Why Zombies?

[nolabear]

Historically, it's pretty easy to figure out why a particular kind of horror creature will ascend in the public consciousness. It tends to be a reflection of repressed anxiety that surfaces in a manageable form. Frankenstein was created when medical science was booming and rather frightening to the populace. Godzilla and the Japanese monsters followed a nuclear attack, as did The Incredible Shrinking Man in the US. Dracula became a romantic, sexual figure during the repressed Victorian era and now during the simultaneous upsurge of sexual freedom and conservatism (True Blood vs Twilight).

So what's up with zombies? General paranoia about what is coming for you and can't be killed or controlled? Fear of being the last sane person left on Earth?

Whaddaya think?

[rrneck]

1. A walking, moaning plague of easy targes that splatter well. nt

[charlie and algernon]

2. George Romero turned his movies into parables against mindless consumerism

[nolabear]

4. I'd forgotten all about that! I remember reading it long ago.

I guess these days they'd be Aberzombies.

[ZombieHorde]

3. Consumerism and pointless wars.

The zombies in many movies are very slow. If the people worked together, the zombies would be very easy to defeat, but the people freak out and fight each other, which allows the slow moving zombies to move in.

[nolabear]

5. Something tells me you have inside info.

[Swede]

6. Werewolves,vampires and zombies started out as our neighbours.

Something changed them into monsters. We fear our neighbours.

[tigereye]

7. fear of diseases?

How Freudian an analysis do you want? :rofl:

[nolabear]

8. LOL... you know not whom you ask.

[tigereye]

11. yeah, I think I do - fellow therapist here!

:hi:

[Chan790]

9. This is really a simple one if you think about it.

It's all about the end of the world, the collapse of civilization. Zombie films almost always depict the world as overun by the dead, society has failed and man is alone in the post-apoc wasteland surrounded by the walking rotting dead. The end of civilization, the rise of the libertarian "hell of necessary self-sufficiency."

It represents our deepest fear. The best has past us by, we're on the down side of history, just running out the string in the decaying wasteland of our culture.

The reflection isn't of the monster in this case, it's of the consequences of that monster. Zombies are decay and mindless consumption, we are social-decay and mindless consumption. We're the fucking zombies, man!

[kayakjohnny]

10. Damn!

That was good.

[nolabear]

13. That WAS good. The only thing worse than death anxiety

is undeath anxiety.

[LostInAnomie]

12. Zombies are a slow, creeping manifestation of death...

... and how little we can do to stop the inevitable. Just like shooting a zombie, death is easy to stave off for a little while (i.e. going to the doctor, eating right, etc.) but that only slows what IS going to eventually happen. At some time, there will be nothing more you can do. You will eventually have no place else to run and death/zombies will eventually get you.

[dimbear]

14. Zombies started out as cheap labor, manufactured by

African witch doctors. Leads me to believe they must nowadays represent illegal immigrants.

Vampires, of course, represent ex-spouses.