In the early days of writing this zombie script, I happened to be working on a freelance project about conspiracy theories surrounding the USS Liberty, an American ship in the Mediterranean Sea that was accidentally torpedoed by Israel during the Six-Day War. I watched a video on the Russian news station RT of a very angry tat- tooed man who fully believed the incident was evidence of “Jewish supremacist Tal- mudic ideology” that somehow coalesced with Holocaust fabrications and tied in with direct Mossad involvement in 9/11. It helped me imagine my way into how, say, a burgeoning zombie crisis centered around Jews might be spun by righteous lunatics who clung to any rumour they hear online. The Holocaust is not nearly as ambigu- ous as the USS Liberty, but they’re both old. And the older things get, the more flippantly people tend to treat them. A lengthy passage of time may not be a strict prerequisite for historical revisionism, but it certainly helps. Combined with rising 21st century nationalism, digital echo chambers, and the proliferation of fake news, it’s no coincidence we’re seeing Poland enact
out of them. After one of the undead seems inexplicably drawn to Kat and her family, they realize he’s docile and curious. The group decides to uncover the truth behind the phenomenon and fend off attempts by bad-faith outsiders trying to manipulate the situation for their own advantage. All this was less inspired by George A. Romero’s zombie classic Night of the Living Dead than by the online world I witnessed during the pandemic: the slow devolution of civil discourse throughout the social media age. We live in an era in which confidence is rewarded over accuracy, and the most confident personalities are often the most sanctimonious. Social media is transfixing, but it’s not just doomscrolling and viral vid- eos that hook people: as the neuroscientist Molly Crockett has observed, reinforcement of moral outrage—feeling angry at perceived injustice, then having a digital mob back you up—unleashes dopamine in our brains. Social media has transformed outrage into an addiction. When people are fed up with being treated unfairly in their offline lives, they feel compelled to vent this frustration
at any online target that fits their ideology: corporations, antifa, COVID, refugees, Jews. To self-described mavericks bent on tearing down ivory-tower institutions—gov- ernments, universities, newspapers—the Holocaust, which exists in a space of reverence, can easily be denigrated as just another monument the public is never supposed to question. And as anyone who’s raised a toddler knows, if you tell someone they shouldn’t question something, they are going to question the hell out of it. I view my work, essentially, as a sneaky piece of Holocaust education geared specifically to younger audiences.
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