6 Reasons People Love Zombie Flicks
28 Days Later. Resident Evil. Land of the Dead. Deadgirl. Army of Darkness. The Walking Dead. Fido. Dead Snow. Planet Terror. Evil Dead 2. Dawn of the Dead. Zombieland. Shaun of the Dead — the list just goes on and on. Everybody seems to LOVE zombie films — but why? What exactly is so intriguing to people about the idea of being stalked by dead people who want to eat their brains after a worldwide apocalypse? Simple: zombie movies cater to a whole range of deeply rooted human desires. It may be an apocalypse for the world, but for the moviegoer picturing himself in the middle of it all, it’s finally his chance to shine.
1) You can plausibly be the hero. The problem with most action flicks is that the average person has trouble picturing himself as the hero. He doesn’t have special training or powers. He’s not a CIA operative, a Navy SEAL, a gunfighter, or a mutant. So the idea of taking on a gang of Die Hard-style terrorists or fighting with a sword against the medieval equivalent of Chuck Liddell in a film like Gladiator is completely outside of his reality.
On the other hand, zombies are most often portrayed as extremely slow and stupid, yet still dangerous. That makes zombies an enemy that the average restaurant manager or accountant feels like he could realistically handle. Every man, in his heart, wants to be a hero. He wants to be John Wayne, he wants to be Rambo, he wants to be Bruce Lee. In a world filled with zombies, that’s an achievable goal.
2) You can have that cool stuff you’ve always wanted. Even if you’re not materialistic, you still have to admit that there are some really cool toys in the world — picturesque mansions, exotic cars, opulent yachts, submarines, and 10,000-bottle wine cellars! Who wouldn’t like to drive a tank through a wall or bunk down in a house with a bathroom so big you could shoot hoops in it?
Well, after the zombie apocalypse, all the people who owned that nifty stuff are going to be dead and their toys are just going to be waiting there for you to grab. Then, once you’re done, you can hop in whatever car you want and swing by the mall, the gun store, and Wal-Mart to loot anything else your heart desires. No cashiers, no police, no store owners — just everything you can carry with no consequences whatsoever as long as you can dodge zombies in the process.
3) The playing field has been completely leveled. In a world full of zombies, there’s no more “keeping up with the Joneses” because the Joneses are dead. That means there are no more bosses, billionaires, star athletes, or celebrities who’re ahead of you in the game of life. Sure, everybody who’s left is dodging zombies and hoping there are still some baked beans that haven’t been looted from the local grocery, but at least you don’t have to feel like you’re a loser compared to everyone else while you’re doing it.
4) You can get the girl. That model who would normally never talk to you because she’s too busy laughing at a CEO’s jokes? The homecoming queen who would normally be trying to catch the eye of the pro baseball player? Guess what? Their options just narrowed considerably. The most attractive man to women like that suddenly becomes the guy who’s nearby, who can feed her and protect her from zombies. To a lot of men, this is very appealing. Of course, they’re also just assuming they’ll somehow end up in a small group with a hot woman, just like they assume they’ll be one of the tiny fraction of humanity that survives a zombie apocalypse. In reality, they’d be much more likely to end up dead or stuck in a small group where the only two eligible women are scrubby-looking 50 year old grandmas, but there are a lot of details about the awfulness of a post-apocalyptic world that get smoothed over in these movies, so why should the dating pool be any different?
5) It makes life simpler. Throughout most of human history, life was extremely simple. You were a child, you got old enough to work, you got married and had kids, you farmed, and then eventually you died. There’s still a certain appeal to that kind of lifestyle. That’s part of the reason movies like Avatar are popular and Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden; or Life in the Woods” is still considered a classic.
Zombies would make the world very simple again. Instead of worrying about global warming, Social Security, and getting the latest Apple product, life would be back to the same pattern it followed throughout almost all of human history….well, except for the dead people who want to eat you.
6) There are no more rules. There are a lot of rules you have to follow in life. Your parents tell you what to do when you’re a kid, your teachers make you study, your boss insists that you do it his way, and the government will arrest you if you don’t obey its laws. It’s all very tedious. But in zombieworld the only law is your gun. You get up when you want to get up, you go to bed when you want to go to bed, and no one tells you what to do — well, at least until the warlords inevitably rise up and take over, but who thinks that far ahead? Being able to shoot zombies in the head, take what you want, destroy what you want — it’s the complete freedom to do as you please for as long as you want as long as you’re not eaten.
