Lately zombies have been the answer to every medium;
inserting themselves as the antagonists in books like Max Brook’s World War
Z, or television shows like The Walking Dead, or comic books like… The Walking Dead, or films like any of
George Romero’s films (and remakes), or video games like Resident Evil
1-6, Dead Rising 1 and 2, Dead Island, Dead Space 1
and2. That list is just the beginning of
the overuse heaped upon the shambling undead.
Zombies are now an overused, over thought trope. We have brought the extreme attitude (fuck
you the 90’s, sincerely everyone )to zombies with pieces like 28 days Later
where we super charged the slow moving and stumbling corpses into speedy
versions of hungry hungry hippos just with, you know, people instead of
marbles. But besides getting a does of
Tony Horton the main concept hasn’t changed much. The back story has changed here and there
with genetic modification, voodoo, evil spirits, ancient civilizations, various
scientific issues, and other possibilities but honestly zombies don’t need back
story I’d actually prefer it if we as an audience never knew the cause. The unknown has and always will be the staple
of good horror. It’s why the first Night
of Living Dead worked when it did. It
was a new enough concept at the time.
But is the problem with zombies the lack of creativity of
the overuse? Or is it because everyone
and their brother uses the archetype that there isn’t enough quality control? But content is only consumed if there is a an
audience for it. And oddly enough the
audience mindlessly craves and consumes. There is an obsession with the faithful, an
over analysis and delight in the possibility of a true occurance. People have devoted time to building zombie
survival teams. And not just like a few
minutes of fancy. Whole discussions and
serious periods of thought. Well… maybe
not serious concerning the subject matter.
But taken far too seriously.
Discussing the ins and outs of rules and keys to survival. Because obviously in the zombie apocalypse
with fires raging, family members dying and/or infected, society fallen, energy
failing, food sources scarce, a foe that doesn’t sleep or stop, some idiot
who’s watched a couple of movies won’t crack under pressure. They will obviously triumph and with their
equally brave cohorts triumph and restore society. These heroes chose teams of people based on
some merits of awesomeness and violence.
Not really on true merits like perhaps having a doctor, or a scientist,
or probably most helpful a farmer.
Everyone forgets about starvation.
It does mildly concern me how people truly get excited over the thought
of a zombie apocalypse happening and all the fun they might have. It’s like they see the collapse of modern
society as okay and these murderous truly scary and gruesome foes as nothing but
way to vent violent fantasy. But perhaps
I am looking too deeply here.
So what would happen in a zombie outbreak. If we assume that zombies are slowly rotting
bodies the zombie outbreak would just kill itself. The human body isn’t really meant to work
once you’re dead just don’t tell Mary Shelly; she wanted humanity to be the bad
guys anyway. Regular humans being the
really bad guys is a common theme in many survival horror plots, especially
those by Stephen King. Watch The Mist. Or better yet don’t. It doesn’t *spoiler* end so happily. *end
spoiler*
Zombies just dying off and falling apart would be logical
but this is a reanimated body come back to kill mindlessly. It’s hard to interject too much logic
here. So assuming the body won’t degrade
to much either due to magic or some other explanation humanity will not do so
well. If there was an outbreak and it
didn’t fizzle out we’d pretty much be fucked as a species. Don’t take my word for it. Trust the power of math.
Yeah, someone actually spent the time to figure out the math
behind the spread of the infection and humanity’s chance for survival. Also remember a handful of people surviving
does not guarantee humanity survival in fact it guarantees the very
opposite. Having only a few hundred
people essentially means a stagnant gene pool and well that is not so good for
humanity.
The one good thing about the rules and codification of
zombies (rule as evidenced by Zombieland) is that it gives a stable and
well defined set of guidelines for the world of the story. The problem with a lot of terrible writing is
we, as audience are completely unaware of the rule in the world presented to
us. If we feel like things are
constantly being revealed to us and we’re like “the fuck is that? The fuck is this? I don’t get it?” that generally means the
author is bad person. Take that dreadful
dragon series that turned into a single movie “Eragon”. You know why I can believe it was written by
a teenager? Because it sucked. If you shoot someone in the head they should
generally die. You can’t casually
introduce new rules, like only a direct shot to the heart kills a warlock (or
whatever the fuck the bad guy was), especially to a person who lives in that
world. That’s why so many stories have
that fish out of water who gets introduced to the weird stuff to help us the
audience understand so the other characters, the ones who know what’s going on,
have a good reason to explain things and give exposition. It’s why there is always that new recruit or
student or what have you. Otherwise if
one character was lecturing another about why Cyclops has to eat a sheep every
week to live and the other character would logically say “Yeah, I know that
fucktard; I feed him. Why are telling me
that? Am I some sort of audience member
new to this story… oh, right.”
These well defined rules are part of the reason why everyone
is an expert on zombies, a made up creature that exists only in fiction. There are so many armchair zombie survival
experts it boggles the mind. Hell, I’m
complaining about this and I know far too much about zombies.
But hey zombies are really just an expression of mindless
consumerism (mindless eating machines that crowd together), a reaction against
communism (they never attack each other and ‘convert’ those they fight – this
is especially prevent in movies with pod people in place of zombies), and a
reaction against single minded acceptance of the norm. You look at these stories and it usually a
small group against a horde of the same.
It’s also often an allegory for racism and warning about cultural
hegemony (that means a disparate group can be controlled by a single entity of
subgroup). But heck sometimes it’s
really more about gratuitous violence and we tend to accept a greater level of
violence those circumstances.
But either way you look at you should totally have me on
your zombie survival team.
Ben
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Thanks for posting. You are awesome!