Fear The Walking Dead: Does The Zombie Apocalypse MAKE People Crazy?

The zombie apocalypse is crazy. Does it make us crazy, too? Or does it just bring the crazies out?

It doesn’t take too long for anyone watching The Walking Dead or Fear The Walking Dead to realize that not everyone we see in them is entirely all there. I can hardly think of a season where there wasn’t at least one character who wasn’t either partially or completely in Crazytown.

Thinking about this has made me start to wonder: Does the zombie apocalypse make the people in it crazy, or…does the zombie apocalypse bring out the crazy people amongst us?

Let’s think about it for a minute: How many characters have we met, just in this half season of Fear The Walking Dead alone, are showing signs of being unstable or heading that way?

How many, over the last season and a half, have done things, not out of necessity, but, out of some previously unseen malice, a twisted, violent streak, confusion, a distorted view of the new world, or an apparent mental breakdown?

More than enough. And we’re not even getting into The Walking Dead.

But, while I don’t think it can be argued that we’ve seen a lot of people who are unstable, the real question becomes: Were they always that way? Or, did the apocalypse make them that way?

Let’s take a look at a few subjects…

Reed

Reed is, frankly, an easy character to figure out.

While being interrogated by Daniel, he reveals that he was the victim of abuse by his father, abuse which had obviously left him damaged, as he was very prone to resorting to violence and seemed to take cruel joy in taunting his victims.

Though it certainly seems that the abuse he suffered is the root cause of his behavior, one wonders if he would become the wanton killer Jack seems to describe, who makes a point of killing any and all people he was ostensibly supposed to be dropping off on land after he and his crew took who and what they needed from the ships they captured.

Now, onto slightly more difficult characters…

Chris

…Hoo boy…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock during this season, you might have noticed that at least one member of The Group seems to be rapidly unraveling right before our eyes: Chris.

In the span of about three episodes, Chris has gone from loudly asking permission to shoot pirates to, apparently, being willing to gun down children.

…Seriously.

Now, you’d think this would be easy, a fairly open and shut case, wouldn’t you? Chris lost his mother about thirteen days into the apocalypse and hasn’t adjusted terribly well to it, going to extremes to try to exert a modicum of control over his increasingly chaotic world.

But, to be honest, Chris’ descent into madness, for lack of a better term, seems extremely rapid.

In the approximately six days since Liza died, Chris has killed two people, and threatened to kill three more, by contrast, after Carl had to put down Lori, he killed one person, weeks later, during the last skirmish with Woodbury, and never threatened anybody.

Now, obviously, different people handle loss differently, but, this rapid evolution into a violent, deceitful, menacing person honestly makes me wonder if this behavior is not merely the result of what he’s gone through since the apocalypse began or the culmination of a problem that’s been brewing in Chris, presumably since his parents’ divorce.

With the whole second half of the season left, it’s entirely possible that, much like Daniel, we may learn elements of Chris’ past that previously hadn’t been revealed before, including hints that this behavior goes back further than we know.

Celia

Now, here is where things can get really muddy.

I feel like, if there’s a character we met thus far in this season of Fear The Walking Dead who really raises the question of whether or not the zombie apocalypse makes crazies or simply brings them out, it’s Celia.

Celia seems to be an adherent to Santa Muerte, a Mexican folk culture which seems to worship a death goddess (From what I can tell), which certainly explains her strange reverence for the dead.

However, her belief that the infected are not, in fact, dead seems to be another matter entirely. It seems reminiscent of the distorted vision of the walkers Lizzie had in The Walking Dead, believing that the walkers, who are clearly decaying, are somehow still alive, but only “changed” (A term Celia, rather frighteningly, also uses to describe the infected).

This begs the question: Has the zombie apocalypse, and seeing the dead walking the earth, made Celia lose a certain grip on reality, believing the dead aren’t dead? Or…has she always been like this?

While her beliefs may seem unusual, I’m not convinced they would cause her to believe a walking corpse is simply “changed”, instead of actually being dead.

I’m starting to think that, once she started seeing the infected, Celia started spiraling into some kind of madness, distorting her beliefs to the point we find her at in “Sicut Cervus”, where she is housing infected on the grounds of Thomas’ hacienda, and feeding them live animals.

Just how deep her belief in the “changed” state of the infected went, or just how crazy she might be, depending on how you look at it, is tough to tell, as the last time we saw her, she was being locked in a cellar with what seemed to be over a dozen infected, whether the she escaped, or offered herself to them to be changed, we don’t know.

The zombie apocalypse is, to put it mildly, extreme.

It wouldn’t be too surprising if that extreme nature of the zombie apocalypse makes people go crazy, and even less surprising if the chaos it creates lets the crazy people already amongst us start running amok.

Maybe Strand was right, and the only way to survive a mad world is to embrace the madness. I guess the only question is who just started embracing it, and who always had been…

Next: Fear The Walking Dead Theory: Is Chris The New Shane?

Do you think the zombie apocalypse makes people crazy? Or does it just bring the crazy people to the surface? Let me know in the comments! And, if you like this and want to read more of my writings, specifically about how to survive a zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can get it on Kindle here and on iTunes here!