Though America had been increasing its suburban population since the Federal Housing Administration started insuring loans in the Thirties, it took the demand for housing following World War Two to really crank things up. During the Fifties and Sixties, “Levittowns” sprung up all across America. Planned communities, these networks of ranch homes gave middle class Americans access to the dream of nobility – a landed estate – at a reasonable price.
Of course, this new era of opportunity didn’t extend to everyone. The Federal Housing Administration expressly cautioned against extending loans to families of color – in writing – throughout the Sixties. The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, desegregating public schools, drove families that could afford it to move into pricier neighborhoods. The poorer classes were left in the cities; the middle class on up fled to the suburbs.
Throughout the country, the impulse was the same: get out of the city.
Welcome to the desert of the real.
Why is this? Cities represent one of the human race’s most lasting triumphs over privation. A walled collection of shelters, they provide cheap infrastructure – roads, water, lighting – for all inhabitants. By minimizing communication and travel costs, they encourage the growth of commerce. Cities certainly have their problems: crime, pollution, urban ugliness. But they seem to be a net positive for the species.
Suburbs take the worst aspects of cities and add few benefits in return. Most of the benefits of a suburb are private benefits: the spaciousness of my house, etc. There’s the intangible public good of a nice landscape. But add on top of that the increased cost of powering and watering a pocket of urbanity in the middle of nowhere. And the tendency to cloister oneself in a like-minded ghetto isn’t any better in the suburbs. Suburbs are expensive to get to and expensive to maintain. And the effort of paying that expense creates a kind of mental conformity.
Artists have been railing against the suburbs for the latter part of the Twentieth Century. The suburbs are bland, conformist, bastions of privilege. Richard Yates wrote about the pressure to conform in Revolutionary Road. The Lockhorns, the feuding married couple famous in American comic papers, were originally residents of a Levittown. From Kurt Vonnegut’s Deadeye Dick to Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes,” America’s artistic class has been unhappy with the suburbs for a long time.
In Romero’s initial Dead trilogy, people flee the cities for a farmhouse (on the borders of the suburbs), a shopping mall (the icon of suburbia) and a military base outside the city. However, they brought their problems with them – greed, paranoia, ambition and envious rage. They succumbed to the same bestial group mentality that they had sought to flee in the urban center.
Zombie films took off in the Seventies because they reproduced the “white flight” that America was still undergoing. But they horrified audiences because they suggested that fleeing to the suburbs wouldn’t work. The reason a killer in your house is so scary is because your home is your castle. It blends the familiar – your hall closet, the space under your bed – with the alien Other. Now imagine an army of killers moaning outside your door.
Zombie films petered out in the Eighties, however, not counting some remakes of wildly varying quality. It’s not like people stopped moving to the suburbs. It’s just that the message had been received. The suburbs became places for teen adventure and coming to terms with heartbreak (see the works of John Hughes). No zombies here!
Two things happened in the Twenty-First Century to make Americans fear the suburbs again: rising oil prices and the housing bubble.
Cheap gasoline is the lifeblood of the suburbs. Without it, the commuting lifestyle isn’t an option. Suburbs are “bedroom communities” – neighborhoods that exist only for people to sleep in and mow the lawns of. As the price of gas rises – which it did several times between 2002 and 2010 – living in the suburbs becomes a source of stress, not relief. How can I afford this beautiful home?
The housing bubble, the effects of which are still being felt in America, has been even worse. Planned communities have been wiped clean, as if by some undead disease, when the credit to build them dried up. Americans were told all their lives that homeownership was not only the key to wealth, but the right of every citizen. Then their mortgage became a burden. Then it became a monster, devouring their life savings and their future plans.
Economic turmoil causes us to doubt the safety of our castles. We rediscover the nagging fear that maybe fleeing the city wasn’t such a great idea. And in these times, nothing scares us more than a well-done zombie story.
Zombie stories terrify the West not because of a fear of disease. It’s not even the fear of death that keeps us clutching our duvets. Zombies terrify us because they suggest that nowhere is safe. We can’t escape zombies. Science says we should be able to – they’re slow! They’re dumb! They’re inefficient disease vectors! But they keep showing up anyway. No matter how high our fences, nothing will prevent a horde of shambling mouth-breathers from showing up outside our door.
Zombies reflect America’s skepticism of the suburban promise. It’s when the suburbs come under assault – either intellectually or economically – that the ghouls come back for more.
