The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Only If You Let It

3) Don’t Let Fear/Doubt/Evil In.

There’s old folklore in Europe where evil can only invade your home if you invite it in. It’s this folklore from which the premise for movies like Let The Right One In and its English-language remake, Let Me In, come from. The more I think about this idea of the zombie apocalypse getting to you only if you let it, the more parallels I see between it and those legends from the Old World.

I’ve said before that fear is both normal and necessary in a zombie apocalypse, that it helps you know what you need to be careful around and when you need to take things seriously. That said, fear easily has the ability to cripple you if you let it.

For example, it’s smart to have a healthy fear of zombies, to know you can’t underestimate them, and to be wary of them surrounding or outnumbering you. However, being overly afraid of them, i.e., too scared to even fight them…is not healthy.

That kind of fear, the kind of fear that paralyzes you into inactivity, is something you can’t have. It’s like doubt, it’s a little voice in the back of your mind, trying to worm its way in and corrode your confidence, courage, and faith in yourself; If it succeeds, you fail because you become convinced you can’t succeed.

Similarly, especially as you see the worst elements of humanity at the beginning of the apocalypse, there will be another little voice in the back of your mind, the one telling you to get down in the muck with them, and be depraved, be cruel, be malicious, be evil, and forego any empathy or mercy.

If you let that in, you’ll start doing things that, once you’ve done them, you can’t undo them, and worse still, you may not be able to live with them. Once that happens…you don’t have much left.

These brain parasites will rot you from the inside if you let them. Don’t do it.