that living-dead thing
By Nicholas McCoy
Originally written for The Thunderword.
The scene is a super-max prison emptied out and protected by gun turrets. Or an island, close to supply routes but isolated and only accessibly by boat. Or an abandoned house half-way up a snowy mountain, away from human contact, protected not from, but by, the elements.
All are surrounded by corpses, upright and shambling, moaning for the brains of the survivors hiding inside.
People have many different plans and theories about what to do if the zombie apocalypse finally hits. Semi-humorous guide books to surviving the oncoming, flesh-starved hoards sell like hotcakes. Movies and games about apocalypse survivors facing off against decomposing masses, and each other, proliferate.
These days it seems like the second the word zombie is dropped on a conversation, everyone is offering up their personal plan for when the dead rise. What has fueled this fetid fascination?
Zombies hit the big time in pop-culture when, forty years ago, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead premiered. Romero debuted the zombie (called ghouls in the film) as most of us know them today, as uncoordinated, flesh starved corpses descending en masse on the unaware.Like the cadaverous fiends themselves, the trend was slow moving. Today, Night of the Living Dead is a well-known cult classic.
Romero's zombies were a product of the cold war, and the fear people have of the unknown, the end that comes with no reason and no warning--the atom bomb that obliterates civilization, leaving illness and decay in its wake. Although much of the mindless fear of the Red Menace had abated by the time the movie premiered, the ramifications of our nuclear advancement continued to resonate within fiction.
These days, however, the zombie menace we fantasize about has taken on new characteristics. In movies such as the Resident Evil series, the threat is explicitly biological. The shambling undead are often still the default, but other threats emerge as well. Some zombies retain higher reasoning, using it to better target the survivors. Animals, such as dogs in the first Resident Evil movie, or birds in the third, are also carriers of the zombie disease and ready threats. People may communicate the disease before they visibly transform, lurking within a group of survivors waiting to emerge.
And the disease, no matter how well it seems to have been eradicated, always returns.
Since 9/11, our fears in the United States of terrorist attack have increased. Our fear of biological threats and the occurrence of a pandemic are also intense. Most people have, at some point in their lives in the US, received some form of education about the existence of the HIV virus; we're aware of the spread of disease, aware that it can hide, that disease can be unobvious and can be spread by those we share the most intimate of connections with.
Additionally, the public responded with significant interest and fear to the 2009 Pandemic Flu. We know, as a public, that diseases can jump species (although maintained interspecies communicability is relatively rare). As far as the public is concerned, the threat of disease could arise from anywhere.
The idea of an intelligently designed, man-made pandemic plays off both our fears of a terrorist threat, and our fears of disease.
Our fear of each other--that the people we know could communicate a hidden disease to us, or that the stranger we see on the street is really a terrorist biding their time--is transformed into a fear of zombies. By preparing for the zombie apocalypse, we get a sense of preparation for the other threats we believe to be imminent as well.
The love of zombies isn't all serious; I know part of my personal adoration comes from the extremity of the idea. They make the menace absurd, and I know at the core I, like many people, love to engage the absurd. But there are metaphorical overtones to the treatment and attention we give them.
Zombie fiction lets us distance ourselves from what we're really afraid of, while still trying to engage the questions it raises. Where do you go, if the cities are diseased? How do you deal with the collapse of supply lines, water treatment facilities and electricity generators? What if you're in a pandemic and a strange asks you for shelter--what if they're infected?
Fiction and games engaging these questions don't answer them directly, but they offer ideas. We feel a kick, a thrill, that maybe when faced with the unthinkable, we could cope. We tell ourselves, we have a plan.
The zombie menace in fiction terrifies us, because it represents our real fears.
It also gives us a sense of empowerment.