Zombies!

Not Edited
There has been an unstoppable force, a horde if you will, staggering through all forms of entertainment in recent years. This epidemic has bitten, clawed, and mauled into movies, TV, video games, books, and nearly every other source of media. What I’m referring of course to the incredible way that zombies have become such a huge part of society. It’s been interesting to watch how they’ve saturated the entertainment industry and yet are still eagerly looked forward to every year as they come up in what we indulge. I wonder why exactly we are so fascinated with the idea of the dead reanimating and so violently munching on our bodies. The fact that it has become such a prevalent source of entertainment shows that there must be a reason for our undying interest in this genre.
                I hold my own interest in this genre as I have always enjoyed it from a young age when I saw the first “Night of the Living Dead” by George A. Romero, and so I have my own beliefs of why I and others find the undead so enticing to watch. George A. Romero is quoted as saying “I also have always liked the monster within idea. I like the zombies being us. Zombies are the blue-collar monsters.” This is by far one of my favorite explanations the captures what truly make zombies terrifying and unendingly interesting at the same time. You can be scared of spiders, the dark, or monsters, but zombies are frightening in a way that these things cannot be. They are us. They are a twisted and dark version of us and in a way very intimate. A complete stranger, someone you have no association can rob you and scare you, but the idea of your closest friend or family member reaching for you with the soul intent of turning you into their personal chew toy is something that can shake us. They are unsophisticated, simple instinct driven killers with no true goal other than to kill.

There is more to the appeal of a zombie apocalypse however. Through the utter devastation and terror of the situation, it has a strange way of feeling controllable. Movies have taught us that any average guy can survive a zombie attack and save the people he loves. It portrays a sense of invincibility that is easy to believe. Whereas the living can be unpredictable you can always count on the undead to do the same thing. They may be tough, but they are nearly always portrayed as destroyable objects that can be escaped or dispatched and faced with this challenge it is not uncommon to see apocalypse of the undead kind not only survivable, but an entertaining way to fight against the end. The desensitizing effect this flooding of the genre has had has engrained us with these ideas of being a cool macho zombie slayer an actual possibility. It seems to be comparable to the perceptions that games such as “Call of Duty” present, have lead youths to believe war is nothing more than a cool scene from a movie, when the reality is often something entirely different. Could we make it through such an event? Is it possible to avoid such a gruesome death at the hungry teeth of a corpse reanimated? It is impossible to know but these ideas continue to flourish throughout our entertainment.