The zombie fad we've had for the past few years...an expression of unconscious anxiety?

I've often wondered how all this zombie drivel became so popular the past few years. It occurs to me now that we were all aware there would be a pandemic here sometime soon. We had plenty of warning, both from experts and from observation: ebola, MERS, SARS, H1N1, etc. But we individually couldn't do much about it . So we pushed it down into our subconscious, where Hollywood and book publishers found it and ran with it.

What do you think?