For zombie week, I watched Night of the Living Dead and read World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. It was really fascinating comparing how zombie stories today compare with the original tales. While the intricacies and specifics of the zombie myth seem to be ever expanding, the base story is quite frequently nothing more than an exaggerated and distorted war story. In a way, this is because zombies present themselves as the perfectly unsympathetic enemy: they're already dead, they can't think, they have no sense of empathy, and their only motivation is to feast on the flesh (and brains) of humans. While the humans in a zombie movie will usually be some shade of moral gray, a zombie will always be pitch black, and thus the viewer will feel no remorse when the main character smashes their face in with a rusty shovel. Zombies use this inherent evil quality to appeal to readers/viewers in two ways. First, the zombies help nurture a sense of moral absolutism, which for many people is a comforting thing. Second, the focus on fighting and survival nurtures people's innate need for conflict. For many people living in first-world countries now, living has become extremely safe and secure compared to several hundred years ago. The conflicts that the majority of the youth face now are anything but immediately life-threatening, so many people actively seek out conflict in other ways. Entertainment has been a common source of harmless conflict for quite some time, and zombies do a good job of pushing that conflict to its extreme. Take World War Z, for instance. It essentially takes a war story to the point where only highly unethical acts can be taken to ensure the survival of the human race. Unless half the population was used as bait, the other half would have had to live out the remainder of their days under constant, relentless attack by the zombies. Other humans resort to cannibalism to live. However, once again, it is only because we ourselves are not stuck in a true life-or-death survival scenario ourselves that we take interest in these narratives.
