A zombie falls in love with a human. A man  chains his zombified best friend up in the shed to play video games with. A doctor  is convinced that he can pacify victims of a zombie outbreak and appears against all  expectations to make progress. When the dead pop out of their graves and start eating  brains, the answer was at one point very simple. Kill them again. Put them back in the  ground. After all, they're already dead. The person that was once in there is long gone, so  it's not really murder, is it? But recently, zombie stories have seemed a little dissatisfied  with this solution. It's very final, after all, and more than a little blunt. Something must be  animating these walking corpses. Shouldn't we at least try to understand it, whatever it is?  Is slaughtering them really the best approach?

Zombies were so recently human after all. If  you treat them like they're beyond redemption, isn't there some risk that you become a monster  yourself? Zombies are dead. We know this. You know this. There's no recomposing the decomposed.  But from what I've seen, humans just don't want to accept that answer. You can't seem to stop  wishing, counterintuitively, that zombies could be alive again. You can't seem to stop wishing  that you could heal the living dead. [Music] Quick shout out to Mariana from her channel, The  Morbid Zoo. She did the majority of the writing and research for the script. It would not have  happened without her. Definitely go check out her channel. She is one of the best essayists writing  on this platform right now. I am not kidding. If you like our stuff, you will love hers. In season  3 of The Walking Dead, our heroes find a town that seems to be against all odds completely  functional, idealic even. Woodbury has clean streets, a library, shops. You could almost  convince yourself that there's no apocalypse raging outside its gates. The town is led by a  man everyone calls the governor. At a glance, he genuinely seems to care about his town. But this  is The Walking Dead. you know, almost immediately that this guy is going to have a skeleton in  his closet. And in this case, he literally does.

It just still has some of the meat on its bones.  Turns out he's secretly been keeping his zombified daughter locked up in his house. In public, he  seems to hate zombies just as much as anyone, if not more. He seems almost obsessed with drawing  a clear line between the living and the dead, usually with barbed wire and wooden stakes. To  him, zombies are dangerous not just because they eat brains, but because they blur that line. The  governor claims that the entire point of his town is preserving civilization. And zombies, they're  the opposite of civilized. Yet, here he is kissing a zombie on the forehead, singing her lullabies,  brushing her hair. This is actually something you see throughout The Walking Dead. Between all the  zombie killing, there is this simmering tragic desire to save them, too. And it's hard not to  relate. The urge to hold on to bygon life in humanity is, I think, one that will be familiar to  most. But the show actually positions this impulse as misguided. Those who cling to the undead  are portrayed as even more ghoulish than the zombies themselves. It is inappropriate, almost  obscene to feed a zombie, to touch one, to care for one. Almost every time a character tries to  do any of those things in the show, it inevitably results in some kind of explosive conflict. The  proper thing to do with the zombie in the show, the moral choice is to put it down, which makes it  interesting how often the characters are reluctant to actually do that. It is, of course, something  they're also reluctant to do to each other.

The show puts a consistent emphasis on the danger  of community in this world. It's the apocalypse.

Everyone knows you don't just let an outsider in.  They could be infected or worse. The devastating internal struggle over killing an infected friend  is almost a cliche for The Walking Dead at this point. And look how often they go out of their  way to avoid violence against people who have themselves become monsters even worse than  the living dead. Despite the obvious danger the narrative mandate to dehumanize each other,  they just can't seem to do it. I'd argue it's The Walking Dead's central theme, the show seems  to ask over and over, how do we differentiate between a human and something that is no longer  human? The answer it seems to give badly. Humans do a bad job at it. As much as you might like the  idea of being able to draw a tidy line and make rational decisions about who gets to be treated  human, it's just too hard. There are too many ways the monstrous can masquerade as human and  too many opportunities for humans to compromise their own humanity by failing to recognize someone  else's. The governor is a desperate. He's declared himself the sole arbiter of what constitutes a  human being. He has no qualms with dehumanizing the people around him, using and disposing of them  as he sees fit. He has in a not even metaphorical sense become one of the monsters. But when it's  his own daughter, it's impossible even for him not to look at her and see what he wants to see.  The human that was once there. In this show, no amount of exposed guts or missing limbs  can fully obscure the sense of personhood coming from these creatures. It's a touching  principle. Anything that looks human is human and should therefore be helped and protected.  I suppose when you think about it, the very thought of curing a zombie sort of requires you  to assume it's still a person somehow, doesn't it?