I don’t think that I agree with the central hypothesis. In my eyes, two of the central appeals of the zombie genre are the questions: “What happens if we suddenly and unexpectedly lose our intricate network of transportation and communication?” and the related “How would I be able to function in a rudimentary dog-eat-dog society when I don’t even really know how to start a fire, let alone repair the engine of my car?”
Both of these notions have become more pressing in the last decade or so, which in my opinion facilitated the re-rise of the zombie genre more than urban flight: Question no. 1 gains more and more importance in a world in which I can access all the information mankind has gathered in the last few thousand years by the touch of a button, even if I’m walking in the jungle or sitting on the toilet. I can tweet anything to anyone at any time, and some of us might be afraid about that: What if our communication with everyone depends on breakable electronic systems?
The second question relates to the satiric aspects of the zombie genre: The billionaire bank manager, the powerful president and the genius scientist would be nearly worthless in a post-zombie-apocalpyse society. The people we will need are mechanics, the carpenters, the welders. The average nurse will be more helpful than the average doctor, which means that paygrades will be reversed. And this reversal is especially attractive to an audience that is displeased with said bankers and presidents, celebrities and what-have-you. The phenomenon of cities being unattractive locations during a zombie attack is IMHO included into this reversal: NYC, for example, would be reversed from being the cultural and financial capital of Western society to a lonely and fearsome place nobody wants to go to.
Now, the following point touches on a different subject, but since you mentioned it: I usually hate it if something in a story doesn’t make inherent sense or is insufficiently explained. The one big exception is the zombie virus: Even the strong attempt at explaining the background and the mechanics of the disease is detrimental to a key aspect of the zombie genre: The notion that civilization is overrun by a catastrophe that can not be foreseen, stopped or explained. In serious zombie movies, none of the characters has ever seen a zombie movie before (in fact, they often don’t even know the word), which enhances the feeling the apocalypse could not have been expected in any way. This is also the thing which makes the zombie genre different from (and more attractive than?) “usual” disaster stories: In the usual earthquake, climate change or meteor movie, you have this one guy who knows in advance what’s going to happen and trying to warn everyone. In a zombie movie, this same guy might not even know anything is happening while the outbreak is already going on, because he’s in a coma or something.
Anyway, that’s just my two cents. Please tell me you find it interesting, otherwise I just wasted precious office time.
Time spent commenting at Overthinking It is never wasted!
I don’t think your theory and mine contradict. The useful people in a zombie apocalypse are the social outcasts (that guy in the hills who hunts with a crossbow) and the lower classes (that Honduran who speaks no English but knows how to strip down and service a Ford). The useless people are the middle and upper classes – the kind of folks who fled to the suburbs. So maybe we’re touching on the same story from different facets.
Yenzo, this is definitely an interesting take on post-apocalyptic narratives as a whole. (So you’ve earned your paycheck today as far as I’m concerned.) But if that’s all that’s going on, what would separate the zombie movie from the Mad Maxes and Waterworlds?
Thanks a lot for your support, guys! In that case, I will write some more ;-)
@John: Yes, we might be on to the same thing. I guess it’s a question of which effect explains how much variance in the zombie genre.
@stokes: You’re right, I was basically only talking about disaster stories, not apocalypse stories like Mad Max etc. There is certainly a relation between zombie apocalypse and apocalypse in general. The main difference between those genres is in my opinion two-fold: first, while a “usual” apocalyptic event can certainly change the landscape indefinitely, the danger itself is usually expected to end at some point in time (or it’s already over at the starting point of the story). The one big conflict or the one big flood have ended, and the world is forever changed by it. However, there is no immediate threat left (unless there is a good example which escapes me right now). In the zombie apocalypse, the danger continues indefinitely and might even increase over time (Romero’s zombies have the potential to develop new abilities). This shifts the focus from short-term survival and adaptation to living in constant fear (the effects of which are captured perfectly in the Walking Dead comic books).
The second point is the nature of the threat itself: Every disaster confronts us with our own mortality, but only zombies let us literally look into our own dead eyes, chipped teeth and decaying skin. This is IMO one reason for the constantly high gore-factor inherent in the zombie genre: The frailty of the human body is displayed very openly when someone destroys a zombie body. This concept reaches its climax when someone is forced to fight against a zombie which used to be a loved one just hours or minutes ago: The human ceases to exist and merges with the disaster itself, which is something that no other apocalyptic concept can deliver (unless, maybe, if it’s a religious apocalypse and people have the choice to defect to the side of the demons).
