Editor’s note: Liam’s theory about the appeal of zombies makes sense to me. The living dead provide a backdrop for human struggles that we can all relate to. I’ll also take his analogy one step further, and say that someone should replace British soldiers from the Revolutionary War with zombies and make a game out of it. At least they wouldn’t have to change the AI much. -Jay
If aliens from Mars tried to figure out what life on Earth
was like by examining our popular media, they would quickly assume that we are
all shirtless, gunslinging badasses who, when not kicking everyone else’s butt, engage in love lives that are to romance what the movie Memento is to
chronology.
They would also think that zombies inhabit Earth — lots and
lots of zombies. The leading cause of death on Earth is not heart disease,
cancer, or Chuck Norris. It is being eaten alive by either the living dead, or
victims of an infection that makes people act like the living dead.
This conjecture makes me scared whenever we come close
to discovering life on Mars. I keep thinking they’ll just mercy kill us as soon
as they start receiving FX on their holoscreens.
America is obsessed with zombies, in case you haven’t
noticed. The only way that they could be more prevalent is if an actual zombie
apocalypse occurred. Judging by what’s on TV these days, this may have already
happened.
The question is: why? Why is America so obsessed with
zombies nowadays? People say that you can tell a lot about a culture from its
monsters. Does that mean that we’re all a bunch of mindless shuffling lumps of
flesh? Well, this is partially true, but our fascination with zombies has many
other sources.
First of all, we practically made the damn things. You can
tell people about Haiti and zombi powder (yes, it is spelled like that), but
when you say “zombie,” what comes to mind is as American as Grandma eating Babe
Ruth’s brains.
George Romero, as most people know, made Night of the Living
Dead, and created a new genre in the process. He introduced many of the common
themes: kill the head and kill the ghoul, the whole “living dead” thing, and
the part of zombie films that keeps us entranced to this very day: the
struggles of the human survivors.
He put a group of survivors in an old, abandoned house,
created tensions between them, and then made them try to fight off a pack of
zombies on the front porch. We don’t watch zombie movies for the zombies. We
watch them for the human stories that arise out of the death of the world and
society.
These relationships, which would normally be tenuous, are
stressed and tested by the fact that everyone in the world is trying to eat
you, and you’re stuck with someone you wouldn’t share a subway car with. Yes,
in games like in Left 4 Dead or Resident Evil 5, the characters are supposed to
collaborate, but you get the point.
Zombie plots regularly feature a plucky, outnumbered group
of people up against a much larger force of zombies. These zombies we are told,
are very stupid, usually shuffling along out in the open where anybody who can
hold a gun still can shoot them in the head. Usually, the outnumbered group
tends to win, whether by making it to the escape boat or helicopter, clearing
the land of the foul beasts, or finding a cure. Roll credits.
Now, reread that last paragraph. Does that sound familiar?
Face it, the foundation of America mirrors a zombie story.
Replace “zombies” with “British”, “group of survivors” with “Colonists”, and
“abandoned house” with “America”, and suddenly Night of the Living Dead is a
lot more familiar.
Is it really any wonder that America is so fascinated with
the stories of zombie survivors when the country practically is one? These stories
appeal to us because they seem strangely familiar, and not just because we took
a walk down Main Street.
Also, zombies are just plain fun to shoot, and we can kill
them without the messy moral dilemmas in games like Call of Duty. Sure, this
could be interpreted as a commentary on our consumerist society. However, when
blasting away at the undead is so enjoyable, do we really care?