Back in 2013, on the tail end of the big 2000  zombie craze, a movie came out called Warm Bodies. I know this movie got a lot of hate,  but I think it's interesting. To this day, I think of it as the quintessential cure a zombie  story. In the movie, when a zombie eats a brain, they consume all the emotions and memories of the  person they've killed. By doing this, they feel, at least for a few minutes, human again. The movie  is about a zombie named R, who seems somewhat listless about his zombiehood, not like the rest.  Somehow, his lingering unconscious desire to be a human again, explained to us through a very  conscious voiceover, finally gets a chance to blossom when he meets a human named Julie.  As R and Julie slowly grow closer together, R's heart starts to beat again. Literally,  he remembers how to speak. When they kiss, the transformation is complete. R is human. It's  sort of a punk version of the princess and the frog. Generally, part of becoming a zombie is  losing your agency. You become an unthinking, unfeilling automaton. Riscovers his ability to  feel and think for himself through love. Perhaps the most intimately self-motivated behavior there  is. Love is active, both a choice and a feeling, and is therefore directly incompatible with  death. In order to make this work narratively, the zombies amor bodies need to have some  life left in them to cultivate. This is why there's another kind of zombie in the movie,  a zombie that zombies even harder, the bonies, who are completely decomposed and really are  unsavable. It's kind of a clumsy workaround.

In order to cure them, the movie has to rely  on an insistence that for all appearances, the zombies aren't actually dead yet. Not  completely. I actually think there's something deeply resonant about that narrative choice,  something that reflects how humans feel about these creatures. There seems to be this need to  turn the zombie into something it isn't alive. You cure zombies by making them not zombies anymore.  Resurrection is a notoriously difficult thing to accomplish with the dead across all of fiction.  After all, they're actively decomposing. But Warm Bodies is at the end of the day a romantic  fantasy. It adheres to or ignores the established zombie tropes to sustain this romance in the  same way that Twilight does with vampires, which I like actually. It's a cute movie. It's  fun to stretch the limits of what is and isn't possible with these kinds of stories. That kind  of play can teach us a lot about how we think of creatures like zombies. In this case, it reveals  that mere agency may not actually be enough to convince us of someone's humanity. In the logic  of the movie, it doesn't matter that when you die, you lose your ability to think and act. Unlike The  Walking Dead, there's no anxiety here about how capable we are of recognizing someone's humanity  or lack thereof. Imagining the zombies as human in this case isn't a delusion. It's a virtue. The  fact that a zombie once had its own agency is what matters here. By being human in life, making  choices, building relationships, having left a trace on the world, it seems that the corpses  in this movie and the zombies that they become, earn a residual humanity among the living. What  Warm Bodies doesn't seem quite willing to say is that this residual humanity is present in all  the dead, not just the reanimated kind. Human corpses are still very human, even when they're  not walking around. Think about all the different rituals humans have to honor their dead. Many  of them involve direct handling of the corpse rather than getting rid of the body as soon as  possible. These rituals are partly an acceptance of responsibility, an acceptance of the fact that  it's up to the living to consciously maintain the humanity of those who no longer can. It takes work  to do this. Some funeral rituals continue as long as the practitioner's life. But in exchange, you  know others will do it for you. And when you die, you also won't stop being human. In the standard  funeral rituals most of you are probably used to, the actual bodies seem a little superfluous  to me. I mean, even when it's an open casket, you're still seeing a manicured, imbalmed body  with as much of the decay as possible erased.

It's quite a conceit. Even in death, I think you  kind of prefer to think of yourselves as immortal.

This is in a way the point of a zombie. It's a  human corpse you can't escape. One that follows you around. One that asserts itself. When zombies  rise from the grave in all their shambling putrid glory, they confront humanity with the reality I  don't think you really want to face. when you've evidently taken great pains to evade that you  don't stop being human just because you're dead.

This year we finally got the sequel to 28  Days Later. It's the sequel, not the third installment. No, I don't know what you're talking  about. Don't leave that comment. It's called 28 Years Later, and it is perhaps the single most  cleareyed take on zombies I have ever seen.

It's about a boy named Spike braving the  zombie-in-fested wilderness in search of a doctor he hopes can heal his sick mother. Spike's  experience of zombies is completely different from most other characters in this genre. His island  community is completely functional. No saboturs or desperates. The zombies of his universe, humans  infected with an incurable virus that makes them violently angry, are really not much more than an  afterthought. They're scary and dangerous, sure, but so is a grizzly bear. So is an earthquake.  The most anyone seems to think about zombies is during the island's coming of age ritual, where  every child is sent out into the wild to kill their first zombie. Spike has just returned from  his first kill at the age of 12, several years ahead of most of his peers. It's not a terribly  significant thing to him, all this zombie stuff.