There might even be a third point, but maybe it’s just a subpoint of no. 2: Even if they act like lower animals most of the time, people in a zombie story should never forget that they’re basically dealing with humans in regard to the danger level of the threat: They are equal or superior to us in terms of physical strength and durability, they may be able to climb ladders, use tools and basically clear every obstacle that we can put in their way because: if it was built by a human body, why would another human body not be able to tear it down? The only thing we have on them is technology, and maybe long-term reasoning. If you think about it, zombie invasion stories should be related to alien invasion stories (only that we are the ones with inferior technology etc.), but the usual alien flick doesn’t normally go in this direction. I’m not fluent in sci-fi literature, but maybe there are some interesting storylines to this effect out there.
Everything Yenzo has said is awesome, and correct.
I’d like to offer a few more tweaks. Beyond just reversing the usefulness of high-class/low-class citizens, part of the fascination of a zombie apocalypse is that it removes our status as the Privileged Species: we are just a part of the food chain in a state of nature, and not even the top link anymore. We are busted down to a rank we previously held millennia ago, and it’s exciting to see how that turns out. We haven’t been prey for a long time. It is effective in a negative sense as horror (for obvious reasons) and in a positive way as an opportunity to see how human ingenuity deals with the situation.
Related to that, zombie stories are also Sartre’s moral from No Exit writ large: Hell is Other People. You cannot get away from them. The zombies are inescapable (and are symbolically “people,” whichever group the movie has decided to use them to represent allegorically), and then there are all the assholes you are forced to cooperate and cohabitate with, who are the real focus of all Romero’s movies.
Finally, there is also the true allure of any Post-Apocalyptic story: all social conventions have been removed, or are at least negotiable. This is what plunges us into the state of nature described above, and also what gives the aforementioned assholes more power over you, but it is also very attractive for everyone on at least some level, no matter who you are. It’s a brand new world, Anno Zombi Year One, and while it may not be pretty, you have the potential to make of it whatever you have the power to create.
How blatantly realistic yet beautifully realistic. Win.
Gah, I just realized I meant to say, “beautifully poetic.”
I fail. You win, I fail.
w/r/t science fiction: you know, I think one of the largely unacknowledged precursor texts for the modern zombie canon is John Wyndham’s 1951 book Day of the Triffids. Not so much for Night of the Living Dead, but for everything that came after. You’ve got the slowly shambling flesh eaters, the danger from other survivors, the authoritarian military run amok, and the “continual apocalypse” scenario Yenzo just identified.
Have you purposely omitted ‘Sean Of The Dead’? It takes place in a very big city – London. And Sean is not trying to flee it.
Yeah, Shaun of the Dead is a spoof / reversal of traditional zombie tropes. Spoofs are always tough to examine through the same lens as the ‘serious’ films in a genre.
One point about ‘Shaun of the Dead’ which actually fits in with Perich’s and Yenzo’s comments. Anyone watching this movie would assume that Shaun is living through the Zombie appocolypse but in reality it seems that only London was infected, but because of the lack of transportation and communication, no one in there troupe knew that. Just a small aside.
It fits even better than that–they stay in London, they live through the infection, and, at the end of the movie, they learn how to live with zombieism.
They stay in the city, and they adapt. Urban people utilize each other and survive.
I don’t see “Shaun of the Dead” as a spoof at all. It’s a very traditional zombie movie in basically every way, which just happens to have some romantic comedy elements thrown in. The characters aren’t even particularly genre savvy.
In the original Dawn of the Dead, there was no more explanation than “when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.” It’s an unexplainable, perhaps supernatural phenomenon that has occurred. And by explaining it by not explaining it, the audience can’t seek the holes in the explanations and can concentrate solely on the effects of the menace. Since the advent of the viral cause*, zombie films are less satisfying. Not only are there problems inherent in a pseudo-scientific explanation, the scientists of the world can work on a cure. There’s a hope in that. There’s an out for humanity. And isn’t it dread/lack of hope that keeps us watching zombie films? I think that’s the more basic appeal of the early Romero films: without an ability to explain the reason, there’s no ability to solve the problem. So all solutions are temporary ones. Survive the night. Survive a year. Survive as long as possible, but the dead still walk the earth, and you will never truly win. Isn’t that a bigger fear than our own death? The fear that eventually our entire species is doomed? Survive until our earth dies, our sun dies, our galaxy dies, however far you push it, there’s going to be an end.
* Of course I’m leaving out the Last Man on Earth (from way before the 28 Days Later rebirth) where a plague causes the undead problem, but they’re called vampires, not zombies.
Slightly off-topic, but for a mathematical model of zombie outbreaks, I highly recommend this paper:
http://mysite.science.uottawa.ca/rsmith43/Zombies.pdf
Here’s the abstract:
Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually
portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently,
we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie
movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and
their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the
model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but
not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the
effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular,
impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which
eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the
doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.
I love this!
“It’s not hard to keep someone from biting you.”
It’s not hard to keep a rational human being from biting you. It’s much harder to keep a rabid biped with opposable thumbs and a desire to do nothing else except bite you, from biting you.
“Unless you live on one of the country’s remarkably few family farms, you do not have the capability to grow a sustaining diet.”
You neglect to consider predation. There are great swaths of America where even if you don’t live on a family farm, you could easily sustain yourself with hunting, fishing, and growing what food you can in your Zombie Victory Garden. And, really, in the event of Zombepocalypse, I wouldn’t think anything about annexing an acre of that corporate farm I live next to.
“Your odds of successful scavenging are much higher in an urban center than in the sparse surroundings.”
I wouldn’t say “much higher,” and any advantage would disappear rapidly due to the much higher population of would-be scavengers. Once the power goes out, you’ve got about a week tops before you run out of fresh food, and then if you haven’t spent all your ammo on zombies, you’re going to be shooting it out over the last of the canned peaches.
Meanwhile, I’m laying out strips of fresh venison to make jerky. It’s a clear win for the ruralites.
It’s not hard to keep a rational human being from biting you. It’s much harder to keep a rabid biped with opposable thumbs and a desire to do nothing else except bite you, from biting you.
Here we stray into the territory of where along the zombie spectrum our hypothetical scenario falls. Are these guys fast, dumb tool-users (like in The Walking Dead)? Are they slow, strong brain eaters (like in the Dead trilogy)? You or I could fend off a shambler with a garden hoe and a quick walk. A sprinter, not so much.
I wouldn’t say “much higher,” and any advantage would disappear rapidly due to the much higher population of would-be scavengers. Once the power goes out, you’ve got about a week tops before you run out of fresh food, and then if you haven’t spent all your ammo on zombies, you’re going to be shooting it out over the last of the canned peaches.
A city that feeds a million people a day will have a greater stockpile of food than a farm that feeds a thousand people a month. Sure, it’s easier to grow more on a farm, but that takes, well, an entire season. Presuming you get it right on the first season. Farming isn’t easy, especially for city boys like me.
Of course there will be a battle with the last survivors over a dwindling pile of resources. I see no scenario where that’s unlikely.
I’m no expert in the Zombie genre, but I will say I found your suggestion that there’s a hole in the epidemiology of Zombie films very intriguing. You mentioned how during the bubonic plague no one knew how it was spread exactly, but we do know people had their own superstitious theories as to how it was spread and how to guard against it. I think it would be really interesting to see a zombie film where the cause of the outbreak wasn’t understood correctly. Maybe something more invisible than a bite or scratch caused it. Maybe there was a longer incubation period. That would be more terrifying–to follow a group of survivors and have one or more suddenly turn without causation.
Also, I do find your second idea regarding city flight intriguing. Isn’t one of the biggest horrors in zombie films discovering that a loved one is infected? That we can recognize ourselves and the people we love within the mindless hoard? I think there’s something there. I think perhaps this was your point, but the suburbs also commercialize the pastoral ideal. If you leave the city, you can escape its moral and political corruption. Life will be simpler, happier. When in fact, there is no escape. The pastoral ideal or myth is something that permeates British literature from as early as the middle ages. Could there be something there in connection with the bubonic plague? Or am I stretching?
The pastoral ideal or myth is something that permeates British literature from as early as the middle ages. Could there be something there in connection with the bubonic plague?
The notion of escaping the city to avoid the Death is definitely prominent in British literature. Hell, not just British – we owe a great deal of Middle Ages and Renaissance tradition to the tales in the Decameron.
I want a zombie apocalypse Decameron. Now.
I only have so many hours in the day!
You know, I bet you could totally sell that idea to a publisher. If PP&Z was published, why wouldn’t a Decameron with zombies make it? I wonder how many of the “problems” could be changed to zombie attacks and the like…
My mind is boggled.
Yeah, Zombie Decameron is a *really* freaking good idea, in a way that P&P&Z never was. Zommb-Decameron? Decazomberon? No no, “Decameron of the Dead.”
@Stokes:
I actually like “Decazomberon” the most- it reminds me of “Necronomicon.” They’d make the movie title “Decameron of the Dead,” for sure- that’d look better on the outsides of movie theaters.
@ Stokes: OMG, and what about a zombified Canterbury Tales?????
(Clearly, I have zombies on the brain right now… I hope they can’t smell it.)
@Perish – first of all LOVE this article! I have a DVDuesday at my apartment every Tuesday and due to yesterdays new releases being ‘The Last Airbender’, my friends and I decided to watch the first three episodes of The Walking Dead (6 of us were caught up, 6 people only saw the premiere and 7 haven’t seen it yet) which lead to lively debates about the Zombie genre as a whole, the specifics of the show and how we would survive the Zombie Apocalypse.
You mention ‘The predators inevitably die off or move on’ . . . my umbrage to this assertion is 1) They are already dead, how do they die off (I don’t mean to sound like a smart aleck when I ask this, I’m being sincere) and 2) They are not smart enough to move on as many of our natural predatory tendencies have been weened out of our genetic code. What I mean by that is if walkers know that through a fortified door is food and since they won’t die of hunger by sitting outside waiting, they would more likely stay and wait then wander away looking for another source of food. (Similar to a dog seeing a bag of food, you put the food in a bowl in another room and they see you put the bag in the pantry. A lot of dogs will spend a few minutes waiting by the pantry before they searching for the food – and yes I’m saying a dog is smarter than Zombie) True, they will eventually move on, but the risk/reward of staying and hoping I have enough food before I have to scavenger for supplies seems a bit too high. Personally, given the option of fortifying myself in a constantly sieged ‘Helm’s Deep’ or stay in someplace where I would only have to fight off a trickle when they do move on, I would take the trickle rather than the faucet.
Also – if ‘World War Z’ taught me anything it would be to go North where the Zombies would freeze. Sorry for all the ramblings – I actually have overthought the genre as a whole and have re-written this many times as I went off on several tangents. :)
Hey Bob!
You mention ‘The predators inevitably die off or move on’ . . . my umbrage to this assertion is 1) They are already dead, how do they die off (I don’t mean to sound like a smart aleck when I ask this, I’m being sincere) and 2) They are not smart enough to move on as many of our natural predatory tendencies have been weened out of our genetic code.
(1) If the zombies were literally immortal, they wouldn’t need to eat. They may no longer feel pain, but the brain – their one weak point – is the hungriest organ in the body. I’m presuming that, while zombies are “undead,” they are not indestructible.
(2) Predatory instinct and “smarts” have nothing to do with each other. This is just law of large numbers – any zombie that doesn’t have the sense to look outside the over-grazed city will starve. Either they get the idea on their own, or the zombies at the periphery of the city-swarm starve last. The effect’s the same.
To address 1, I guess it depends on what type of Z we are talking about. As you mention above – there are several types. Mindless shuffling walkers, sprinters, heck even Romero had a talking/shooting Bud. But in most instances, it seems that the undead have a ‘long’ life cycle (Long considering that they don’t eat).
In 28 Days Later, you can see them still ‘alivish’ but decomposed to a level where they can’t move. Dawn of the Dead remake had them badly decomposed a month or two after the survivors lock themselves in the mall, but still functional. The later of the Dead series (Day, Land, etc) seemed to be months after they last feed, but the walkers still . . . walked.
Rationally – the longer you live the better chance you have to survive simply due to dexterity of the geeks, but when debating a fictional apocalypse, we must define which fictional universe we are talking about ;)
Thanks for writing this, John. The Walking Dead is destined for some serious overthinking, and this is a strong start.
I think you’re dead-on (ha ha!) in your analysis of how zombie stories invariably pass judgment on the suburban lifestyle. But where I think you go too far is your claim that staying in the city is actually your SAFEST option. I’m not buying it.
You say, “What happens in any hunting ground that’s overpopulated with predators? The predators inevitably die off or move on. You can wait up in your concrete fortress for the hordes to dwindle to nothing, then take to the streets.” But in most of the zombie stories I’ve seen, there’s little evidence that the zombies either die off or move on. If they do die off, it’ll be over years, not days. And they aren’t wolves who will trek hundreds of miles in search of food. In a lot of the zombie movies I’ve seen, they pretty much stay in the same place for months, walking in aimless circles, unless they’re given something to chase.
But I think you’re mainly forgetting the first rule of zombie movies – you have just as much to fear from your fellow human beings as you do the zombies. You think you’re just going to able to wander to the bodega down the street and take what you need? That place will be picked clean in hours, and all those cans of Progresso are going to be defended by armed gangs. God help you if you’re a moderately attractive woman.
What I’m saying is, anarchy and panic are just as deadly as the zombies. That’s a big part of the reason you want to get out of the city – the survivors are going to be ripping each other to pieces for whatever resources they can find. You’re better off going to an isolated location, where you can protect yourself against ALL the predators, alive and dead.
Here’s a head start on lines of overthinking:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18683_7-scientific-reasons-zombie-outbreak-would-fail-quickly.html
Hi. First time commenter, long time fan of Overthinking It.
I have been a fan and follower of the zombie genre from the first time I saw Night of the Living Dead when I was maybe 12. For me, our fascination with the “walking dead” derives from the paranoid undercurrent those of us in the developed world have inre: the institutions, infrastructure and community that we are so blessed with yet take entirely for granted. We take things like school and friends and electricity and highways as a given. They’re there today and will still be there tomorrow.
But what if one morning you wake up to discover that your mom has eaten your dad’s head, your phone won’t send or receive Tweets, your school is on fire and there is a pile of smoldering rubble at the end of the driveway? All you have left is your feet and your fists, nunchucks from the flea market, and what food you can scrounge. What now?
At its heart, the zombie genre is about human adaptability. As easy as we have it today, shit can go haywire in a heartbeat. Can we pull it back together and rebuild once the world we know is flipped on its head?
As much as I enjoy the implications and allegories present in the genre, there is a supposition that runs through every traditional (ie. ‘walking dead’) zombie feature that drive me crazy:
Dead Things Can’t Move.
The continued motility of every complex organism on earth (and beyond, likely) is contingent on sufficient hydration and caloric intake. Once the heart stops pumping or sufficient fluids have been drained from the body, cells cease to function and all motility stops. A zombie still needs, at the very least, a pumping heart if it is going to stand up like a good biped and shamble toward its next victim.
No blood pressure = No muscle movement = No zombie plague
And IF cannibalism of living human victims provides enough caloric intake to keep a zombie mobile, it follows that any living humans caught by zombies would be picked clean. Down to the bone. Not bitten and abandoned – as is the M.O. of so many zombies in the Romero-inspired genre.
I’m more primally fearful of the 28 Days Later zombies or the Reavers from Firefly, which aren’t “dead,” just human beings who’ve lost their higher functions and are bent on destroying everything living around them….
Hi Kevin, welcome to the jungle.
Yes, a zombie is a medical impossibility. That’s why I like the zombies in Romero’s movies most of all. In those movies, when someone dies for ANY reason, they become a zombie. If you die of a heart attack in your sleep, you get out of bed a zombie. If you stab someone to death, they’re going to rise a minute later as a zombie.
Instead of trying to come up with a rational explanation for zombies (the disease model) he simply redefines what death means. It’s less “realistic,” but simpler. It dodges the question of HOW zombies work. I think EXPLAINING zombies makes them less scary. So I’m hoping The Walking Dead stays away from, “Hey, maybe we can make a vaccine!” You cannot (in my book) beat a zombie outbreak by using science. Zombies defy science.
@Belinkie, if you or anyone else has read the Walking Dead, do we know if they explain it in the books? I personally, like you, love the fact that they have not tried to explain it and hope it stays that way (Sidebar – if they do explain it, please don’t say how, just that they do as not to spoil anything)
In the comic (where zombies are slow, weak and do not use tools ; they actually stand around for months in front of the prison the characters stay in at some point), they take a long time to work out exactly how zombism work, let alone explain it. As far as I remember, it is not explained in any way whatsoever.
@Bob and VfV: I would say that the explanation in The Walking Dead is pretty much identical to the Romero explanation – in essence, the explanation is that there is _no_ explanation.
I think that is absolutely the magic and horror of the genre, which stories such as Resident Evil miss out on (and as it turns out, Resident Evil is way better as an action game rather than a horror game, anyway, and this is how I tend to try to see all “plague” zombie fiction).
The fact that death itself suddenly and inexplicably changes is _terrifying_ and really adds that disconcerting element of the unknowable (and opposed to simply the unknown). Characters in these stories may make some guesses (hence the “No more room in Hell” approach) but it’s an important facet of the genre, and The Walking Dead, that nothing is ever confirmed.
