One of the protagonists has a friend or loved one infected with The Virus during a Zombie Apocalypse or similar situation. In a fit of loyalty, they attempt to keep the poor victim alive and the infection secret, despite the fact that it has been confirmed irreversible by authoritative, bespectacled, labcoat-wearing scientists across the surviving globe.
The victim eventually fully virus-izes, occasionally taking out some of the supporting cast along the way, and the character has a heart-clenching moment where they have to take the victim out like Old Yeller.
It's most commonly the mother, or at least a family member, for Freudian reasons, but don't worry; they don't have anything to do with Oedipus Rex. Generally, there is no one more familiar than the mother figure, so the disappearance of that familiarity — "She's not your mother anymore!" — is a perfect example of the Freudian uncanny (or unheimlich, as he would put it, speaking German and everything). Since the horror of zombies rests already largely in the uncanny (they walk like the living but are otherwise dead), this trope is a perfect fit for the Zombie Apocalypse.
Used only on the cynical side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism.
Compare with Et Tu, Brute? Also see Tragic Monster.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In the manga Parasyte, the hero hesitates to such a degree that the creature that took his mother is able to stab him through the heart. Good thing he can heal...
- In the Waita Uziga story You After the Rain, a man is unable to part with his zombified girlfriend and keeps her chained up in his apartment. He feeds her raw meat from a nearby grocery store, and one day upon walking home, he gets bitten by one of the outside zombies. Realizing that he's going to die anyway, he unchains his girlfriend and allows her to eat him... while he has sex with her. After he dies, zombie girlfriend leaves the apartment to find more prey, having no memory of who the man was and what he did for her.
- In Attack on Titan, this leads to rather horrifying revelations. The crippled Titan discovered in the ruins of Ragako turns out to be a transformed Mrs. Springer, and retains just enough of herself to greet Connie. This leads to the discovery that Titans are humans that underwent an involuntary transformation and were absorbed so only their central nervous system remains. Because she is unable to move, Mrs. Springer is taken into custody rather than killed.
- And later on, Eren gets revenge on the Titan that ate his mother... except he realizes later he sentenced his father's first wife to death by cannibalism. Eren's not quite sure if said Titan had enough sense to desire revenge specifically against Ms. Jaegar. Yeesh.
Comic Books
- The Walking Dead has this happen a few times, especially early on:
- Morgan and his son Duane, the first two survivors Rick meet after he Slept Through the Apocalypse. While they were reasonably fine when Rick left for Atlanta, Duane was bitten at some point in the year that followed - when Rick returned to his hometown with Abraham and Carl, Morgan is an absolute mess, and has been keeping the zombified Duane chained up in his house, unable to bring himself to put him down. When Rick convinces him to join the other survivors, Morgan still can't do it, and ends up just leaving his undead son behind.
- Hershel Greene, a farmer who's been herding together zombies and keeping them in his barn, thinking that they can somehow be cured, despite being rotting corpses, many of them with fatal injuries or their guts hanging out through their skin. Considering that one of the zombies he's keeping locked up is his son Shawn, it's heavily implied he's in denial, which eventually costs him his oldest son and daughter (Arnold and Lacey) when the zombies break out.
- The Governor, the comics first real Big Bad, keeps his zombified daughter (actually his niece) hidden in his apartment and feeds her human flesh from the people his henchmen kill, or die in the gladiator arena he set up in Woodbury.
- Subverted horrifically in the comic book Pieces for Mom. A couple of brothers are taking care of their undead mother after a zombie apocalypse. They both assume that their father is dead, since he disappeared when he went on the supply run that got their mother zombified, but the younger brother comes across him and a new family, well-stocked and taken care of when he goes on a supply run of his own. Outraged, he shoots both his dad and his dad's new family, butchers them and takes them home to feed to his mom.
Films — Live-Action
- In Night of the Living Dead (1990) the unlovable Harry Cooper refuses to shoot his zombified daughter (one of many ways in which he fails the heroes).
- Shaun of the Dead:
- The literal example of this trope happen when Shaun's mother becomes a zombie. Possibly the only thing played completely straight. An unexpectedly heartbreaking scene, too.
