Under a Gibbous Moon

With the increasing ubiquitousness of zombies in movies, video games and pop culture in general I have seen a slew over articles lately asking the question: Why zombies?

Well apart from the fact that they aren’t the neutered, angst ridden stand-ins for adolescent sexuality that vampires have become these days (which if you aren’t a thirteen year old girl or a lonely house wife, I recommend 13 Bullets by David Wellington for a more visceral vampire novel),  the zombie, as envisioned by George A. Romero, provide the perfect synergy of horror monster.Human being, institutionally fear three things, being eaten alive, dead bodies and disease. All three are good survival mechanisms. Being eaten alive is a pretty obvious thing to fear for the survival of the species standpoint and if you stumble across a dead body, most people wish to get away from it because deep down we are afraid that whatever made it dead might be nearby. Avoiding disease or those who show signs of it, is again an ingrained survival instinct.

Romero capitalized on this fear by taking something that is inanimate that we already fear and making it rise up eat people. On top of this, there is also the unspoken certainty that those that are out to get you used to be family, friends, neighbors and coworkers. Night of the Living Dead does this not once, but twice.  First with Karen Cooper killing and eating her parents and then with zombie Johnny dragging his sister Barbara out of the farm house at the film’s climax.

While Night of the Living Dead, the explanation is never given (though radiation from a crashed satellite was hinted at), it is not surprising how over time zombies in popular culture have trended toward some sort of virus being responsible since the bite of a zombie almost invariable turns to the person bitten into one. Whatever the given origin, the actual effect of zombies is very much like a disease. This is why in it is typically referred to as an “outbreak” as opposed to an “invasion”.

With all this going for them, it seems to me, to be hardly surprising that zombies are as popular as they are.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Related (maybe) posts:

1. Review: Doomed
2. Review: I Sell the Dead
3. Birthday of the Dead
4. Survivng the coming Zombie Apocalyspe
5. Review: Trick ‘r Treat