Hunting Humans
frantic, dread-soaked, gleefully morbid
A compact horror-punk nightmare built around a zombie-apocalypse scenario, drawing explicitly on 'Night of the Living Dead' imagery. The song trades in plot for atmosphere, piling up images of plague, corpses, and compulsion until the narrator himself seems to be turning into one of the hunters he describes.
apocalypse and plague loss of bodily control death and reanimation horror-film pastiche mob violence / contagion
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator caught inside the outbreak, speaking in real time as his own sanity and body start to fail; the voice is unreliable in the sense that he may already be transforming into one of the 'hunters' by the end.
What happens
The song opens with a sweeping, almost Biblical description of catastrophe — plague, burning bodies, heaps of corpses — before narrowing to a bizarre mechanism: a man-made germ that drives people to suicide so they can rise again and feed on the dead. The chorus turns this scenario into a chant, with the narrator declaring that 'we' are now hunting humans. The second verse pulls the camera in close, as the narrator describes losing control of his own mind, hearing a scream in his head, and doubting he'll survive the night. The song doesn't resolve; it just repeats the chant, implying the hunt continues indefinitely.
How it's built
Two verses separated by an identical chorus-and-refrain block, with no bridge or resolution — the song ends on the same chant it keeps returning to. This loop structure mirrors the content: an outbreak with no cure and no end, just recurring 'killing time.' The shift from the first verse's wide-angle, almost documentary description of mass death to the second verse's intimate, panicked first-person breakdown is the song's one real structural turn.
Section by section
Opening verse
“the birth of the eleventh plague”
The song frames its horror in mock-Biblical terms, inflating a zombie outbreak to the scale of an extra plague beyond the ten of Exodus. This elevates B-movie content into something that sounds like scripture, a favorite Misfits move of treating horror-film tropes with mock-epic seriousness.
First chorus
The chant arrives abruptly after the verse's description of disaster, and its simplicity—just the hunting line repeated with vocalized howls—turns the song from narrative into ritual. It reads almost like a transformation is occurring in real time, as the narrator's voice becomes part of the mob he was just describing.
Second verse
“an evil screaming in my head”
Here the camera turns inward. Where the first verse surveyed mass devastation, this one tracks the narrator's own disintegration—he can't control an 'eerie feeling' and doubts he'll survive. The move personalizes the apocalypse, suggesting infection or madness has reached him directly.
Closing repetition
The song ends on the same chorus loop rather than resolving, which enacts its own theme: there's no cure, so the killing simply continues on an endless schedule. The lack of narrative closure is itself the point.
Craft
- imagery of plague and apocalypse
- References to burning flesh, corpses blocking the way, and genocide build a sensory, almost newsreel-like picture of catastrophe before the song pivots to the fantastical zombie conceit.
- chant/refrain
- The repeated hunting-humans line, punctuated by wordless howls, functions like a ritual incantation, turning horror-movie content into something closer to a tribal rally cry.
- genre allusion
- The explicit nod to a classic zombie film situates the song as deliberate pastiche, borrowing B-movie mythology rather than inventing original lore.
- blurred pronoun identity
- The shift from describing humans as prey to the narrator joining the 'we' who hunt them collapses victim and monster into the same voice, deepening the horror.
Reading it
Read straightforwardly, this is horror pastiche for its own sake — the Misfits borrowing zombie-film mythology to produce visceral thrill rather than social commentary. A more pointed reading notes the detail that the plague is man-made and that it compels suicide as a path to reanimation; that could be read as a dark joke about self-destructive urges or nuclear/biological-weapons anxiety filtered through drive-in movie imagery, with the 'hunting humans' chant doubling as a statement about humanity's own capacity for violence against itself. Both readings coexist; the song doesn't develop the social angle enough to insist on it, so the horror-movie surface reading is the safer bet.
Context
Horror punk as a genre, which the Misfits are credited with founding, routinely draws direct imagery and titles from horror and sci-fi B-movies. This song's content and title evoke classic zombie cinema explicitly, fitting the band's broader catalog of songs built around slasher and monster-movie tropes rather than personal confession or political statement.
Listen for
- the shift from wide-angle plague imagery to first-person panic between verses
- the wordless howls punctuating the chant, which do a lot of the horror atmosphere's work
- the way the chorus's simplicity contrasts with the denser, almost overloaded verse lines
- the lack of any bridge or resolution, reinforcing the sense of an unending outbreak
About Misfits
The Misfits are an American punk rock band, often recognized as pioneers of the horror punk subgenre, blending punk and other musical influences with horror film themes and imagery. The group was formed in 1977 in Lodi, New Jersey, by vocalist, songwriter, and keyboardist Glenn Danzig.
1977 - present / United States
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