting and squatting in the place, which sets Aaron off big time.

Later we see tiny badass Judith training a group of other children how to use swords. She’s distracted by a group of other kids, lead by a boy who must be a little older, taunting a child zombie who has his head stuck through one of the holes in the wall around their community. They’re poking their fingers in the walker’s snapping jaws and pulling out before they get bit. Judith tells them to knock it off, then the older boy knocks her over and tells her she talks too much and that’s why her mother left. Judith pulls a knife and dares him to say that again. He demurs and the group runs off.

There have been a number of scenes with the apocalypse kids interacting this season, and they have mostly been as bad as this one. An episode or so ago, a bunch of tiny badasses, including Judith and Hershel, all sat around playing cards and discussing how their parents don’t want them to worry when they’re out facing near certain death. While I think this is not true to how kids interact, fine. It’s not anywhere near as bad as this mess with Judith and the bully by the fence. Where do these kids come from that they are so cavalier with the walking dead, especially after the walls were breached that very morning, and several community members got killed?

I get that kids can act like immortal, entitled assholes, but this kid absolutely must know the world of hurt in store him both if he got bit, or if any adult found him. That Judith didn’t just cut a bitch instead of threatening to tell Rosita is, frankly, bizarre to me. I know I get down on the show for overuse of violent expedience, but here it is absolutely called for. The stakes are too damn high for nonsense like this to be allowed. Which the show even knows on a level, as that’s what the zombie child more or less symbolizes: he’s what’s going to happen to them if they don’t knock it off, and not just symbolically.

Just to argue with myself a bit: I can see the psychology of why these kids would fuck around with walkers, even while knowing the finding was inevitable. I think a lot of stupid dangerous Tiktok challenges — eating Tide pods, inhaling cinnamon, climbing crates — are the risk-taking behavior of the hopeless. We live in an unstable world, which is burned and parched and buffeted by storm, by plague. Refusing to vaccinate, eating fish cleaner and horse paste, all of these maladaptive performances of “freedom” make climbing up on some crates knowing you’re going to fall look positively benign. At least in that case, the only person hurt is the climber. So, okay, I still think that sequence was badly done — the dialogue — but it probably does capture the cultural moment, such as it is.

Either way, I’m not going to make any more predictions about whether there will be more undead kids on the show.