Also, this “explanation” for the zombies, in my opinion, is really the only way to explain a worldwide zombie outbreak. As this article, Cracked, and many other posters have agreed, it’s a pretty crappy plague when it comes to efficiency, and if it started in one place there’s no chance at all it would go uncontained. However, imagine if EVERY SINGLE DEAD BODY ON THE PLANET simultaneously stood up and started eating people. Instead of a starting population of one infected, we’re facing the entirety of deceased humanity, and their numbers grow quite faster than ours. That’s a totally different (and in my opinion, more interesting) story.
@Christopher – Thank you – that is great! I was afraid they would try to explain it which midichlorian-aways the cool factor.
As long as they follow a consistent set of rules, they cannot defy science. Science is about sussing out a consistent, repeatable set of rules out of nature.
You said the Resident Evil movies are best left out of this, but I can’t help but use them as an extreme example of what you get at on the first page, meaning how the explanations or how the virus spreads simply doesn’t make sense when depicted. I mean, how the heck would the collapse of human civilization cause the collapse of Earth’s ecosystems, too? I’ve only seen the third and fourth once each, but I’m pretty sure there wasn’t really an explanation for why the U.S. became a desert wasteland. And, another beef: Having grown up in Vegas, I’ll tell you right now, sand dunes are NOT POSSIBLE. It’s dirt, not sand. And crappy dirt, at that- you can’t even make good mud pies with it because it’s grainy (a big disappointment for a little kid, as you can guess).
Don’t get me wrong, though- I enjoy those movies. They are fun and pointless, but not good. Which is disappointing, because the video games are genuinely good games.
I’ll also point you to the recent craze on college campuses here in the States and across the pond, Humans vs. Zombies:
http://humansvszombies.org/
I played when I was an undergrad, when it was still really new (I don’t think that website was even up yet- the first year my college did it was ’06). It starts with a starter zombie (called the Original Zombie, or OZ) that looks like a participating human, and while the people they infect must identify as zombies, they have anywhere from twenty-four to forty-eight hours where they are allowed to keep their bandanna in the “human” position. I think an interesting way to mess with it would be allow for an incubation period for every infected human, wherein they start out like the OZ and can infect people that don’t realize the person they’re about to hug is a carrier. That would make it more like the Plague, but I imagine it would also make the game mechanic rather broken…
In traditional spoiled-college-kids-need-something-to-complain-about nature, there was a stink on my campus when some students said it was insensitive to soldiers in and veterans of the current Iraq War. Go figure. >.<
ANYHOO, my point is… well… I kind of lost it. Whoops.
1. I do not have time to read the comments (which are so dense! so numerous!) right now. Frustrating. Promise to go back and read asap. Apologize in advice if my other observations have already been made.
2. I Am Legend is sort of a zombie movie set in a city. They don’t call them zombies, but the basic effect appears to be the same.
3. Your observation about Dawn of the Dead reflecting a 1970’s horror of cities reminds me of a movie of the same era: Escape from New York. Manhattan Island has become so debauched, they decided it was easier to wall it off and make it an maximum security prison/penal colony than to clean it up.
4. Zombie Decameron!!! I am so in love with that idea!
I really need to discuss with my LDS friends their perspective on the Zombie Apocalypse. Seems there is an argument to made for Zompocalypse as Rapture variant; just not an instantaneous or pleasant one. Seriously, Mormon families would seem to preemptively have an awfully good position to survive and thrive in this scenario:
One year of food in storage, garden and cannery equipment for more
A home ‘compound’ often in a more rural kind of setting
A familiarity with guns and their upkeep for hunting and defense
An exceptional emphasis on family cohesion and self-reliance
Religious certainty for reunion in the afterlife with family members who are bitten…
I suppose this is a variation on the mountain hermit with a crossbow, or the blind monk with a sharp shovel (from World War Z), but the LDS folks I know manage to engage in middle or upper class lives in society, while also engaging in a survivalist scheme as a hobby.
Me, I’m grabbing my pack and hopping on the first boat to Edinburgh of the Seven Seas.
Oh yay, zombie analysis! There’s been a frustratingly small amount of this considering how much zombies have increased in popularity in the last several years.
There’s an old quote by Clive Barker I love that zombies are the liberal horror, because here are the teeming masses that you’re supposed to want to help but their faces are sliding off and they’re trying to eat the cat. Again, it’s an old quote and may have some validity but it predates the current zombie popularity. I can’t help wonder how much of it has to do with the growing division in the public discourse. There’s been a steadily increasing amount of anger and demonization of the “other side”, much of it stoked by fear. It’s a pretty small leap to “mindless horde of monsters”.
