Zombie Week 2009 – In Which Greg Rambles On About the Living Dead
Why are zombie stories so prevalent in pop culture? From Night of the Living Dead to World War Z to the Bible to Marvel Zombies, people can’t get enough of the flesh-eating bastards.
Why?
Zombies are not, by any stretch of the imagination, scary on their own. By that, I mean a single zombie. In the realm of horror and monsters, zombies are towards the bottom of the ladder (a step above mummies). The terror comes from groups of zombies. Swarms.
Sort of like bees, except everybody’s allergic to zombie bites.
So why do we like them so much? Because zombie stories are rarely about the ghouls themselves. The thing about them (and, to be fair, every monster/creature) is the way writers, directors and other creators use them to provide commentary or metaphors on various situations, events, groups and/or society and humanity as a whole. George Romero has done this several times with great success.
In the less metaphorical area, these stories help us explore fantasies of surviving apocalyptic scenarios and the end of the world.
Also– the escapist thrill of decapitating a walking corpse is hard to top.
The only problem? Zombies are way overexposed. There was a resurgence in zombie movies and that spread to comics and now we’re being bombarded with the living dead every damn day. Marvel still has a zombie variant cover every month, regardless of the zombie content of the issue. For Christ’s sake– speaking of zombies– Smallville is doing a zombie episode.
(In the interest of openness and honesty, I’m guilty of this, too. There’s a zombie script sitting half-finished on my hard drive.)
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