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: 

From the Grave to the Silver Screen

How Modern Film Has Changed Our Outlook on the Zombie

Zombies have been an integral part of the horror and sci-fi genres of film since 1968 with the release of George A. Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead. Romero’s film spawned a large number of zombie-based movies that would assist in creating a new culture based on the fear of a ‘zombie apocalypse’. These films have created the idea of the modern zombie with which most people have become familiar. However, they were not the first to depict zombies on the ‘big screen’.

Poster for Halperin's White Zombie (1932)

Believed to be the first zombie movie, White Zombie (1932) directed by Victor Halperin, depicts the zombie in a more traditional light by relating it back to African voodooism . Done on a much smaller scale, there is no sign of the ‘apocalypse’ that has spurned many of the popular notions and fears behind zombies. ‘Traditional’ zombies were the product of shaman black magic - empty shells whose souls were at the mercy of their master. The fear created by this movie was not necessarily rooted in the idea of a mindless walking corpse. Instead, it was the fact that an intelligent being was in control.

Romero played on the fear spurned by the Cold War. His zombies were the products of radioactive contamination rather than black magic. Numbers were the main source of the fear created by the modern zombie. The idea of an endless wave of single-minded beings driven by their ‘hunger for brains’ would form the basis for countless zombie movies to follow.