Sink your teeth into the Zombie Renaissance — why are there so many zombie movies?
The last 14 years have been a veritable Renaissance for the zombie apocalypse genre. Here’s why.
It was the height of summer and with New York City slowly being cooked to death, I found myself part of a city-wide exodus to the cool, dark, Precambrian sanctuary of the local cinema. As if pulled by fate, or some other unknowable force — Marketing and Advertising — I found myself in the sensory embrace of World War Z. World War Z was just the start of the 2013 zombie flick feast — by the end of the year 12 movies featuring zombies in a significant role had been released (my numbers are based on Wikipedia’s unparalleled list of zombie films). Already in 2014, there are two more zombie movies.
Since the year 2000, there have been over 230 zombie movies produced for hungry movie-goers to devour. The number of silver-screen zombies increases exponentially beyond this if you also include the AMC TV show, The Walking Dead. Conversely, from 1932 (when White Zombie was released) to 2000, there were only 144 zombie movies. In case it’s not obvious — there have been 160% as many zombie-themed movies in the last 14 years as in the previous 68 years of filmmaking. What happened in the past decade or so to render our society obsessed with the undead? Why are lurching, spitting, groaning corpses so central to our contemporary fantasies?
There were only six zombie movies made in the year 2000. There were seven in 2001. Four in 2002. Then, suddenly, in 2003 there were 12 movies about the undead and 20 zombie flicks in 2004. In subsequent years the number of zombie films has multiplied like bite victims in a crowded subway car. If we assume that it takes between one and three years on average to make a movie, the horde of zombie movies went into production beginning more or less in 2001 and 2002 and multiplied each year after.
In academic circles, the resurgence in zombie films has been attributed to the 9/11 attacks. Other theories occasionally lurch into view, notably that zombies signify a discomfort with modern technology and the overwhelming nature of digital communication and modern consumerism, yet this fails to explain the spike in production of zombie films in the years after 2001.
The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 brought about a ‘Renaissance’ in the genre of zombie movies. Danny Boyle’s 2002 film, 28 Days Later, is often cited as the start of the rebirth of the zombie genre and the creation of the fast, running “infected” zombie in contrast to earlier “shuffling” zombies. Boyles’ zombies, and later screen zombies like those in I Am Legend, World War Z andThe Walking Dead are the product of some kind of infection or virus. The undead chase their prey and can strike suddenly, yet still maintain the inexorable advance of previous generations of walking dead.
Sociologists and film theorists have often cast the revivification of the zombie genre as a response to 9/11 and the subsequent global war on terror. The new generation of zombie films portray “dystopian anarchy on a grand scale that could not be achieved in early renditions of the zombie apocalypse. With characters left to fend for themselves, these ‘everyman’ tales become gripping stories of individualism and resilience, thereby resonating with Western audiences,” according to a 2012 essay by Dave Paul Strohecker, a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland.
The zombie movies of the aughts worked on a world spanning, grandly apocalyptic scope not seen in previous generations of the undead. The war on terror was global, so too the monsters of our collective unconscious. The threat of zombies is global now, not limited to a shopping mall or a farm house as in George A. Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead. The zombie plague in this new generation of films can spread in the blink of an eye and destroy a city in an instant. It’s no mistake that the zombie virus in World War Z is spread primarily by air travel, the same vehicle as the most traumatic terrorist attack carried out against the United States.
The zombie in film acts “as a fluid and powerful metaphor for articulating our deepest cultural anxieties and social fears” according to Strohecker, and at any given time it reflects our current social anxieties. This theory has often been articulated about recurring film monsters and villains, but the zombie has proved to be especially malleable and resonant with contemporary problems. In Strohecker’s words, “the zombie has acquired a powerful cultural currency since 9/11,” and has been a constant metaphor for our perceived constant, unending war against unseen terror.
Zombies are, quite literally, terror embodied in human form.
To survive the zombie apocalypse, you must avoid crowds; you never know when someone will turn to gnaw your face off. The possibility of a zombie among us — a person infected who has not yet turned, a ticking time-bomb — recreates the tension of standing in post-9/11 airport security lines (this perhaps mirrors the Cold War popular obsession with Soviet sleeper agents among us). The fevered stockpiling of guns, ammunition and canned goods for survivors in The Walking Dead mirrors the survivalist tendencies of America’s nativist libertarians. Yet zombies also allow us to model the authoritarian turn brought about by crisis. Again, in The Walking Dead, the ‘Governor’ in season three bluntly decries outsiders as terrorists, a la George W. Bush, before raising an army and ultimately turning his guns on his own people. The writing may be ham-fisted, but the inclination is telling. In World War Z, Israel sees high walls and isolationism as its salvation.
Zombies are a metaphor for our greatest societal fears and anxieties, largely centered around terrorism and the breakdown it can cause in social institutions. But there’s something more to this. There are plenty of rowdy action movies made about fighting terrorists. These are also a regular box office hit — summer 2013 brought us such epics as White House Down, Olympus Has Fallen andMan of Steel in this mold. What is the value of having zombies as a metaphor if our action heroes can fight actual terrorists for us?
The answer lies in the fact that zombie movies are not just about the zombies, they’re also about survival in a primal sense. While the zombies themselves are a metaphor for our worst fears, the fight against them becomes archetypal of the danger and human perseverance that modern life in the developed world is devoid of. An actual fight against terrorists, even fictional terrorists, is somehow too real for a truly cathartic release. The necessity of fighting and killing living, breathing, conceivably empathic human beings causes emotional turmoil rather than acting as a psychic balm. Shooting a terrorist is political. Removing a zombie’s brain with a machete is survival.
We want to survive, not find ourselves trapped in a moral gray area.
The zombies are metaphors for our societal fears, but those who strive to survive contain all of the grit, perseverance and ingenuity of a cowboy in the Wild West of yore. The loner with a six-shooter is as much an archetype of zombie movies now as of John Wayne Westerns. With zombies, things really are black and white, good or bad (to a point). The undead will never be typified as freedom fighters. They have no demands beyond human flesh. Beyond providing an outlet for our fears, zombie movies give movie-goers a fantasy of being able to fight back in the rawest way possible without any pesky consequences.
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