Why Everybody Loves Zombies
In Hollywood’s favorite fantasy, it’s kill ‘em all, preferably using those special guns that never need to be reloaded
End-of-the-world dystopias continue to thrive in movies and literary fiction. One can only wonder what it means that our generation finds the end of the world entertaining. Whatever the answer, there’s no business like zombie business.
Streaming’s latest hit is the apocalyptic zombie-fest The Last of Us on HBO Max. A mutated fungus (!!!) takes only days to turn most of the world’s population into zombies. The zombies are fast, strong, don’t need to eat. The Last of Us follows the story of a silent-type tough guy and a wisecracking rebellious teen girl – the only person who’s immune – as they journey from Boston to Wyoming, blasting zombies along the way.
The Last of Us comes hard upon an 11-season run of zombie-land The Walking Dead, which set ratings records plus spawned two spinoffs and a talk show (!!!). In The Walking Dead, a mutated virus takes mere days to transform most of the world’s population into zombies that are slow rather than fast, don’t need to breathe and actually say, “Errrgggg…argghhhh.” The Walking Dead aired an amazing 177 episodes. Premiering 2010, it anticipated COVID headlines by blaming the Centers for Disease Control, then little-known.
Over in the movies, Brad Pitt’s 2013 zombie-a-rama World War Z was among box office champs of the last decade. (Creepy sidebar: the plague starts in China.) Will Smith’s 2007 bartender-zombies-for-everyone I Am Legend earned $900 million (adjusted to current dollars). Though practically everyone on Earth dies in the original, an I Am Legend sequel is in the works, reflecting popularity of the genre.
Netflix recently remade the classic Army of the Dead, this time set in Las Vegas. Zombies merge with the heist film producing a stream of pure nonsense in which members of an ensemble cast (including Tig Notaro!!!) compete to see who can make the most irrational decision. Practically everyone dies (including Siegfried and Roy’s white tiger) yet, you guessed it, a sequel is in development
Zombie cinema is rife with ridiculous assumptions. In World War Z, being exposed to the never-explained virus turns a healthy person in a zombie in (Pitt says) “12 seconds.” No pathogen has ever been observed to alter the body this rapidly.
Mysterious viruses or fungi (!!!) need mere seconds to give people abilities that are not supported by their cell structures – how could this be possible?
World War Z zombies are ultra fast and have an interconnected hive mind. A billion years of evolution never produced these qualities, yet zombies gain them in 12 seconds. The zombies of The Last of Us are hard to stop even with machine guns, no biologically evolved entity has that quality. Zombies can live for years without food, zombies can breathe underwater. Which of their organs, exactly, support these abilities?
And just what is zombie biology? “Technically, they are undead,” a Mossad colonel intones to Brad Pitt. Technically! What could “undead” possibly even mean?
Of course silly entertainment is full of monsters, lovelorn vampires and other creatures possessing qualities never observed IRL. I and many others like Star Trek, which has physics never observed – faster-than-light travel, teleportation. But Star Trek is set in the future, when maybe somebody has invented the holodeck, which turns energy into matter, a transition not exactly common in nature. Zombies, by contrast, lurk in the present, where no one has ever seen anything remotely similar to what zombie-fests depict.
Zombies entered pop culture through films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968), whose marketing plan was bloody horror to sell tix and get ‘em screaming at the drive-in, dressed up with a patina of social commentary – Communists want to take away individuality, making everyone automatons. In 1968, that was terrifying. Today, repressing individuality is pretty much the official policy of the Ivy League. A present-day reboot of Living Dead would have New York Times editors barricading themselves in Tavern on the Green, trying to survive a night surrounded by freethinkers.
Drawing closer to our moment, TV and movies began to present the notion that super-ultra pathogens could cause instant apocalypse. The 1995 Dustin Hoffman vehicle Outbreak had a virus mutation killing millions of people overnight. In the 2011 Gwyneth Paltrow flick Contagion, millions died in a single day, dropping dead instantaneously because an infected person walked nearby. (Creepy sidebar: the evil bioweapon of Contagion is engineered from a bat virus in a Chinese lab.) NCIS, world’s #1 television show for much of the past 20 years, had numerous plots in which a single vial of something-or-other could kill all of humanity in hours. Two of the Mission Impossible movies were the same.
These and other celluloid did not feature zombies but did promote the notion that novel molecules cannot be stopped and we’re all doomed.
Yet no unstoppable contagion has ever actually been observed. Even Black Death petered out. The living biosphere spent eons conditioning itself to resist runway plagues. The biosphere always wins. The plagues always lose.
Dystopia series such as Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu depict situations that are far-fetched but might happen, considering actual events. Unstoppable instant contagions exist only in zombie-land. Because we’d been pelted with the latter in the period before COVID-19 appeared, society was primed to fear the worst, with exaggeration about infection the norm.
In cinematic terms, The Last of Us is striking because amidst an apocalypse the show has tear-jerking love affairs – a romance between middle-aged men and a romance between gender-fluid teen girls. Lately Hollywood has given viewers lots of same-sex. These romances are arresting because they involve anti-government gun nuts, a cohort Hollywood is not fond of.
The middle-aged male lovers and teen female lovers are alive because they would not surrender their weapons and refused to bow low to corrupt elites. There’s an ultimate lockdown in The Last of Us – government-run camps are spreading the zombie plague. Only gun nuts have hope. That’s a refreshing change from Hollywood’s relentless stereotyping.
This also seems a Yellowstone-esque subtext – viewers are drawn to shows and movies that give the middle finger to the leftist privileged.
But there’s something more basic in zombie fare. Viewers like violent cinema in which people are butchered left and right – the Scream movies, the John Wick drivel. Why do audiences find depictions of pretty girls being butchered to be entertainment? Perhaps we’d rather not know.
But if nagging moral qualms spoil one’s enjoyment of slasher flicks and shoot-em-ups, there’s always zombies. You’re supposed to blast zombies. It’s a public service! Use the 12-guage that never runs out of ammunition.
Bonus: Rabbinical View of Zombies. David Wolpe, rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles – his sermons on YouTube are well worth your time – notes, “Televisions and movies like The Last of Us show how easily we can be persuaded that some lives matter and others don’t. ‘Extras’ thoughtlessly killed in cinematic depictions should spur our suspicions when it comes to the ‘other’ in real life. Our dehumanization button is too easily pushed.”