I hate the latest generation of zombie movies and they’ve been being churned out awhile now. People run – the screenplays are not very clever. The average old Tom and Jerry cartoon is the same basic theme and much more creative.
I don’t include Evil Dead II in the category. That was such a ground-breaking film at the time that me and my friends taped it and watched it over and over again. Nothing remotely like that had ever been done. The reason Evil Dead II was so good is because it took archetypes we were all familiar with and completely re-presented them in a fresh way. This is something the genre could use.
Enough with the automatic weapons already.
The original Evil Dead (and the re-sequel) was a fun romp, but didn’t represent the classic “world overrun by zombies” theme, as described here. I still like the original Romero cycle, up to Day of the Dead (though Land had its moments). Not so much his later stuff.
In a zombapocalypse, automatic weapons are best used to fight other breathers who want to hurt you or to take your stuff. If you have to fight zombies, learn to use a good slingshot. It’s easy to learn to use, quiet, hard to accidentally kill yourself with, and ammunition is fairly ubiquitous (while steel bearings are your best bet, marbles and smooth stones work in a pinch, and can be surprisingly damaging). =^[.]^=
Don’t forget “Army of Darkness” the third movie in the Evil Dead series. That one was closer to a world overrun with zombies, except with demons and their skeletal undead.
Shop smart. Shop S-mart.
Man, did Sears blow an opportunity in its K-mart merger.
Hey, dumbass. Two things here…
1: ED2 is not a part of this latest generation. It’s from the generation before now.
2: ED2 is not even a zombie movie!
Get your facts straight and stop insulting the greatest B-movie actor of all time.
Try holding a hand over one eye and reading this from my comment:
“I don’t include Evil Dead II in the category.”
I believe that the zombie flick has been dead (no pun intended) for years now. It was a great concept but where the hell do you go with it? The only fresh take on zombie films for the last five or six years has been “Shaun of the Dead” and maybe “Zombieland.” (I find AMC’s “The Walking Dead” amazingly depressing and pointless. Where’s Sid Haig when you need him?)
I suppose the genre will stumble on (tee-hee!) because we have so many entertainment outlets that simply need product. We’re not just talking about putting butts in the seats at movie theaters but also the straight-to-DVD market and all of the cheapo made-for-TV stuff (SyFy, Chiller, Showtime, etc.) stuff. Zombie flicks are incredibly inexpensive to make because you need few interior sets and can shoot a lot of it outdoors with unknown actors. Also fans of the genre really don’t expect much. Lots of fake gore and body parts and (most important) hot chicks with kick-ass automatic weapons seems to fill the bill very nicely.
There is only one zombie movie made with any real craft: “I Walked With a Zombie” (Lewton/Tourneur). Enough with the automatic weapons, axes, swords, blood, and gore.
Come on John, you left out the #1 reason: Leftists see new Democrat Party members/voters everywhere…
GMTA! I was just about to comment that I personally don’t care to watch zombie movies because they remind me too much of Election Day.
The only advantage to the zombies in the movies is that I can’t smell them – unlike the street bums, welfare leeches, SEIU thugs, and other members of the lumpenproletariat that the Demonrats use to cast votes on behalf of all those dead people who can no longer get to the polls on their own.
“Night Of The Comet,” from 1984 is a lot of fun. Not only does it have everything you described in a good zombie flick, the BEAUTIFUL GIRLS are the heroes. They handle themselves beautifully, until they are captured by some bad guys still in the process of becoming zombies. But not before meeting a young stud, who leaves them on their own, because he wants to check on his family. Needless to say, he returns in the nick of time for the big climax. I suppose the big short coming in this one, is a lack of real gore, or demented attitude. It may be too Valley Girl for the hard core. But I think it’s worth a look if you want a different kind of Zombie Apocalypse.
Definitely.
Another recommendation….Class of Nuke Em High.
Zombie by Lucio Fulci definitely had the most horrifying zombies. They were rotting and full of maggots. But as everyone knows, Romero’s Dawn of the Dead will forever and always be the best Zombie movie ever. Some people watch Star Wars over and over. I watched Dawn of the Dead.
Did you ever notice that zombies can’t swim? I guess if you lived on a boat off shore, you wouldn’t get attacked by zombies. You would have to go on land every now and then for food and fuel, but for the most part you wouldn’t have to go near them and you’d do just fine. But I guess that wouldn’t make for much of a movie, right? But think about the cool boats you could have, and all the while you could just wave at the zombies milling about on shore, sort of like keeping away from Democrats that want to suck the last dime out of you. Oh, so now I get it. Zombies are the same thing as Democrats. Makes perfect sense to me. If Obama gets a second term in office, I’m going to need a big boat.
