When I first heard the term “dead week” as a first-semester freshman, I assumed that it referred to student sentiment during this fateful pre-finals period and alluded to students’ deathly appearances amid exam-related stress and end-of- semester research papers.
The dead week subculture that has emerged on university campuses features student-produced horror films, zombie-related dictionary definitions, late-night screams of despair and more.
A 2014 short film titled “Dead Week” was a collaborative production by student filmmakers and professionals at University of California, Berkeley.
The film parodies dead week and features a multitude of puns about dead languages and dead distant family members. Death confronts the characters from all angles as they experience a literal week of death.
When I discovered that dead week merely designates the prohibition of final exams or new assignments during the week, I found it much less interesting than the process of student zombification I had imagined.
My original interpretation is, in fact, more accurate in the social context of university culture — an experience featuring zombies and the raw horrors of death. Student subculture during dead week is far more entertaining than pre-exam realities, and creative university students across the country seem to have reached a similar conclusion.
“Dead Week” jokingly references the Oxford English Dictionary when commenting on Latin’s sad state as a dead language, but the OED, in fact, yields no results when attempting to define dead week. Instead, Urban Dictionary offers a more accurate, zombie-related description of what dead week really is.
The top definition from Urban Dictionary explains the student impression of dead week: “The late night working and hardcore studying for finals gives the students a zombie like atmosphere, and causes an eerie silence and many blank, unseeing expressions.”
A zombie flick called “Dead week (A Zombie Film for Zombies),” produced by students at Samford University embodies this zombie-based definition of dead week. In the film, intoxicated college students not only bring back the dead, but they disguise a zombie as a college student. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the undead student seems to blend in relatively well with the “dead” college atmosphere.
In university culture, zombies, horror films and dead week traditions are valuable cultural practices — if you’re looking for a moment of stress-relief, dead week is an ideal time to get caught up on horror movies.
If horror movies aren’t your preferred form of entertainment, you can just embrace the sleep-deprived, zombie-like conditions that accompany cramming for exams and polishing final papers — the unsensationalized, but nonetheless horrific, realities of dead week.
kmilvert@umail.iu.edu
