The zombies are taking over. There must be reason.
You would have thought the genre would have been thoroughly mined out by the old Romero flicks. Yeah, they were scary, and lots of fun, and for a while his sequels seem to have extracted everything that could be squeezed out of the “The Walking Dead” trope. Sure, all the bogeymen have their season; vampires, werewolves, even the mummies. But they all come and go, or at best sputter periodically back to life and then fade away again.
But the zombies won’t go away, and its not just grade B slasher epics and SyFy gorefests, but TV series, major theatrical features with big budgets and A-list stars, the damned things just don’t want to die off. It’s not just the exploitation of a profitable fad that you would eventually expect to taper off. This is getting bigger, its got legs. Even Space Opera has its Rievers.
Far be it from me to posit some deep-seated psychological motive at work here, but its hard to escape the notion. What is it about the slow-shuffling, rotted-flesh, grotesque twitching undead that has captured our collective imagination? Could it be a sublimation of the AIDS epidemic? A manifestation of a psychic symbol of the Tea Party? Illegal Aliens? Crystal meth freaks? Jihadist terrorists?
Like vampires, they are even starting to develop a mythos that migrates from film to film–you have to shoot them in the head, they hang out in sterile urban malls and the banal landscapes of suburbia, they are the latest Children of the Apocalypse. They won’t negotiate, you can’t reason with them and they always want more. They are not afraid to die. We now expect them to behave a certain way, Even the Game of Thrones universe has it own variant.
Surely this phenomenon has not gone unnoticed. And surely I’m not the first to suspect that their ubiquity and staying power in popular culture stems from some deep-seated, highly disguised subconscious fear we are afraid to bring up and face head on.
The films are very popular with young people. Could the walking undead represent for them the aging population that seems to refuse to just step aside and die?
Somebody help me, here. This just might turn out to be important.