- Ed was bitten painfully across the neck, and Shaun bravely shouts "You leave him alone!" and charges to his defence.
- The DVD extras also has a short called "Remembering Z Day" which included an advert for a child who had to "fight off his entire zombified family".
- Resident Evil Film Series:
- Resident Evil (2002) had this happen with Rain, who turns at the absolute worst moment. Admittedly, though, in this version there was a cure, and it had been administered on Rain. It was just given to her too late.
- There was also a priest in Resident Evil: Apocalypse whose sister had been bitten. His solution was tying her up so she couldn't hurt him, and then killing people to feed and nourish her. By the third movie, we find out the bit where he fed her was pointless as zombies don't actually require the meat they devour. Of course, how was he supposed to know that?
- Braindead/Dead Alive has Lionel's mother be the first zombie to turn... and plays it for all the black humour it possibly can. Peter Jackson was twisted before The Lord of the Rings.
- In The Evil Dead (1981), Ash has to kill zombified versions of his girlfriend, his sister, and two other friends. By Army of Darkness, he's gotten completely used to it ("Baby, you got real ugly."). Then again, the girl in Army of Darkness is magically okay at the end of the movie anyway, probably as a consequence of the series moving from straight horror toward comedy.
- Which turns grim when you learn in Poker Night 2 that she lived just long enough to have a family with nine grandkids and then watch eight of them succumb to the black plague / zombification / whatever. She was probably protected by fate because the universe needed Brock Samson to be born, but after they had the right ancestor she needed a large dose of this trope to balance out the favorable karma.
- The Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake has Andre keep his heavily pregnant infected wife Luda tied to a bed and kept a secret from the rest. She dies in childbirth. Andre delivers the baby. When the others finally discover the truth, Andre kills Barb to protect his baby after the former shoots Luda. Anne has to deliver the coup de grace to the zombie infant.
- In Diary of the Dead, we see YouTube footage of a S.W.A.T. team raiding a house. The elderly owners beg them not to open the bedroom door because (you guessed it), they are keeping their zombified family there. One bites the team leader, who becomes enraged and kills the old couple but deliberately avoids headshots so they will "wake up dead."
- A cruel subversion occurs in the Australian comedy-horror movie Undead. Towards the end of the film, it is revealed there actually is a cure for the zombie outbreak (distributed by friendly aliens via rainwater), and cured, human-again former zombies even end up dying from the gunshots they sustained from the protagonists during the film. However, the cure misses a single infected man, who ends up starting the zombie outbreak all over again. The film ends with the protagonist forced to round up the zombie villagers in a large outdoor pen and shepherd over them in the hopes the aliens will return with the cure again (which is unlikely to happen, since they have no way of knowing a second outbreak occurred).
- In Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning, Brigette continues to hide the fact her sister Ginger has been infected by a werewolf way past the point where it's sane to do so, causing the death of a mostly innocent doctor and murdering the noble hunter trying to end the curse, before deliberately infecting herself and implicitly dooming future generations to suffer the same fate.
- 28 Weeks Later: In this case mom was a carrier, she had a gene that allowed her to remain sane while infected with The Virus, unfortunately when her husband broke into quarantine and kissed her he became infected and not only killed her but also infected almost everyone else.
- Let's face it, everything in that film could have been avoided by shooting those stupid children at the beginning.
- Or by having security measures that wouldn't have ensured maximum slaughter with minimal effort - the movie's biggest head against wall moment was the way emergencies were responded in the colony.
- Subverted in "The Case", the Amateur Film Within A Film from Super 8. When the detective's wife becomes a zombie, he manages to inject her with an antidote and cure her without being bitten or forced to shoot her.
- Howl (2015): Even after it's concluded that the monster that bit Jenny was a werewolf and shows signs of being contagious, her husband Ged refuses to let anyone kill her, insisting that she is just simply sick. This results in her mutilating him when she turns further and her mind goes completely werewolf like.