Picturing Obama as a big Jaws-like shark zooming up to engulf us all, “you’re going to need a BIGGER boat”.
Maybe they can’t swim but they can walk underwater. They did this in one of the last of the Romero movies to attack a city. They also do this in the novel “World War Z” where zombies regularly climbed up anchor cables, fishing lines or walking up onto islands, etc. Eventually any boat would have to put to shore for resupply and repairs. That makes the crew vulnerable as well.
Mr. Hawkins,
To me, the very best Zombie Flick was the very first: “Night of the Living Dead” (I know, I know, there were zombie movies back in 30’s and 40’s starring Step-N-Fechit or Lon Chaney, but “Night” was the first truly modern film featuring the rampage of the Undead.).
Think of the ground it broke. First, it was filmed in grainy black-and-white with a hand-held camera. Lit with a glaring white light, the film starkly familiar to anyone who watched the real-life horror of the televised nightly news of that era (film techniques later used in the Blaire Witch series and a few others). This rendered the film so much more believable than had it been filmed in color. In fact, later films lost much of this realism precisely because they were rendered in color.
Second, the hero of the story wasn’t your typical Hollywood leading man, but a tough, clever black man, a most unlikely choice for 1968 Hollywood. Again, the odd chance that it would be a black man, not a chisled-jaw Hollywood stereotype “hero”, that held the monsters at bay, lent credibility to the film’s unlikely story.
Finally, the ending. I won’t spoil it for those of you who have never seen this film, but suffice it to say that it was shockingly unexpected.
I’ve enjoyed later zombie flicks, and I really like the current television series “The Walking Dead.” But despite the cinematic advances over the succeeding four decades, I have to say, that none has ever scared it’s audiences as much as “Night of the Living Dead.”
And isn’t that the point? Beyond the valid points you raised in your article, being scared is WHY we watch Zombie Movies.
I, too, am a fan of the original “Night of the Living Dead.” The Wikipedia description of the 1968 movie says the action takes place in rural Pennsylvania. I attended Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh from 1962 to 1966. A good deal of the movie has TV news shows telling what the zombies are doing, and the TV reporters in the movie were actual TV reporters on Pittsburgh news shows! For Pittsburgh area movie goers that added a lot to the movie.
I recall the main TV reporter in the movie was billed as “Chilly Billy Cardilly.” (I’m guessing on the spelling of his last name.) He was the announcer for wrestling shows on one of the local channels.
I think there is one more thing as well. Zombies have human bodies but no moral status, so the zombie movie fantasy allows re-killing these bodies in gruesome ways. You can fantasize about killing your boss’s body because it is not the same as killing your boss. It appeals to the bloodthirsty side of people.
Rats, I thought this would be a review of Zombie’s many fine photo-essays.
Yeah. I was all excited to read this story….until I got to the word “Flicks” in the headline.
New zombie movie idea: a horde of zombies show up at a polling place on election day, to vote DEM.
Already been done. “Homecoming,” one of the epsiodes in the series “Masters of Horror.” The zombies are soldiers who come back and vote for anyone who ends the current war. Conservatives are predictably portrayed as evil. It was completely distasteful and a horrible insult to the memory of the heroes who died for our freedom.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homecoming_(Masters_of_Horror)
3a — not only do you not need to keep up with the Jones, you can picture them as zombies and act accordingly
Reason #7. It’s a good preview of 4 more years of incompetence if our current administration is reelected..
I like the fact that there is now a genre of “funny” Zombie movies
Army of Darkness, Zombieland and Sean of the Dead are vastly more entertaining than lamestream zomflicks.
Current Zombie movies are a travesty.The Old Zombie film (enslaved deadmen forced to labor after death) could be seen as a tragic metaphor for souless exploitive systems. It also seems concistent with certain practices of Vodun.The new movies are a goulish mess. Not Mythic.
There was a pretty good zombie movie called “The Dead” that came out last year or so. Set in Africa. The zombies are veeeery slow in this one. Great atmosphere. Not a tremendous amount of gore and fast-paced action, really, but worth watching, if only for the change in scenery from the usual.
