The Zombies are Coming. Undead apocalypses in disaster training

Jared Bly
May 25
11 min read

Presentation at CAEP/ICEM 2025, 25 May, Montreal.

Objectives

Explore why we love zombies, and a few examples where organizations have used the idea of a zombie apocalypse to advance disaster preparedness.
Review the pros (a few) and cons (a few more) of fiction and apocalyptism in training.
Identify the key principles that should underlie disaster preparedness.

It seems that we have always been fascinated with zombies. From the Epic of Gilgamesh in 2100 BC "Raise up the dead and they shall eat the living"; ancient Greek “graves which contained skeletons pinned down by rocks …to prevent the dead bodies from reanimating”; Knights of the round table and a weird tale of a medieval Christmas party interrupted by a decaying green knight who invites Sir Gawain to lop off his head, which Gawain does, and the night picks up his head, headless horseman style, and walks off with a promise to return next year to talk with Gawain about revenge or something; Lazarus in the New Testament, if you lump resurrection in with reanimation. I’m not here to debate that.

Skip to modern times, and it’s the same stories, different media. Frankenstein, Night of the Living Dead, iZombie, Santa Clarita diet, Plants vs Zombies, WWZ, Walking Dead…Paper instead of parchment, tablets instead of, uh, tablets, iPhones instead of actual human thought… books, movies, games… zombies are still cool.

Why do we love zombies so much? Is is some fundamental philosophical attraction? Obsession with youth? Fear of loss of capacity/beauty/self? Our secret hopes or our greatest fears? Or both? Do we fantasize about having no brains or soul to hold us back? Do we fear dying? Or fear not dying? Heidegger said "Life without death is existentially meaningless."

Zombies have been used to represent all kinds of metaphors:

religion - death and resurrection, eating flesh and blood to stay alive (eternally)
communism
global capitalism
the rise (and fall) of Starbucks
an "utterly alienated modern workforce"

“Zombies are the perfect twenty-first-century threat: they are not well understood by serious analysts, they possess protean capabilities, and the challenges they pose to states are very, very grave.”

Daniel Drezner

Author of Theories of International Politics and Zombies

Professor of international politics at Tufts University

So maybe this popular theme would make a good educational tool. The CDC thought so, based a preparedness campaign on a zombie apocalypse scenario, the Canada red cross too, and lots of other organizations have used this fun and fascinating idea for emergency preparedness. The CDC advertised it like this, If you’re prepared for a zombie apocalypse, you're prepared for anything. Makes sense. Does it?

Let’s look at some advantages to this approach. It isn’t easy to practice disaster response in real disasters, you kind of have to make things up. And fiction is powerful because it can teach us things that we couldn’t get in other ways. That’s why we love fiction, if we do.

“Some philosophical ideas…can be most meaningfully conveyed through fiction”

Daniel Klein

Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It:

Wisdom of the Great Philosophers and How to Live (2017)

But using fiction can be a drawback, specifically in disaster preparedness. The main drawback to fiction is that it is fiction, it’s not real.

“…fiction can be used to learn about disasters and to train people to expect some disasters as part of normal, everyday life—and to ignore or deny other disasters that are already part of normal everyday life for millions of people” (Thomas)

The zombie apocalypse is sometimes promoted as the ultimate all-hazards approach.

Plants vs Zombies is a good example. You have basic zombies, slow, not too resilient, but stronger if they’ve a traffic cone or a bucket on their heads. And fast and strong if they’re an unfortunate undead (American) football player. Mini zombies, not that strong but very fast and sneaky, giant zombies slow but strong and powerful, swinging a telephone pole; or old man zombies that are slow and oblivious until you piss them off

Water zombies that can swim, zombies on pogo sticks that can jump, zombies with torches that light your defences on fire, flying zombies (well, not actually flying zombies, that’s just silly, they’re carried by helium balloons or pelicans).

If you play a lot of PVZ, you will indeed be prepared for a lot of different hazards. Only really zombie-type hazards, but all of them.

Pam vs Katrina

Let’s look at some real fiction, if that makes any sense.

Pam, a simulated hurricane, and Katrina, a real one.

