Who Owns the Zombie?

How much does it cost to manufacture a zombie? Well, if you want to get technical: one corpse and a rabbit’s heart (or a child’s bones) if you follow the lore of the television show Supernatural. Oh, and the ultimate price: The Earth. Because we all know zombies will be the end of life on this planet as we know it. Someday this price may need to be paid but, until then, it is a little easier to put a monetary value on the walking dead.

Gray makeup was a poor choice made by the makeup
 and special Fx teams. While it seemed effective in the
flesh (pardon the pun), it appeared blue on film.

The zombie genre has been an extremely popular one since George A. Romero’s first film, Night of the Living Dead (1968).  Costing approximately $114,000 (about one million dollars by today’s standards), the black and white low budget film produced a niche for films featuring reanimated corpses harassing the living. 10 years later, his second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead,  cost about $650,000. In this instance extras, usually friends and family of the production crew, were reported to have been paid in the form of $20 cash, a box lunch, and a t-shirt. And aside from $7,000 worth of drunken zombie fun involving a golf cart and a marble pillar, it did not appear too expensive to create mobs of zombies (albeit extremely corny, blue skinned mobs of zombies) even 10 years after Romero’s debut zombie production. 

Amazingly, in comparison to two recent zombie movies, Zombieland (2009) which cost about $23 000 000 to produce and Resident Evil Afterlife (2010) which cost around $60 000 000 (a considerable amount more due to the added 3D effects), Romero is still able to maintain a minuscule budget of just around four million dollars for his most recent zombie epic, Survival of the Dead (2009). 

In contrast to the millions of dollars spent on these productions, the zombie can be seen more as a phenomenon than an actual commodity. While Hollywood may seem to have a monopoly over the genre it appears as though the true monopoly belongs to the fans themselves. With events such as Zombie Walks or Humans vs. Zombies the idea of the apocalypse is still very much intellectual property of the people. While the zombie genre can be related to modern North American consumerism in that the undead will not stop until they have ‘consumed’ everything (and the fact that a great deal of zombie related media tends to occur in shopping malls) it is also counteracted by these free events organized by the people, for the people.

So, how much does it really cost to produce a zombie? Well, if we are going by Romero’s standards then about as much as the cost of a tube of gray face paint. Everyone having the ability and rights to make their own zombies? Priceless. For everything else, there’s Mastercard.

Gather Your Village!

In my second post I pointed out that the idea of an apocalypse was cause for empowerment in the masses of fans. The young, able-bodied believers of the zombie apocalypse live with the idea of being the sole survivors after the dead return to walk the earth. Zombie media (films, video games, comics/books) provide the consumers of this genre with a sense of immortality that can only be fulfilled through the terms of the apocalypse but, is this the only reason why someone might lead themselves to believe in the destruction of the human race by bloodied corpses?

Aside from the fact that any responsibilities (aside from killing zombies) are thrown out the window, could it be that this group of people wish to see the world in chaos? If so, then why? Most might say they wish to see modern, human society crash and burn so they no longer need to bother with the rules and laws forced upon them. This may be true but, as social creatures, we do require interaction with other humans. 

However, do we really need that much?

150. This is the number of social relationships one person can maintain at a given time (give or take). I do not care how many friends you have on Facebook, you cannot keep up with every single one of them, nor can they always keep up with you. According to Jonathan Barrickman, this can be related back to man’s earliest forms of living in communities: villages.

With modern developments (i.e. more or less anything that improved living from the onset of the Industrial Revolution onwards) we’ve been forced to live in huge cities with thousands of other people that we have no desire to connect with let alone interact with. Besides your 150 relationships, your modern day village, these people are just road blocks (sometimes literally) in your life. Who cares if they were to actually become a zombie?

The ideal world for the zombie-obsessed would be one that must be started from the ground up or for others just left as it is. The most important thing is the removal of these modern cities full of people. By a certain age we have reached our current capacity for social relationships and as far as a believer of the apocalypse could be concerned, everyone except for their ‘village’ can just go off and die (and be reanimated to walk the earth of course).

So, for these people who are involved with zombies, be it through film, games, or some form of literature, the idea of the zombie apocalypse is the only tangible option short of removing themselves and their 150 closest friends out to the country to form a self-sustained farming community. At least with the rest of the human populace wiped out they only need to be concerned with killing the zombies that threaten their lives. In the world of Zombieland, farming is not required. And as most zombie fans know (at least the ones that are active on the internet), Farmville has taught us that farming is not fun.

Check out the amazing zombies from Toronto's Zombie Walk 2010: