On Zombies

January 12 2012

All about zombies...

I will begin by stating that my view on the icon of the zombie in contemporary literature and media has been drastically overplayed. This has become especially true in the past decade after the wake of new zombie-centric films, zombie-centric remake films and zombie-centric video games. Most of us are aware of the popular Xbox game "Left for Dead" and its recently released sequel. The game has been praised by zombie fans and casual gamers alike. The game itself features a small-ish range of zombie types. Most of which do not actually reflect the base characteristics of what one would commonly envision in the "classic" form of zombie. Such a zombie typically moves exhaustingly slow, owed to poor locomotive functioning within the reanimated corpse. Also, the classic zombie is much more of a walking corpse than a weird hybrid/mutated monster breed. Such hybrids seem apparent in Left for Dead, which I suppose in the end makes it a unique reinvention of the zombie in the first place. However, it is still branded a zombie game, thus fueling the ubiquitous zombie craze as of late. So what is it that makes zombies so awesome? Lets look further.

The zombie alone, as a mere creation, is so stimulating for the imagination for a few simple reasons. The zombie simultaneously animates our fantasies and our nightmares. On one hand, a zombie in its coming back from the grave, has cheated death. And don't many of us, on some level or another, fantasize about the potentiality of cheating death? The fact that the creature is cheating death by becoming something only half alive is irrelevant when posed adjacent to the fact that the zombie has indeed escaped death , ironically to serve as a minion thereof. Returning the the crossroads, the secondary allure of the zombie is that it very effectively inverts the benign nature of a stable, run of the mill human being. The "zombie-virus" transforms the ordinary into the nightmarish. When people engage their imaginations with the concept of a zombie or concurrent zombie outbreak, it is so terribly easy to re-contextualize within the order of ones own life. "What if my neighbor Bill was a zombie? Or my whole neighborhood?" A zombie is a very accessible icon, and perhaps more importantly, a very simple icon. And as much as zombies are overplayed within modern society, they are not going to cease there clawing on the doors and windows; they are not going to leave. A zombie is too archetypical, too ingrained within the psyche to be rendered into obsolescence.