Name _________________ Class_________________ Date _______________________

Its the Historical Fiction Zombie Horror Story Project!

The hardest assignment youll ever love.

I. Rules for the Whole Assignment:
1. Stories must follow the conventions of the Zombie Horror genre.
2. Stories must include at least 5 significant elements from Romeo & Juliet.
3. Stories must not stink, to be determined by other students in the class.


II. Genre rules: or, How to Have Fun with the Walking (and Biting) Dead!
1. You have to get bitten to become a zombie. You get a headache, flu like
symptoms, die and come back for more.
2. Zombies cant run.
3. Zombies want to eat people. Zombies are always hungry.
4. Zombies only die from head trauma/destroying the brain. Zombies cant die
on their own.
5. Zombie cant use tools, fly planes, think or any other stuff like that.
6. Zombies are no longer human. Any efforts to have them remember who they
were end badly.


III. Historical Fiction Rules
Your story must take place within the world of Romeo & Juliet.

Background
In William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, a long feud between the Montague and Capulet families
disrupts the city of Verona and causes tragic results for Romeo and Juliet. Revenge, love, and a
secret marriage force the young star-crossed lovers to grow up quickly and fate causes them to
commit suicide in despair. Contrast and conflict are running themes throughout Shakespeare's
play, Romeo and Juliet one of the Bard's most popular romantic tragedies.


Final Drafts due on:
Friday,
October 31
st
: Halloween!
The Stages of Zombie Apocalypse
Your story must take place in one of these phases of a zombie apocalypse.
Phase One Mutation & Patient Zero
Somehow, a previously unknown disease causes living people to become zombie-
like infected, causing the dead to walk again and attack the living. The disease
changes from whatever it was into a zombifying disease. No one will know at
first when this begins unless someone does it on purpose using genetic
engineering in a research lab!).
Patient Zero is the first person who contracts the disease. At first, no one ever
believes what is truly happening.
Phase Two Outbreak & Containment
Patient Zero starts infecting others and they, in turn, infect still more. Only once the authorities get many
independent reports of the same thing happening will they finally realize something weird is going on.
Once authorities realize what theyre up against, containment is their primary response. They will try to seal off
the affected area using police and military personnel. The aim is to stop anyone from getting in and, more
importantly, from getting out.
Its possible that the soldiers wont understand and have trouble telling those infected from the uninfected who
are just trying to get out and some will respond with excessive force. This makes being in the containment zone
incredibly dangerous with not just the ever-growing number of zombies but also a panicked populous and a
military thats unsure of exactly who their enemy is.
Phase Three Uncontrolled Spread & The Fall Of Humanity
The shift from containment to uncontrolled spread has outbreaks happening in multiple locations and all
attempts fail to keep the disease in check. Authorities lose control.
Being out on the streets in this phase will be incredibly dangerous as there will be ever-increasing numbers of
zombies roaming the streets. Survival is more about luck than planning. Almost everyone has been turned into
zombies. There will be a few pockets of survivors here and there, all struggling to stay safe and remain
uninfected.
For those few humans that remain, life will be extremely hard and theyll be able to concentrate on little more
than keeping themselves, and those around them, alive.
Phase Four Reconstruction
Once the threat of zombies and infection have reduced to a point where people can start thinking past day-to-
day survival, people might work together to make a great world or a few warlords could take over areas or even
the old governments could be re-established. Theres also the possibility that the disease will break out again,
sending the world back towards earlier phases of the apocalypse.