Zombies & Us

Thoughts?  Mine below...

I thoroughly enjoyed the first season of AMC's The Walking Dead.  I'm not much of a horror movie buff, but have definitely gotten a kick out of zombies in other media.  World War Z was a great book, and killed some good time playing Rebuild here and there over the last couple months.

But what's the appeal?  It's not just me.  It's nothing to match vampires, but zombies have had something of a resurgence in popular culture (thankfully, not just a plain resurgence).  Let's start with someone else's take.

Pop culture essayist Chuck Klosterman took on the topic, arguing that zombies resonate as "allegories of how their day-to-day existence feels."  It's true that "zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork." Is it really that combating a zombie outbreak is really just a more heroic version of what too many of us do on a daily basis?

Of course, I'd imagine Klosterman hasn't spent nearly the same amount of time thinking about zombies as Robert Kirkman, the man behind the Walking Dead graphic novel.  His introduction is more of a personal opinion, but I think tackles this topic.  Some zombie movies are all about "splatter fests of gore and violence," but the great zombie stories "make you question the fabric of our very society."  So far sounds like Chuck...  But the real appeal of zombie movies is how different the post-outbreak world is.  The fascination isn't that not that killing zombies is so similar to our daily grind, it's that everything we worked for has been replaced with an everyday struggle for survival.

That's why, in some of the best zombie stories, the real enemy isn't the zombies.  They're always a threat, whether they ratchet up the tension by possibly popping out around any corner or just keep vague pressure on the protagonists.  But once you're deep into the story (e.g., 28 Days Later), you can't just count on ever more hopeless numbers of zombies to reach the climax.  How people react under pressure is the real engine of the story.  "I want to explore how people deal with extreme situations and how those events CHANGE them": thank you Robert Kirkman.

But why zombies?  Zombie stories take place in a post-apocalyptic world, but a more fantastical rather than deathly serious one.  Nuclear holocaust can test a character too, but it's a lot less fun.

Some of my recent zombie favorites