His real concern, his only concern, is his mother,  who has been growing mean and erratic for reasons no one can explain. In some ways, Spike's mother  is the domesticated zombie of this story. She's not chained up in a shack. She's not halfway to  zombiehood, but she is losing herself. Her memory is fading each day. She's less able to control  her own actions. When they finally do reach the doctor in the wilderness, they find out that the  mysterious illness is cancer. It's spread to her brain. There is nothing the doctor can do. So, she  dies. And in a scene as strange as it is touching, the doctor gives Spike his mother's skull. The  doctor has been building a monument out of the skulls of all the dead he's encountered over the  decades. We get to watch Spike, a child of 12, add his own mother's skull to it. Spike doesn't  hate the dead in 28 years later. How could he?

His mother is dead, and he certainly doesn't  hate her. Curing her may have been his goal.

But once it's clear that won't be possible, he's  also able to let go. Through his addition to the doctor's monument, Spike has seen and felt the  finality of her passing with his own fingers.

He understands perhaps more intimately than most  adults the truth of the matter that the living will all one day join her. Should humans hate this  about themselves? Should you need to be so distant from the inevitability of death? If the dead  don't stop being human just because they're dead, maybe you don't need to cure them or eradicate  them. Maybe it's enough just to live with them.

So, I know what the thumbnail says. I know we  told you this video was going to be about how to cure a zombie. The truth is, I don't think  you can cure a zombie. I mean, that's the point, right? Zombies are the one thing you can't  cure, dead. But I do think this desire, this fantasy of healing zombies, fixing them,  returning them from the indignity of death is extremely telling. I mean, what exactly is so  wrong with zombies? What is their obligation to you and to humanity? It would be nice if  they stopped trying to eat people, sure, but if we can't have that, and we probably can't,  what do zombies need to do to earn your respect?

Well, what do the living have to do? The world is  full of people who are strangers to you. People you'll never know, whose motivations are  a mystery, who might mean you harm or not, who might become friends or not? Do you expect  those people to earn their place in your world with party tricks that prove that they can think  for themselves? I don't think humanity is really a matter of recognizing a toothbrush or playing a  video game or even being able to speak. After all, the dead don't speak. They are not gamers. They  don't use toothbrushes. And yet, the dead are still human. They become human as soon as you say  that they are. And you clearly want to say that they are. Humans keep telling zombie stories  because you love zombies. You love the dead.

I just don't think you know how to say it in a  way that they can understand. But as with all concerns of the living, that's your problem. Not  theirs. No cure required. [Music] Okay. But that doesn't mean anyone wants to be a zombie, which is  unfortunate because I gather a lot of you kind of feel like you already are. Actually, strangely,  from time to time, I feel that way myself. Going through the daily motions of life, inorded, caught  in the grind. I kind of think it's easy to feel like some part of you is dead. Maybe that it has  been for a long, long time. In a literal sense, what I said before is true. I don't know how to  cure a zombie. But I do know a pretty good cure for feeling like one. Here's what I do. 10 minutes  of logic puzzles every day. They might look like games, but this is actually me acquiring a whole  education. I honestly never realized there was so much to logic and reasoning. I always kind  of got the impression that rationality was just sort of something that happened, cognitive  magic in the brain. Now I'm starting to see the processes behind it. This is the kind of learning  that somehow feels active, the kind of thing that makes me feel alive. This is brilliant. as in like  that's the name of the app I'm using here. This is how it works and what it does. You've probably  heard about a zillion other creators talk about it already, but honestly, they're right to. It's  a fantastic tool for developing an education while you go about your life. It moves at your pace and  slots easily into your daily routines. The way it's structured really helps you to learn things  rather than just memorize them. To give it a try, visit brilliant.org/tailfoundry or scan the QR  code on screen. You can actually get started for free. Then, if you want to sign up and get  unlimited daily access to everything Brilliant has to offer, you can use that same link to get 20%  off an annual subscription. Scan the QR code on screen or click the link in the description to get  started. Again, that's brilliant.org/tailboundry for 20% off an annual subscription. No, this  kind of learning won't literally bring you back from the dead, but it'll definitely  make you feel more alive. Give it a try.

Anyway, that's all for this one. Thanks for watching and keep making stuff up.  I'll see you next week. Bye. [Music] [Music]