I agree, that was a pretty good one because it had a relatively realistic feel that’s lacking in most of them. I don’t much care for zombie movies in general because the people in them are too dang dumb. The remake of “Night of the Living Dead” I liked better than the original, because there was one smart character (Barbara). The original “Dawn of the Dead” had a few smart moves, but stupidity won in the end. “The Dead” has a couple of smart characters, though they still have to do some dumb things, I guess it’s a requirement. It was almost there, but not quite. And I can’t stand the soap opera stuff like “Walking Dead.” I was told the comic books are very different from the show, but they’re also soap opera. Ick.
I keep watching these movies in hopes there will be one I actually like (other than comedies like “Sean..” and “Zombieland”) but so far the cupboard is bare. I don’t like zombie movies…but I want to, for some of the reasons listed above.
Horror aside, there are two ways to look at zombie movies.
1. There has been a disaster of some kind (economic collapse, war, disease, etc.) that knocks out our comfortable society. Some people react on an animal level like the zombies looting and plundering. We see this happen sometimes now. However, imagine that things don’t get put right in a few days or weeks. More people in addition to that first wave go feral as their supplies run out and they attack those who have stuff. Just like the zombies they only want to feed and don’t care who gets hurt or killed in the process. This could indeed become a reality.
2. The zombies are a metaphor for the socialist welfare state. At first the number of eaters (zombies) can be controlled by the producers (the living). Over time the number of zombies grows as producers are brought low and made into zombies (productive people turning to the dole because the taxes and other government interference have put them out of work). Eventually the balance tips as eaters become too numerous for the producers to handle. That’s when scenario 1 takes effect.
I guess there’s something wrong with me. I detest zombie movies. I think I’ve seen only one.
I think Mr. Hawkins is right on. And I think, for zombie fans, the only intelligent reaction to the truths he has expressed should be embarrassment at how juvenile and self deluding they are in their heart of hearts.
At this point I would like to tip my hat to George A. Romero who came up with one of the most beautiful and simple syllogisms in the history of, well, the world.
1) One zombie (flesh-eating or not) in a world of normal people is mildly interesting but not scary. 2) One normal human (or a small group))in a world of flesh-eating zombies is absolutely terrifying.
Why was he the first to come up with that? It seems so simple in hindsight. I suppose it’s because the cinematic creation of “zombies” pre-Romero was a lot of work. You had to have a dead guy, an evil or wronged voodoo priest/priestess, a ritual, a person or persons who needed killing and a penchant for said persons to inexplicably run into windowless rooms or blind alleys with said zombie hot(dead) on their heels.
Romero took all this and pulled it inside out. He never worried about WHY most of the human race got all zombified. It was like Hitchcock’s MacGuffin. The cause was/is nuclear testing, passing through the tail of a comet, a mutating virus, space spores whatever. It’s not important and relieves the story-teller of endless exposition. You just cue the flesh-eating hordes and let em rip!
Personally I think that the genre is pretty much played out and I am waiting for the final installment in the “Underworld” series where EVERYONE is either a vampire, werewolf or flesh-eating zombie. (No substitutions please.) Of course we will all pull for Kate Beckinsale’s side because she’s so hot in that ultra-tight leather jumpsuit. Can Abbot and Costello be far behind? I wish they were!
Maybe some part of the idea for the modern zombie movies came from the Chinese “human wave” attacks, where (supposedly) hordes of Chinese would overwhelm any defenses due not to battle expertise but solely because of their numbers. You can kill more and more and more of them, but they still keep coming. I believe the best most innovative change in the zombie stories was to make them carriers of disease, such that one bite from a zombie makes you into a zombie yourself. “The Walking Dead” upped the ante by showing that everyone was infected with the zombies’ disease, so you turn into a zombie when you die no matter whether you’re bitten or not. There are so many ways to play the zombie story that each new telling of it brings forth a new innovation. Zombies are fascinating.
There was nothing ‘supposed’ about it. These kinds of mass attacks were used by the Chinese in the Korean war. The American defenders reported that they had to shoot continuously for so long that their machine guns would jamb from getting so hot. The initial waves of attackers weren’t armed with much at all because their main purpose was to make the gunners run out of ammunition. The next wave would be armed. That’s what the Chinese thought of human life. Now, those are REAL zombies.
How Many Chinese are in a Horde of Chinese?
The answer: 5
On approach the AO is covered in waves of Chinese until a Position or line of resistance is found, the line is broken down into individual fighting holes and bunkers.
Once the targeted area is found then the Chinese would send in waves of five (5) men each at each position/foxhole or bunker, one five man wave after another until the weapons break down, a barrel needs changing or ammo run out.
This was common Chinese infantry tactics.
The idea of one massive wave of many men attacking a position able to call in Tac-Air and Arty seems to have been rarely encountered.