Literature
- In Elantris, Adien is an Elantrian, but his family keeps it secret from the world by dressing him up with makeup to cover the issue of his skin tone. However, despite the numbers being his Madness Mantra, he still is Good with Numbers when Elantris is repaired.
- In Pet Sematary by Stephen King, the hero discovers that dead animals can come back to life if they are buried in the field behind the pet cemetery (the field actually being a Mi'kmaq burial ground) near his house. He tries this when his very young son is hit by a truck and killed. The boy returns as a demonic monster, and then kills the mother. The father kills the zombabie, but apparently hasn't learned, because he then buries his dead wife in the field, too...
- The thing is that the protagonist is in a trap from the start, there are supernatural forces at play which he makes the mistake of underestimating from the start. His wife has an irrational fear of death (by which I mean she can't even stand to think about it because of childhood trauma), but the protagonist is likewise too scientific about it, too rational, which is the weak spot the Wendigo plays to. By the time he buries his wife, even knowing the danger, he's insane and he even knows that he is insane. Seeing what his reanimated son did to his mother snapped him.
- He also deludes himself into thinking that, if he can only bury her quickly enough, she'll come back right.
- The thing is that the protagonist is in a trap from the start, there are supernatural forces at play which he makes the mistake of underestimating from the start. His wife has an irrational fear of death (by which I mean she can't even stand to think about it because of childhood trauma), but the protagonist is likewise too scientific about it, too rational, which is the weak spot the Wendigo plays to. By the time he buries his wife, even knowing the danger, he's insane and he even knows that he is insane. Seeing what his reanimated son did to his mother snapped him.
- In the novel World War Z, this is one of the contributing factors for the quick spread of the zombie virus, often with refugees from Third World countries taking their infected loved ones with them in the hopes of finding a non-existent cure in the more industrialized / wealthier First World nations.
Interviewer: The low-income areas?
Nury Televaldi: If that's what you want to call them. What better place to hide than among that portion of society that no-one else even wants to acknowledge? How else could so many outbreaks have started in so many First World ghettos?note
Live-Action TV
- The Walking Dead (2010) shows the zombified wife/mother of Morgan and Duane, the man and his son who help Rick out in the pilot episode, an expanded version of the first issue of the comics, where she isn't mentioned at all. She wanders around the neighborhood and looks in the peephole of her former house, causing much angst in the process. In a subversion, however, her former husband cannot bring himself to kill her. This ends up getting Duane infected at her hands during the Time Skip.
- Ianto's cyber-girlfriend in Torchwood.
- Subverted in Dollhouse, where the main characters, in the midst of an apocalypse where people can have their personalities erased and replaced with more violent identities, run across a young girl and her father. The man has clearly had his mind wiped, and it's argued over how they're going to explain to the girl that they have to kill her father, made worse when some of them are attacked. Turns out, the little girl had been wiped and given a violent, older personality, and she'd been playing this trope to her favor to blame the man.
- Comes up a lot in Ash vs. Evil Dead. Just for starters, Amanda is forced to kill her partner in the first episode after he gets possessed, and the second episode sees Kelly's mom come back from the dead with a story about suffering amnesia after a car accident. It's a lie. Then in season two, we find out Ash had his life and his relationship with his father completely ruined by the events of the films, described above. It's implied at one point that his badassery is just a form of Obfuscating Insanity to cover up how deeply traumatized he actually is.
- Pippa's mother turns sometime during the first episode in Dead Set. She returns in a deleted scene, revealing her to be the one who infected and killed Pippa.
Video Games
- Likewise, the fourth (technically third) Resident Evil installment Resident Evil – Code: Veronica has a scene where Steve can't bring himself to shoot his father, who's become a zombie. Luckily, he snaps out of it and guns down his own zombie-dad just as he's about to sink his teeth into Claire's neck.
- And Sherry Birkin's story in Resident Evil 2 basically boils down to What Happened To Daddy.
- He was gunned down by Umbrella goons, injected himself with his own G-Virus, and turned into a giant mutated blob of flesh. Which we then shot, burned, and blew to pieces. Sorry, sweetie.
