When I heard a while back about the recently-released "Undead Nightmare" expansion for Red Dead Redemption I originally thought "hey that's pretty cool". Then I bought it (at $30 it's sort of hard to not recommend it by the way...but I digress) and started playing it and I thought "dude this is freakin sweet." This sort of made me wonder (as I tend to do), "hey, what's with all the zombie love lately?" And it's not just me - for some reason, zombies and zombie lore have enjoyed a surge in popularity in the past few years, especially within gaming/comic/"nerd" circles. I thought I'd posit (ooooh philosophy word) a few theories as to why this is.
I suppose the most obvious appeal zombies hold is their inherent gore-factor; after all, they are reanimated corpses, so while vampires are defined by fangs and sexiness, zombies are synonymous with decaying flesh and exposed internal organs. Add to this the fact that (at least in most popular zombie lore) they can only be killed by destroying the infected brain, you've got every Counterstrike player's wet dream wrapped up in an undead package (BOOM headshot).
One of the hallmarks of the 20th century has been the many advances in medicine that we have made. From penicillin to polio vaccines, we pride ourselves on using human ingenuity to overcome the worst that nature can throw at us. But recent outbreaks of things like Mad Cow Disease, Avian Flu, H1N1, and not to mention the omnipresent AIDS virus serve as stark reminders that deadly viruses do still exist, and they're scary. Nowhere is this epitomized more than in zombie fiction. After all, zombies are themselves victims - mothers, fathers and friends who have all succumb to an exotic virus against which even the most advanced medical techniques are rendered useless. Zombie transformations are usually portrayed as being fairly quick, grisly, and always 100% guaranteed once a victim has been bitten, and in almost all zombie literature the only cure is a bullet to the infected brain - a crude technique that mirrors (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) bloodletting and amputation, techniques that we scoff at today for emphasizing brute force in place of acquired medical knowledge. I think that this fear is why zombies themselves have undergone a paradigm shift over the past decades - from being supernatural creatures of Hell to being wildly contagious victims of an unknown infection. The fact that in the days of CAT scans and chemotherapy we are baffled by what the zombie virus is, how it works, or how to even begin to cure it brings to light the fact that in matters of the microbe, perhaps we are not as omnipotent as we like to think.
It's hard to deny that zombies themselves are scary. But they are scary in a different way than say, vampires or werewolves are scary; a single zombie is not in itself all that terrifying. In fact, a human could most likely very easily dispatch a single zombie, where that same human would find it difficult (if not impossible) to destroy a single vampire or werewolf. Where zombies get their strength (and their terrifying aspect) is their numbers; you can kill a werewolf or a vampire. You can even kill a zombie. What you cannot kill is zombies plural, as in an entire horde, as in all of continental North America is now a mindless flesh eating monster. This is why is truly frightening about zombies is that they don't attack you per se, but instead they attack the very world in which we live. Once that vampire or werewolf is dead, you bury its victims and then the world returns back to the way it was. In a zombie outbreak, that's impossible - because zombies are so widespread, and because they assimilate their victims into part of the horde, the world gradually changes from a human world possessed by monsters to a zombie world with a couple of humans still alive in it. You may still be alive, but your way of life, everything that was familiar or comfortable to you, is gone and you will never ever get it back. In a zombie apocalypse we are instantly transported from a life of North American luxury and comfort into a life of barely eking out a survival, scrounging for the barest of essentials while trying not to end up on the menu. Through their sheer mass of numbers, one thing is true from the start in a zombie apocalypse - you may be able to defend yourself now, but you will eventually run out of bullets. You will eventually run out of food, and then you're dead - and you are absolutely powerless to prevent it. That is the terrifying reality of the zombie threat - from the start you are already dead, it's just a matter of when and how - and the feeling of powerlessness that accompanies this realization is the greatest fear of our collective American ideal of ingenuity and individuality.
I started writing this entry because I found myself fascinated by zombie fiction as of late, and I wanted to try this exercise to see if I could understand that. What I found was that zombies represent, at least for me, all the fears of North American culture rolled into one ghoulish package. It may be the case that writers have recognized this and that increased zombie prevalence in books and film is an attempt to point the finger at our cultural way of life. It may also be the case that somebody just got the idea that they are both scary and fun to kill. Either way, whatever reason you choose for their surge in popularity, the fact remains that they make damn good video game cannon fodder. Keep 'em coming.
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