Zombie allusions: They just keep on coming-talking candidly about the human condition

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/january-february/zombie-apocalypse.html

The Zombie Apocalypse

Why are we fascinated with the walking dead who want to eat us?

Paul Pastor

[ posted 2/1/2013 8:24AM ]

For a theme with such diverse expression, the zombie genre's conventions are surprisingly rigid. Most stories follow a strict formula: The dead rise and eat, the living flee and fight, and the credits roll. Some tales end well for the living, more end poorly, but these essentials are present in all, marking the limits of a traditional zombie tale as inflexibly as any folk story.

For all the screams and splatter, these common story elements provide a backdrop for filmmakers to talk candidly about the human condition. The first three entries in seminal zombie director George A. Romero's "Dead" series are fine examples of this, using the cannibal corpses to skewer major cultural issues such as racism, consumerism, and abuse of human power.

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The true villains in such stories are not the dead, but the broken living. Zombies serve as an elemental force in the plot, like a flood or a hurricane in disaster movies. The dead force the true conflict—humanity's inability to be truly human. One key scene in Romero's Day of the Dead flips the role of man and monster, showing Bub, an unusually intelligent zombie, weeping over the body of the scientist who had been studying him. His grief expressed in his sluggish manner, Bub then picks up a pistol and tracks down his friend's treacherous murderer. We're impressed with Romero's point as clearly as if he'd written it out for us in blood: A heartbeat alone isn't what makes us human.

The concern with gnawing, existential questions is common in a zombie film. We're invited to ask how we'd respond if we were forced to choose between our safety and the good of our neighbor. Would we risk our own necks to save a friend? What about a stranger? What about a traitor? We're afraid of ourselves here, afraid of our friends, afraid of so many things, least of which are the sea of decaying corpses lapping at the walls of whatever fortress we've found to hide in.