- Prior to all of that, he was stalking her across the city with the singleminded purpose of doing something to her that is unpleasantly close to rape. And in one particular scenario, he succeeded.
- And her being infected with the G-Virus is canon.
- In the REmake version of Resident Evil, we have Lisa Trevor, who spent over a decade being used as the guinea pig for every viral weapon and mutagenic compound that Umbrella could come up with, a situation that her mother was also placed in... for a while. She planned to escape, but succumbed to the first incarnation of the virus (Type-A) and was "disposed of" by Umbrella. Lisa wasn't fooled by the body-doubles of her parents Umbrella sent to placate her, tearing off their faces to give them back to her real mother, wearing them in an insane show of devotion. She spent the rest of her life shambling around the mansion and the grounds, looking for her mother. Near the end, the player uncovers Lisa's mother's remains for her, and she gives a strange show of closure before dropping out of sight.
- And Sherry Birkin's story in Resident Evil 2 basically boils down to What Happened To Daddy.
- In Baldur's Gate II, Valygar Corthala mentions that he had to kill both of his parents when they turned themselves into ghouls. Valygar is a very bitter man, understandably enough.
- Tomb Raider: Underworld reveals that Amelia, Lara's mother has suffered this fate.
- In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask a little girl locks her father in a cupboard after he's partially transformed into a zombie-like Gibdo.
- Subverted in that Link plays the Song of Healing and heals him.
- Which of course only lasts as long as the player continues in the current 3-day cycle.
- Subverted in that Link plays the Song of Healing and heals him.
- In Dragon Age: Origins, possible with Tamlen (for a Dalish Warden) and Danyla respectively from the taint and Witherfang's curse, although the Warden isn't familiar with the latter and neither is shown turning - they're run into when they're already beyond help.
- At the start of Episode 5 of The Walking Dead, Ben (if alive) tears into Kenny for constantly being on his case, citing that at least Kenny knew for sure what happened to Duck and Katja, while he didn't know whether any of his family was alive, as he'd been in another school district when the Zombie Apocalypse occurred.
- Wings of Liberty: At the end of Dr. Hanson's arc, you can choose whether to fight the Protoss busy sterilizing a Zerg-infested planet or do the job yourself. If the latter, Hanson locks herself into the Hyperion's lab, and in a last-ditch attempt at curing the virus, deliberately infects herself with it. Once Raynor comes back onboard, she's already fully infested, and Raynor has to put her down.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons:
- Subverted in "Treehouse of Horror III". Zombie Flanders walks over to Homer's house, presumably to eat him. Homer guns him down without hesitation.
Bart: Dad, you killed the zombie Flanders!
Homer: He was a zombie? - A similar occurrence in the next season's "Treehouse of Horror IV" when the family discovers Bart-turned-vampire about to attack Lisa. Grampa Simpson immediately bursts in with a stake and garlic.
Grampa: Quick! We must kill the boy!
Marge: How did you know he was a vampire?
Grampa: He's a vampire!? AAAAAH! [runs away]
- Subverted in "Treehouse of Horror III". Zombie Flanders walks over to Homer's house, presumably to eat him. Homer guns him down without hesitation.
- Spoofed in the South Park episode "Marjorine". To steal from the girls a "Cootie Catcher" that they assume can really tell the future, the boys fake Butters' death so they can insert him as a cross-dressing undercover agent. Mr. Stotch digs up the pig carcass that was buried as Butters' body and reburies it in the old Indian Burial Ground. When Butters shows up again his parents naturally assume he is a "demon spawn."
- A variation in Transformers: Prime: Breakdown, a Decepticon killed by Airachnid, returns as a vessel for the evil terrorist Silas. His partner Knock Out is furious, and later hauls Silas/Breakdown off for dissection after he's proved useless to Megatron. A later episode, however, reveals that Knock Out is keeping him around for experimentation, partially because he wants revenge on the human within, and possibly because he just wants to keep what's left of his friend alive. Even Starscream is unnerved by this.
Real Life
- During the 2014 outbreak, families of Ebola victims in Liberia hid their sick and dead to prevent them being cremated
by the Government.