Also, I very much want a Zombie Decameron!
I was wondering how much longer I’d have to wait for The Walking Dead to end up on OTI. I kinda had something in mind that I wanted to submit in the way of a guest article, but I haven’t quite fleshed out yet, and that seems to have a weaker premise with each new episode of the show…
Eli: I know, the successive episodes seem to keep changing the tone of the series, don’t they? You’re still welcome to pitch to us.
@Christopher isn’t this what happens in the original Night of the Living Dead? Some satellite crashes and then the dead rise from their graves. This isn’t an infection scenario at all. The only way living people are turned into zombies is by dying.
@Belinkie you say that a zombie movie is less scary if it’s an infection that could potentially be cured. You may be right, but I think it could potentially be used to great effect as commentary on the violence depicted in these types of movies. Imagine a zombie apocalypse where you know that a cure exists. every zombie you kill to save your own life really is another human being and not merely a shambling corpse. You’d have to think twice about every bullet you shoot. The moral consequences of the heroes blasting through hordes of the undead would be completely reimagined.
@applejack The Night of the Living dead really made no explicit approach at an explanation, IIRC (that satellite thing isn’t ringing any bells at all). I do remember that bites definitely infect and kill in the original movie, based on the fate of the family that stay in the basement with the bitten child…
Also, regarding the cure for becoming a zombie:
This has been discussed in two pieces of fiction I’m aware of (POTENTIAL SPOILERS) – the movie Undead and the Walking Dead graphic novels, albeit only briefly in the latter.
In the Walking Dead books, the characters act pretty much as they have in the show (shooting zombies willy-nilly) until at one point they arrive at a farm. They are shocked and disgusted to learn that the farmer and his children have locked up a ton of zombies in their barn, the zombies being the local townsfolk and some less fortunate family members, ostensibly to await the government’s inevitable cure. In turn, the farmer and his family are WAY MORE shocked and disgusted that our group of survivors have been recklessly killing everyone they know or love or maybe happened to come across on the street instead of trying to, say, help them. It turns into an interesting and thought-provoking conversation until, of course, the zombies break out of the barn less than one issue later and the farmer “learns the error of his ways”, you know, with a hacksaw.
The movie Undead provides a way more interesting example in that (and MAJOR SPOILERS follow, like, I’m about to give the whole movie away, be prepared) there actually IS a cure, and it’s totally effective in a restoring a person to health and sanity. The problem is our main characters have no freaking clue this is going on until the very end of the movie (granted, this might be more understandable than it sounds since the cure in question involved _aliens_ walling in the entire town with an enormous living barricade, levitating all the townsfolk one at a time in no particular order to some random point in the sky for an extended period of time, and literally raining the cure on them all — ….yeah). Regardless of the insane basis for the cure, the fact is that by the end of the movie the only people that aren’t cured are the zombies that were slain during the movie (and, I suppose, some people that were like totally eaten, but that isn’t really discussed). Even MORE interestingly, in a final twist the “final guy”, the one dude who survived it all, ends up still being infected, causing the whole zombie plague to re-explode, this time with no convenient aliens around to cure it. Nice Job Breaking It, Heroes.
@Yerzo The idea of zombies as an active disaster, really makes an important distinction between other apocalyptic genres.
@Perich I think the father and child in 28 Days Later make a strong case for the possibility of long-term survival within a city for precisely the reasons you mentioned; availability of food, defensible shelter, etc. Especially in that zombieverse where the undead begin to decay and cease functioning over time, it seems that the threat could be weathered.
These comments are great, I also really like the idea that the zombies’ bodies reflect our own frailty especially when infecting those previously close to a character. I want to add a question: Do the things in the Crossed comics count as zombies? Though they are not dumb and have an intelligence for creating misery, they share a broad characteristic that would be interesting to define. Maybe a working definition for Zombie: things that transform humans by contact, turning them completely unreasonable and antagonistic to the well-being of others.
‘Unreasonable’ and ‘antagonistic’, I think are key to understanding why zombies are so frightening because both are essential for society to function. That is, afterall the main effect of zombieism: active societal destruction. It’s never that there are reports of zombieism in a far off continent, even impending zombieism; it is always sudden and in the backyard. The Body-snatcher zombies would even work here though they are less frightening because they articulate an alternative to ‘our’ society.