	PAM	KATRINA
Date	2004	2005
Inches of rain	20	18
Flooding of New Orleans	10-20 feet	Up to 20 feet
People in shelters	55,000	60,000
Oil port shutdown	3 days	5 days
Refineries shut down	9	7

	PAM	KATRINA
Loss of electricity	786,359	881,400
Debris	12.5 million tons	12 million tons
Buildings collapsed	233,986	250,000
Displaced residents	>1.1 million	1 million
Bridge collapse	Leeville	Twin Span
Rescues	20,000 (boat), 1,000 (helicopter)	53,000

A year later, the reality mirrored the fictional. Vulnerabilities unaltered - people in shelters before landfall, structural failures, damage and displacement. Would outcomes have been worse if the exercise had not been done? Maybe. But it doesn’t look like it did much. And few would call the response to Katrina a success

And maybe this reflects the idea that…

"fiction is always actionable, never consequential" (Thomas).

Zombies may hinder our preparedness in other ways. The emphasis on response ignores underlying issues. How do you prepare for school shootings? You rehearse things like run, hide, or hit; How do you prepare for floods? You designate high ground to evacuate to, have you go-bag ready. At least, the US disaster preparedness is criticized for preparing only to respond to disasters. And this policy, and mindset, is not unique to America.

“Preparedness, document after document implies, is just about disaster response, not prevention, not quality of life, not social welfare, not justice…” (Thomas)

The use of zombie scenarios engenders mistrust and poor crisis communications.

and not just because of decaying vocal structures. When it comes to crisis communications, we can think of technocratic vs rhetorical methods. Techocratic meaning the message is controlled by government or intellectual elites, this approach engenders mistrust, and is not considered a good strategy.

Rhetorical communication relies on local knowledge, includes all those who are affected, or think they are affected, in co-creating meaning and understanding.

Zombie apocalypses generally employ the former, with a small group usually the holders of knowledge (there’s usually an elite response team in there early on, a collection of experts in infectious diseases, necromancy, and weaponry).

Technocratic vs rhetorical communication

Technocratic
- control by government or intellectual elite
- Engenders mistrust
- Poor crisis communications strategy
Rhetorical -
- co-creation of meaning
- Includes all affected
- Participation
- Local knowledge
Similarly, zombies usually go hand-in-hand with an end of the world kind of feeling, an apocalyptic ethic, which has pernicious side effects, lending itself to violent responses, exclusionary policies, and anti-democratic principles. “Among other problems the CDC’s campaign promotes an apocalyptic habit that turns death into the monstrous enemy of existence—authorizing inevitably violent responses”
Apocalyptism is exclusionary - think of your favourite apocalypse story - The Road, Mad Max, or Star Wars - there’s always us and them, right? And is it ok to be exclusionary if the us are living humans and them are recently living humans, now categorized as undead monsters? Slippery slope, right?
Apocalyptism sets up a conflict with democratic ideals - World wars, genocide, atomic weapons, and suicide bombs, have all been justified through an apocalyptic absolutist moral rhetoric.

I saw a runner [zombie] coming straight at me with a big strand of drool spilling from his mouth…it wasn’t till after I’d smashed the poor soul’s head through a car window..did I realize it wasn’t a zombie after all but a normal fitness freak.

Matthew Collins, The Ultimate Zombie Hunter’s Handbook

The stigma of infectious disease

This one’s a bit more obvious - zombie-ism is the ultimate contagion, 100% infection rate with any dermal (usually) exposure, technically a zero percent fatality rate, but a 100% unmortality rate, which seems to be even worse. Exposed individuals quickly lose their humanity and are equated with flesh-eating monsters.

This cringy quote from Max Brooks compares infections to zombies…“…growing in the 1980’s…I watched AIDS go from an obscure, arcane curiosity to a global pandemic…AIDS could have simply been stopped by a pamphlet…a little education and clear-headed leadership and it might have ended up as a footnote in a virologists’ medical text. If that’s not zombies, I don’t know what is." Really brings me back to the homophobia, misinformation, and fear-mongering of the 80s and 90s. Ahhh, nostalgia.

So lets go back to the CDC campaign, it was fun but advertised as serious messaging. "You may laugh now, but when it happens you'll be happy you read this…” Dr. Ali Khan (CDC).

