[/caption]Today Zombies are everywhere(1) and we owe it all to George Romero. Like his creation he bit into popular culture and infected us with the zombie. 1968’s Night of the Living Dead(2) changed popular culture forever. He offered us a vision of the macabre like we had never seen before. A slow moving mindless killing machine that could destroy all of us and despite its rotting flesh and putrefication we didn’t want to kill it. Max Brooks, author of the 2003 The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead, attributes the zombies success to their apocalyptic nature: "Other monsters may threaten individual humans, but the living dead threaten the entire human race." "Zombies are slate wipers." (3)While I think the zombie apocalypse is part of the meme I don’t think it fully explains the success. Nuclear war, alien invasion, along with mutant flu bugs all offer the same apocalypse, but fail to resonate as strongly with the public. Part of the draw of the zombie seems quite the opposite: there’s always the chance of being a survivor. None of the fan sites, or movies expect everyone to die. The ending of every Romero movie is fairly bleak and the heroes rarely survive, but some people do. Even though Ben is shot at the end of Night, the rednecks, who shoot him, still survive. Or at least they have a chance to survive, no matter how slim. Think about the endings of Day of the Dead(4) and Land of the Dead(5) , not only do the heroes survive, but in the case of Land even the zombies survive.
So there has to be more to the zombie than just the apocalypse.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2009-04-08-zombies-pop-culture_N.htm
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063350/
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2009-04-08-zombies-pop-culture_N.htm
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088993/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418819/
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