Why Do We Fear Zombies?

There's no doubt that zombies are the monsters of the moment.  Every generation has one, all with sound cultural and psychological reasons behind them.

Just as the vampire horror genre boomed in the 1980s, along with the AIDS. scare (something dangerous passed on through bodily fluids), then the zombies have something important to tell us about our own era. It's through them that we're venting some tension.

So what's it all about?  I've collected together some of the best theories to date, which you can read while you're counting down to the actual zombie apocalypse.

Good luck with that by the way!

Before we venture into the modern day, let's nip back into the past, to when zombies first appeared in popular culture.

There was something a little different then.  We weren't looking at a massive infestation of the undead, but one threatening from the fringes of society.  In short, it was all a little bit worrying that African-Americans could no longer be labeled as property and stuck onto the plantations.

When White Zombie appeared on the silver screen in 1932, there were people in the audience who had been born into slavery.  Veterans of the American Civil War were still alive; and zombies were most definitely the preserve of the mystical blacks.

So what if those unsupervised colored people, no longer under the yoke of a nice slave owner, took to Voodoo magic?  What if they used it to turn a white woman into a mindless zombie doing their will?  (Also known as inter-racial marriages.) 

Just stare into the eyes of Madge Bellamy (pictured above) and tell me - do you want your womenfolk being zombified like that?!

The horror!  The danger!  They could be doing anything if we're not watching them!  It'll all end in civil rights and African-American presidents, you just mark my words!  You listening, y'all?

I'm sure that we've all stared in horror at our newspapers and television screens.  Or we've rushed into online forums, gasping in outrage at someone being wrong on the internet. 

At least we can get at them there.  We can use our reason to teach them the error of their thinking.

Most of the time though, we're left tearing our hair out, shrieking at inanimate objects.  How can they say that?!  Why are they obeying those orders?!  How is this person even getting votes?!

"I hate people,"  A friend of mine often quips, usually in a resigned, dead-pan tone; and generally after reading the political reports of The Other Party.

I usually concur, as our politics run parallel.  It's so easy to become depressed, when the Age of Information has laid it out stark that there are a lot of people being wrong out there.  I'm not talking about breaking laws or worshiping a different deity - such criminals have always existed - but the shock of discovering that your own truths are not necessarily self-evident to everyone else.

There had always been the vague feeling that they were before.  That some things are so blatantly right, that no-one in their right minds could think otherwise.  But they do.  And they're everywhere.  And many of them have the vote.

The only natural conclusion to reach, in such circumstances, is to assume that they are mindless drones.  They've been starved of the correct information (by only reading tabloid newspapers and watching soap operas) or ill-educated by the failing in our school systems.  Or they've been brainwashed by evil clerics and half-witted celebrities.

Unfortunately, they keep on coming and there's only so much you can do.  You can't hunt down each and every one of them, proscribe a course of selected book reading and teach them the right way to think.

Because there's too many of them.  They're going to end up forcing unpalatable laws or electing in terrible representatives.  They're going to cause stupid fads and fashions. They're going to lead to the destruction of all humankind and topple civilization as we know it.

You will live to see it.  But worst still, what if you become overwhelmed by sheer peer pressure into thinking like them?  What then?  Oh no!  Then YOU would become a zombie too!

By the start of the 21st century, we couldn't be bothered with all of those vague metaphors about societal rot and lack of thinking.

We got the message!  There was a pandemic of hippies/racists/anti-racists/conservatives/socialists/liberals/communists/fascists/feminists/misogynists... oh! Name your gripe and insert it in the gap.

They were mindless and they were undermining life, the universe and everything.  But at least they were our people.  Uneducated and unthinking, but still home grown.

At the turn of the century, we had something much more scary to contemplate.  We were back with the Others. Not marginalized Others in our own society, doing suspicious things in swamps, but people on the other side of the world - Being Wrong.

Except, when they were wrong, things tended to get blown up over here and people died.  It wasn't just ideas infecting brains, but real danger to life and limb too. 

Movies like 28 Days Later encapsulated the post-9/11 zeitgeist with an almost blatant realism.  It took the developing ideas of films like Twelve Monkeys (1995), but switched them totally into the zombie genre.

These human monsters were relentless, but they were also furious.  The violence came not from mindless persistence, but from real rage and vengeance.

It was almost like saying that those in the West might have, vaguely, sort of, not really going into the specifics, done something to provoke terrorist attacks in our cities.  Could our military have done something a bit dodgy?

Not that anyone is taking the blame here, because we're just innocents caught up in the frenzy; and those terrorists are still brainwashed zombies.

28 Days Later might be a classic, but it's not proper horror, if we're being made to soul-search our own thinking.  It's much better when we can feel superior, while also letting out some of that inner fear and despair.

Hence the backlash. 

We still wanted that whole 'zOMG! The baddies are military and they come from overseas' thing, but at one step removed.  Godwin's Law kicked in and we were immediately facing a veritable onslaught of Nazi Zombies.

Three movies and a notable appearance in the game Call of Duty: World at War later, we're still not completely sated.

Nazi Zombies tick too many boxes.  They look like us and they rot, hence they can be a perfect metaphor for the ills in our own society.  This works particularly well if your own politics cannot ever be aligned with the white supremacist ideals of the Third Reich (thus bringing us 180 degrees from White Zombie).

The thinking person will also find many calming analogies in the fact that the similarity didn't end with skin color.  Historically, the only reason that the Nazis are so reviled and such easy targets is that they lost the war.

While the Third Reich went further, much more openly, than other Western societies, they did not exist in a vacuum.  The concentration camps were nicked from the British.  The gas chambers followed blueprints developed in Nevada, USA.  The eugenics program was practically universal. The racism is still endemic throughout the world.