It had so many views it crashed the website within hours of posting, is that a success? Maybe in terms of exposure, but what were the results? The aim was preparedness, but result was, well, not that. When tested on elementary school kids, the zombie training taught them to be prepared with weapons ("hatchets, assault rifles, and handguns" -Houghton). Another study saw that a zombie scenario, compared to some boring but catastrophic flood, led to less retention, participants less likely to make an emergency preparedness plan (Kruvand, Bryant). The CDC, demonstrating the delusional thinking behind the campaign, said:

“What makes zombies the perfect preparedness mascot? When you walk up to a person and start talking about the undead they have all kinds of preparedness ideas, most involving food, water, and other life essentials…”

I guess it comes down to what one believes constitutes "life essentials".

I bring up results, it’s like I’m talking about the scientific method. Is there evidence to guide disaster preparedness? Who are the experts? The problem with expertise is that it is biased, at least not based on evidence. In a study on counter-terrorism “evidence”, these authors said…

"After reading through the thousands of article abstracts from peer-reviewed sources, we also discovered that only 3.4% of them were based on studies that employed some type of empirical analysis" (Lum et al, 2006. Journal of Experimental Criminology).

Experts are important since evidence in disaster preparedness is really hard to come by.

Here’s one, a senior research fellow at West Point, in the same class as someone with a Master’s in strategic studies, a pHd international relations, and a director of a graduate program in organizational leadership. There’s a former ambassador to Poland, a white house national security council director, people like that.

This expert I’m highlighting, doesn’t have an economics degree or political science or leadership experience, but was invited to advise the white house on pandemic response, he’s a best-selling author (of fiction), Max Brooks, creator of World War Z.

And here's an example of his expertise:

“…in many crises…people lose their minds and they do irrational things and they hurt each other”

Here’s another expert, much less published, not on any best-selling list, not invited to speak at the White House.

Observed human behavior seems to bear little, if any, weight with both lay publics and policy makers…

Baker ND. Zombie Experts and Anarchy Imaginaries: Fantasies of “Crises to Be” in Climate Change Futures. Journal of Strategic Security. 2020;13(4):141-155.

So where does the evidence come from for zombies as agents of preparedness? Well, from popular culture. Popular culture is all about narrative production. Narratives are how we individually and collectively make sense of the world. Narratives construct social identity, frame rationale for past and future actions. What we talk about, the stories we tell, create our narratives, and fiction makes for better stories than facts. So fiction in popular culture plays a huge role in creating our “evidence”.

These are from popular pieces of fiction, examples of "evidence".

“You remember what it was like, people just freaking out…” (World War Z)
“…regular people would turn to eating the flesh of humans” (The Road)

Which is why “security has now entered the realm of hyperreality, it does not refer to anything real but is part of a self-referring system, which is perceived as more real than reality” (Lene Hansen, international security scholar, University of Copenhagen).

And the line between fiction and fact becomes irrelevant

As large as life and twice as real

Alice,

in Wonderland

Approaches

Let me finish with a focus on guiding principles. The pillars of disaster management are preparation or prevention, mitigation, response, and recovery. In medicine, especially in emergency medicine, we tend to focus on the response part, definitely not the most important part. Prevention is far more effective than response, except in movies and literature. Very few good stories feature strong preventative measures.

And reducing risk starts with addressing hazards and especially vulnerabilities. Here's a good way to think of preparedness and vulnerability:

If our present support structures do not meet their needs at the best of times, what can we expect at the worst.

-Dave Egan, City of Winnipeg

Disaster vs Emergency?

Disaster in common speech can be anything from burnt toast to a hectic day, but in the academic, professional sense a disaster is an event with a massive damage to people or community which exceeds the resources available to that community. Emergencies are not disasters, emergencies are crises that require response outside of the usual procedures of the system, but where the resources are available within the system. So in emergency medicine, we aren't, or shouldn't be, dealing with emergencies very often. For a patient, their sprained ankle, or pneumothorax, or STEMI, or ingrown toenail might be an emergency. But for practitioners, it's routine. Standard operating procedures, if they are inadequate, can lower the threshold for what constitutes an emergency. Rehearsal of those standard operating procedures, addresses that, and policies and procedures can strength SOP, and prepare us for emergencies.

