Good
question. Why are they so popular? You would think that as a guy who has
invested the time into writing a trilogy based on zombies, I would have a
response waiting to fall from the tip of my tongue. The truth is; I kind of
didn’t when I started putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as the case
may be). But as time went on, I was asked this question more and more and I’ve finally
been dragged, kicking and screaming, into thinking it over. So here it is. It should
be interesting… or at least moderately amusing.
To
start with, I think there are two things involved in the modern concept of
zombies that makes them so popular in our society. The first is the idea of
zombies themselves, and the ancient human motivator that these monsters have always
embodied since someone first dreamed them up: our fear of the unknown- which in
this case, boils down to our fear of death. This fear is the driving force
behind so many things in our lives that we hardly recognize its existence until
we actually sit down, take stock, and be brutally honest about our motivations
for doing the things we do. In the case of zombies, though, it’s pretty easy to
see. They’re dead, they’ve been somehow brought back to some sort of
pseudo-life, and they shamble around trying to kill living people. They’ve got
everything needed to scare the crap out of us: Death- oh no! Corpses- Gross! And death- oh no! Trying
to kill me- Run away! Death- oh no!
Death, death, death.
All of this “death” stuff is very scary for us human creatures
who are so instinctively concerned with life and living. The idea, the fear
titillates us. And we love to be titillated.
The
second element to the popularity of zombies comes in the form of our fascination
with the apocalypse that generally accompanies their presence. Now, let’s be
fair, this fascination with the apocalypse has always been present in human
societies to some degree (think Ragnarok in Norse mythology, the floods in
Greek, Christian, Sumerian, etc… myth stories). Our modern experience with it
is therefore nothing special, but where does it come from? Well, the answer to
that is based on- you guessed it- our fear of death! All of these stories, from
floods to earthquakes, to a bunch of giants coming down to smash us into bloody
pulps, are ways for us to categorize, make predictable, the idea of death, of
our mortality, so that we’ll feel better about the whole scary business of not
having coffee or beer anymore.
Now,
if you take zombies (Death- oh no!) and the apocalypse (Death in large numbers- oh no!) and combine them, why, you get a
perfect storm of fear and anxiety. But never fear. These are stories. And we
are all living a story, the story of our lives. In that story, we all have a
main character, the person who looks back at us in the mirror. And the main
character in stories usually survives any crazy scenario nature or bad
screenwriters can throw at them. So, that person in the mirror will survive!
Right? That one person is the hero, they’ll be the one to live while everyone
else gets swarmed by- insert your apocalyptic
event. That’s how we picture it, isn’t it? And there’s nothing wrong with
that. It helps us get through the day and gives us something to think about
while we’re on the bus to work, or while we’re at work snapping circuits
together or flipping burgers or… whatever. So go ahead zombie apocalypse, give
it your worst. I’m not afraid.
