What’s lumbering, mindless and dead all over?
I’ll give you a hint: they just might eat your friends and family.
Films, literature, comic books and music videos have portrayed zombies for years, but the decaying corpses are continually growing in popularity. The undead are no longer mere dance extras as they were to Michael Jackson in the “Thriller” video – they’re flesh-hungry badasses.
And we’re falling in love with them.
On my walk home from class the other day, I saw a dead squirrel on the side of the road. My first reaction was to cross the street, quicken my pace and think about playing with puppies. Lots and lots of chubby, clumsy puppies. Conversely, I recently devoured the first volume of The Walking Dead, a comic book series created by Robert Kirkman.
The cover shows a blood-spattered photograph and gray-skinned zombies with chunks of their skin missing, rotten teeth and blank, white eyes.
Who knows what it is about the fictional undead that draws us in. No one’s making movies about a road kill apocalypse. No one’s dressing up as their flushed pet fish for Halloween. If I can run past a dead squirrel and not think twice, how can I voluntarily read comic books plagued with images of rotten humans?
Monsters have been a fascination among people young and old for centuries, ranging from sea monster Scylla in Greek mythology to friendly, huggable beasts like Sulley and Mike in Disney and Pixar’s Monsters Inc.
But in the last five years alone, there has been a resurgence of zombies in pop culture – a zombie renaissance, if you will. Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone battled the undead with Woody Harrelson’s help in 2009’s Zombieland. Video game developer Capcom released Dead Rising in 2006, a survivor horror game, and achieved huge commercial success. The Walking Dead was turned into a television series last year and its second season began on Sunday.
So we’re into decaying corpses that are unable to speak anything resembling a language; they’re covered in flies and hungry for flesh. Does that make us weird?
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the States doesn’t think though. In preparation of the last hurricane season the CDC released a guide on how to plan for a zombie apocalypse on their website. The goal was to take a different approach on getting people engaged in hazard preparedness and the response was overwhelming.
The zombie apocalypse is a scenario that’s been – and continues to be – played out in numerous mediums, but unlike other monsters, their structure stays mostly the same. They’re always dead, they’re always bloody and they’re always out to eat you. They’re almost always slow-moving (the way it should be), but travel in herds. While you can often outrun a single zombie, good luck getting away from 40 of them.
But apocalyptic interpretations all have their sensitive sides, and that’s where our adoration comes in. For instance, in Peter Jackson’s 1992 film Braindead (or Dead Alive, as it was retitled for North American release), the protagonist takes care of his mother-turned zombie as long as he can before she starts turning the town into her kind and he tries to keep everything a secret from his new girlfriend. Adorable, right? (And yes, you read that correctly. Peter Jackson as in Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson.)
Seven hundred litres of fake blood were used in the last scene of Braindead alone. The main character uses a lawnmower to fend off an attack. One zombie is thrust up against a wall, impaled by a light bulb and turned into a rotten, fleshy lamp.
Some people are into horror, gore and being spooked. I, on the other hand, was frightened by Scary Movie 3. What got me hooked on zombies are the s
tories of those who are desperately trying to survive the apocalypse. All they want are Twinkies, man! They lost their family! They’re lonely! It tugs at your heartstrings and terrifies you at the same time. It causes consideration and conversation about what you would do should zombies emerge.
Our love for zombies isn’t romantically-based – no one wants to kiss those things. While on the surface the idea of the dead coming back to life and taking over the world is plain horrifying, the zombie movement can also take a more insightful route in terms of observing human relationships.
It’s about rooting for the hero and cheering him or her on when she decapitates a zombie with a shovel. It’s about shedding that single tear when a character is bitten and the others have to kill them.
And if our obsession also helps us prepare for a natural disaster, then what’s the harm?
