The point of Zombies! (2) [movies]

Hat Trick Commentary on Zombies (expanding on E’s and LD’s thought):

The Zombie — though slow, stupid, and poorly equiped in a one-on-one fight — gets you precisely the same way most truly evil social forces get you in the real world. Like Republican scare tactics (think repetition of the word “terror”) or your parent’s nagging for you to brush your teeth or get married, zombies get you by wearing down your defenses until you either slip up and do something stupid or simply get mobbed under by a crowd of them.

When you watch these movies, you get pissed at the humans for being so stupid. Just stay in the damn mall where you have food and water and weapons and a barrier between you and the sea of the undead (Dawn Of The Dead (2004)). But the people don’t. From the audience’s perspective, you almost don’t know who to root for because YOU know better. You would survive against the zombies. Of course, how long will you persist in defending your favorite band against universal disdain from all your friends or in voting for an independent candidate? It’s hard for the zombie movie to dramatize the slow and seeping social evil that zombies represent. Another classic horror flick had even more trouble doing that: The Blob (1958, 1988, 2006…)

Not to beat the analogy into the ground, but if zombie mob is a clear metaphor for the infectuous stupidity of the masses constantly clawing at anyone with a thought process that’s outside the norm, then it’s also interesting to notice what happens when you are bitten by a zombie. Worse than death, you become a zombie yourself. Dead to thought, you become what you ran from. Eventually, the zombies tend to win out. In reality, that surrender can take a number of forms, from working in a cube to wearing the turtle-neck sweater your mother bought you for your birthday and keeps after you about.

The danger here is not that you will acquiesce to social pressure, we all do that, but that you will actually bend yourself to it. The danger is that you will become someone who actually likes turtle-neck sweaters. The You who was critical of them will be dead, replaced by something alien and mindless. Someone who might even vote Republican. Think of that and tell me zombies aren’t freaking terrifying.