Sorry! Sorry!  This is the comedy backlash era!  I'll return my observances back to the realism year and quickly realign my comments with the current age.  *inserts a LOL*

While rotting white people are soothing all of the mid-range people - who would have been happier with more Night of the Living Dead or Day of the Dead - we also get a third box ticked. 

Nazis invade your country and kill your people.  That's the borderline 28 Days Later people sorted out too!  But without the unsettling background message!  Take down those zombie terrorists and laugh as you do it!

There is one last social consideration to take on board, before we move into the realm of the physical.

When the zombie apocalypse comes (we're so past 'if' at this stage), we will have hard choices to make.  Do we lay down and play dead, then get back up again and eat our families?  Or do we fight back?

On the most superficial scale, that's asking if we stand up for our beliefs.  If all of society appears to be thinking Wrong Things simultaneously, then do we put our heads above the parapet and speak out against the crowd? 

That can be really hard.  It can involve standing firm against peer pressure and making your mother cringe.  It opens us up to ridicule, at best, and prison or assassination at worst. 

Or we can side-step all thought of that and just kill zombies instead.  Staying silent, but watching movies, reading books and playing games, where we symbolically speak up by shooting zombies in the head by proxy.

On a deeper, more primal scale, it's stepping away from the veneer of civilization.  It's letting our bestial, murderous tendencies rise to the fore.  We are human beings, probably the most vicious, brutal, dangerous creature to have ever stalked the planet.

We smile as we kill.  We plan it.  We don't just kill for self-preservation or food.  Look at our history and you'll find that we, as a species, will commit genocide on the flimsiest of excuses.

As individuals, we might believe ourselves to be good, wholesome people, who wouldn't hurt a fly.  But if we didn't collectively stand by and watch other people do it in our name, then the world would be a much better place right now.

Zombies allow us to stop lying to ourselves.  They are sort of human and we kill them en masse.  It's them or us.  Just like it's always been.

It seems that you can barely turn around for yet another zombie apocalypse video game appearing on the market.

Pre-orders are already pouring in for this Christmas's most anticipated zombie game. The Walking Dead is based on the graphic novel by Robert Kirkman and artists Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard.

It's already spawned a highly successful television series, starring Andrew Lincoln and Sarah Wayne Callies.  Now, instead of watching others fight for their survival against zombie hordes, you get to do it for yourself.

The Walking Dead is entering a gaming market already in love with yet another zombie game (or ten).

ArmA 2 was a reasonably popular military simulator, until Operation Arrowhead introduced the DayZ mod.  This unleashed zombies onto the soldiers and suddenly it was the best game EVAH! Or, at least, until the next batch of similar zombie apocalypse fests arrive.

At the time of writing, Steam has just started its Halloween sale.  Included there are dozens of brain-eating predators.  Deadlight looks good.

And we haven't even mentioned Left 4 Dead here.  The zombie games keep coming with the relentlessness of the horrors that they encapsulate.

This isn't even a phenomenon confined to 2012.  Who can forget the most memorable game trailer of last year?   Dead Island's evocative entrance became a meme. There are some who'd maintain it's better than the actual game!

But why are we so enamored of zombie apocalypse survival games?  One Norwegian academic made it the mission of his thesis to find out.

(Does that really mean that he's got a doctorate in zombies?)

Again this is a throwback to our early survival instincts, when rotten food would kill us outright.  Anyone who has ever suffered from food poisoning will know that it's not any better for us in the 21st century either.

As soon as we see or smell anything that's decomposing, our brains send urgent messages along the lines of 'do NOT put this into your mouth' and 'back away from the mold'.

That's the problem with zombies.  They arrive rotting and won't let us move away.  It's not a case of not putting it into our mouths, it's avoiding being put into theirs!

Zombies represent something a little more dangerous than, say, a vampire.  Despite several centuries of class war, our brains still haven't evolved into warnings like, 'be scared of the aristocratic count'.

But the fear of rotting is much more primal.  Moreover, it's all tied into the fear of death.

In the search for why zombies so fascinate and repel us, the most obvious answer of all is that they are the undead.

We are all going to die.  Your parents, siblings, partner/spouse, children, all of your extended family, friends, acquaintances and work colleagues are going to die. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, living God of the Internet, is going to die.  Your favorite rock star is going to die.

Some of my loved ones and heroes already have.

Everyone thoroughly depressed now?  How about cheering yourself up with a nice zombie apocalypse!  It's been doing the trick since about 2150BCE, when the Epic of Gilgamesh first unleashed the genre on an unsuspecting world.

We try not to, but we can't help our minds flashing over what the occupants of those graves must look like now.  Zombies rise out of the soil for our inspection.  We see that decomposition; we face down the most horrific conclusion of our lives.

What breaks our hearts in mourning is that we've lost our loved one's mind.  We can see what they looked like, as we have the photographs and video footage, but there's no sentience in celluloid. 

That will be us too.  One day, the vital, busy mind that's reading these words will be stilled.  Gone.  Beyond thoughtfulness and reason, unless religion is right with the Afterlife.  If the Atheists called it instead, then our brains turn to mush and feed the worms.  Nothing else remains.

Zombies take that mindlessness and let us take pot-shots at our disbelief and grief.  Aim right for the head now.  Take it down.  Have your cathartic vengeance.

Each dead zombie is one more confrontation with our own mortality.  But the horde is relentless - there are always more dead than were ever alive at one time - and our fascination and fear lie in the fact that we can't kill them all.

One day we will have to join their ranks; and it won't be pretty.