"I'm already dead. I just need some help lying down."
A low-budget Found Footage Zombie Film from 2013, starting Carly Oates, Ryan Shogren, and Quantae Love.
Young doctor Regina Spencer has a pretty good life. She's got a great job, a trusted circle of friends, and an EMT boyfriend who adores her and is on the verge of proposing.
This changes after one wild night of partying. One of Regina's friends brings some cocaine, and Regina overdoses. Her boyfriend Ryan manages to resuscitate her, but she's not the same after that night. She has strange food cravings, she no longer sleeps or even feels tired, and she can heal from injuries much faster than before. A rational person, Regina decides to test and experiment with her new condition, and document it for posterity.
Considering the film opens with a crawl indicating that Regina is currently institutionalized after killing and cannibalizing four people, we know from the start that this doesn't go according to plan.
This film provides examples of:
- Anachronic Order: Due to the Framing Device, the Found Footage segments jump around depending on what Regina and Doctor Romera are talking about.
- Apocalyptic Log: Regina didn't intend to make one of these, but eventually her videos become this.
- Artistic License – Medicine: A full medical exam would have been one of the first things Regina would have received upon admission to the asylum. They would have found the unknown biological agent in her blood almost immediately. Or the very least, realized that she doesn't have a pulse.
- Dead All Along: Regina realizes this late in the movie. All her friends tried the tainted cocaine, but only she turned into a zombie. Because Ryan didn't successfully resuscitate her. She actually did die that night, and has been a zombie this whole time.
- Dr. Jerk: Doctor Romera is condescending and dismissive of Regina during their interview, outright refusing to see the extraordinary circumstances right in front of him.
- Driven to Suicide: The first scene in the movie is chronologically one of the last: Regina at the end of her rope putting a gun in her mouth. It doesn't work.
- Facial Horror: As Regina's condition worsens, her skin becomes gray and cracked, as if it's peeling off her skull. By the time of her incarceration it's black and craggy, and her self-inflicted gunshot wound hasn't healed.
- Foregone Conclusion: Sadly, we audience members know from the beginning that Regina's attempts to manage her condition will fail.
- Framing Device: Most of the story is told through flashback, as Regina is interviewed by a doctor at the asylum.
- Freudian Excuse: Doctor Romera is insistent that Regina is suffering from this, due to the recent death of her mother from illness, and that her undead state is purely psychosomatic.
- Healing Factor: At first Regina finds she can recover from injuries very quickly, with a deep cut on her hand healing in a matter of hours. This fades as her condition worsens.
- Horror Hunger: Regina first finds that normal foods like milk and bread taste so bad to her that she can't stomach them. Raw meat, on the other hand, tastes wonderful. This of course soon escalates to human flesh.
- Just Think of the Potential!: Regina is initially very gung-ho about exploring her symptoms and trying to devise a treatment, because of the potential benefits to medical science. So much so that she outright refuses to let Ryan take her to a hospital even when she starts killing people.
- Love Cannot Overcome: Ryan is an almost-supernaturally supportive boyfriend, helping Regina manage her cravings and document her condition, but eventually it takes its toll. When Regina first kills a person, and still won't go to the police or the hospital, that's the last straw for him.
- Love Makes You Stupid: After walking out on Regina, Ryan returns and tries one last time to get her to turn herself in. Instead he winds up her second victim.
- Men Are the Expendable Gender: All four of Regina's victims are male. Including Ryan.
- Mundane Solution: Initially Regina devises a fairly simple way to manage her cravings: as a hospital doctor, she has access to medical waste. A few bags of blood or human fat here and there are enough to satiate her...at first.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Regina is closer to a Revenant than a traditional zombie. She is still sentient and self-aware, and her condition can't be transmitted to others by biting. The moments when she gives into her cravings manifest almost like a Split-Personality Takeover, with Regina seeming to be in a trance and only vaguely aware of what she's doing. Regina herself theorizes that her undead state may be due to a cordyceps-like fungal infection she picked up from the tainted cocaine, which is asserting control over her nervous system whenever she's unable to remain conscious. Eventually she becomes convinced that if she's unable to contain her condition, she will "spore" and infect everyone around her. The movie never confirms or denies her theory.
- Sanity Slippage: Predictably, as Regina's physical condition worsens, so does her mental state. By the time she winds up in the asylum, she's barely there anymore.
- Space Whale Aesop: Don't do cocaine. Especially if you don't know where it came from. Because you might become a zombie and kill everyone you love.
- The Stinger: The first of two post-credit scenes indicate that the CDC has contained the outbreak at the hospital where Regina was incarcerated. The second scene shows a fully-zombified Regina escaping into the world.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: When the CDC finally gets involved, they handle the situation in an entirely logical and believable way: by taking every possible physical precaution, quarantining the hospital, and isolating everyone who had contact with Regina. As such they manage to avert a full-blown Zombie Outbreak. Maybe.
- Tragic Monster: Regina doesn't want to hurt anyone, but eventually she finds it impossible to control her murderous urges.
- Understanding Boyfriend: Ryan, but eventually even he reaches his limit.
- With Friends Like These...: This entire tragedy was kicked off by one of Regina's friends bringing some cocaine to the party and pressuring everyone to try it. Cocaine she confiscated from a patient. Without knowing its source or what it might be cut with. Nice going.
- Would Hurt a Child: Unable to suppress her cravings, Regina actually bites a friend's toddler. She only gets away with it by blaming the dog.