Disasters Require Adaptability

Disasters require us to be able to adapt, to improvise beyond standard procedures, to call on resources not usually employed, and to work with organizations we don’t routinely work with - think of a civilian hospital having to interact with military organizations in a large-scale conflict, for example. So disaster preparedness benefits from a wide net of relationships, and the ability to adapt and improvise our well-rehearsed responses

Disasters cross borders - collaboration >> coordination

Because disasters knock down walls, cross borders, and fences, we have to venture into the unfamiliar. Community involvement is key because that’s where the needs are best understood and most felt; because different organizations are involved that don’t usually plan together, we have to adapt to new relationships, we need strong authority, but not inflexible authority, we’re communicating on new channels; and emergent response refers to those unplanned, but often invaluable, actions that are borne of extreme events, often volunteers, or response from community members, which has to be expected, but can’t possibly be planned.

So back to zombies, maybe not the most effective preparedness tool.

"What we see in horror fictions are scientifically impossible events; they are not the right sort of thing to test our authority over our feelings.”

Carroll, from Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy.

New Life for the Undead (Greene and Mohammad eds).

Stay well, stay alive. Or dead (just not in between).

Key Points

Zombies are used to advance disaster preparedness
Pros and cons - fiction has its uses; reinforcing biases (response>prevention, social inequality, stigmatization, not all hazards are equal, fiction creates narratives that are not ideal)
Principles of disaster preparedness - strengthening our systems, building relationships, allowing for adaptation

References and readings

Baker ND. Zombie Experts and Anarchy Imaginaries: Fantasies of “Crises to Be” in Climate Change Futures. Journal of Strategic Security. 2020;13(4):141-155.
Max Brooks on pandemic planning. NPR, March 2020. “All of this panic could have been prevented”. https://www.npr.org/2020/03/24/820601571/all-of-this-panic-could-have-been-prevented-author-max-brooks-on-covid-19. “Apocalyptic novelist Max Brooks is something of an expert on planning for pandemics and other disasters…” (see what I mean?)
CDC. Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic (2011). https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/6023 (but the link is broken, hmmm…)
Cheek, R. (2019). Zombie Ent(r)ailments in Risk Communication: A Rhetorical Analysis of the CDC’s Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness Campaign. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 50(4), 401-422. https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1177/0047281619892630 (Original work published 2020)
Drezner, Daniel. Theories of international politics and zombies. Revived Edition (2014).
Houghton F., Del Monte K., Glessner D., Goff J., Hopkins E., Loney K., . . . Toms J. (2016). Zombie pandemic preparedness: A cautionary observation. New Zealand Medical Journal, 129(1432), 97–99.
Kruvand M., Silver M. (2013). Zombies gone viral: How a fictional zombie invasion helped CDC promote emergency preparedness. Case Studies in Strategic Communication, 2, 34–60.
Thomas, Lindsay. Training for Catastrophe. Fictions of National Security after 9/11. University of Minnesota Press. 2021.
Are you prepared for a Zombie Apocalypse? The U.S. Government is. Thaddeus Morgan (2017, updated 2025). History.com. https://www.history.com/articles/are-you-prepared-for-a-zombie-apocalypse-the-u-s-government-is
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Jessie Weston translation). https://www.yorku.ca/inpar/sggk_weston.pdf
History of Zombies - Origins, Pop Culture & Film, History Channel. (https://www.history.com/topics/folklore/history-of-zombies
https://owlcation.com/social-sciences/Why-Zombies-The-Significance-of-Zombies-in-Contemporary-Culture
Zombies as "Others": Growing Isolation in the Information Age
(You against hordes of undead)
Zombies as Metaphor: "Eat the Rich"
(Against capitalism... home invaded by mindless monsters, destroying all that is dear)
Zombies as Archetype: Symbols of Shadow
(“All the things we’re afraid of but have (little control over) like pandemics and terrorism; or just things we fear like death, or aging with loss of faculties)
Zombies as Reflection of Historical Trend: Generational Disillusionment