DATA:
A typical Chinese short attack was carried out at night by small fireteams on a narrow front against the weakest point in enemy defenses.[12] The Chinese assault team would crawl undetected within grenade range, then launch surprise attacks against the defenders in order to breach the defenses by relying on maximum shock and confusion.[12]
If the initial shock failed to breach the defenses, additional fireteams would press on behind them and attack the same point until a breach was created.[12] Once a penetration was achieved, the bulk of the Chinese forces would move into the enemy rear and attack from behind.[14] During the attacks, the Chinese assault teams would disperse while masking themselves using the terrain, and this made it difficult for UN defenders to target large number of Chinese troops.[7] The attacks by the successive Chinese fireteams were also carefully timed to minimize casualties.[15] Due to the primitive communication systems and the tight political controls within the Chinese army, short attacks were often repeated indefinitely until either the defenses were penetrated or the attacker’s ammunition supply were exhausted, regardless of the chances of success or the human cost.[12]
This persistent attack pattern left a strong impression on UN forces that fought in Korea, thus the description of “human wave” was born.[8] U.S. Army historian Roy Edgar Appleman observed that the term “human wave” was later used by journalists and military officials to convey the image that the American soldiers were assaulted by overwhelming numbers of Chinese on a broad front, which is inaccurate when compared with the normal Chinese practice of sending successive series of five men teams against a narrow portion of the line.[1] S.L.A. Marshall also commented that the word “mass” was indiscriminately used by the media to describe Chinese infantry tactics, and it is rare for the Chinese to actually use densely concentrated infantry formations to absorb enemy firepower.[16] In response to the media’s coining of the term, a joke circulated among the US servicemen was “How many hordes are there in a Chinese platoon?”[8][12][17]
From Wikipedia.
Zombies are not so sci-fi anymore. 60 million people are infected with Toxoplasma Gonndi in the United States alone. T Gondi is a parisite people catch from cats. This parasite even effects the way you think it causes violent behavior. It effects men, women,— even infects pregnant women.
Most of you reading this are infected with T Gondi! I call toxoplasma gondi the zombie parasite.
I think that millions of Americans, mostly Democrats, are infected by a much more serious virus. M.Ghandi.
As for why Zombie movies are so popular, most people watch movies to escape from reality for a couple of hours. But the current state of the world is so awful that most traditional forms of escapism, such as love stories and westerns,aren’t compelling enough for many, especially men. And because the liberal/conservative divide seems so much worse now than at any time since Vietnam, a horror genre that portrays large numbers of “Them” as sub-human creatures begging to be blown away, is more believable than conventional date movies.
Not that “romance” has completely disappeared. I haven’t seen any of the Twilight series, but I’d guess that making the male-female thing sinister has helped its success. And the Vampire genre has always been about sex, all the way back to Bram Stoker.
I believe that Mr. Hawkins has the list right but I would add one more.
“You Can Kill, Kill, Kill Without Any Pang of Conscience.”
Way down deep under our cerebellum (or whatever) all of us have a primitive and feral being just itching to get out. Zombie flicks accomplish a neat pyschological trick. We have spent thousands of years (well – some of us have) establishing rules and laws that keep our “monsters of the id” in check. To kill others is wrong, in fact it’s murder. Even today some people get a little squeamish at cinematic depictions of mass slaughter.
However you can vicariously kill zombies all day without a seond thought because THEY’RE ALREADY DEAD! (And it wasn’t your fault – even cinematically.) It’s like having to defend yourself from a carniverous side of beef. So bring out the AK-47′s, the missle lauchers, the chainsaws, the belt-fed automatic weapons and the double-bladed axes and let er’ rip. No pangs of conscience here. Not even any pangs of bad taste. It’s all so wonderfully liberating and feral. You get to be Colonel Kurtz without the bad dialogue and psychological baggage.
You hit on it chambers- it is the #1 reason – genocide is okay because…
as for Romero, one is reminded of Quentin T’s praise of B movies- B movie still makes it a bad movie…
#7 the reason zombie movies are so popular is because they tap into our ~residual genetic memory of the time when homo sapiens sapiens co-existed with the neanderthals, hobbits and other human-like creatures and fought to survive.
The Obama voters are the real zombies. What do we get to do about them?
this explains it all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6soTEMBWp9E
Hey, no Milla Jovavich and Resident Evil? Major fail….lol.
By the way, ya may want to replace the photo on the page describing zombies as slow. In Zombieland the main character had a rule about how important cardio was.