Why zombies

One by one, U. Creature W ith the Atom Brain , features an ex-Nazi scientist named Wilhelm using radiation to reanimate corpses. Zombies of the Stratosphere revolves around an evil alien force that steals atomic bomb plans from the Soviets, with the intention of using its force to swap orbital positions with Earth. In Plan 9 F rom Outer Space , benevolent aliens resurrect a human zombie force and use it to stop the development of a sun-powered mega bomb.

The Earth Dies Screaming features a bulletproof alien force that uses a strange gas to obliterate mankind, then animates corpses with radio signals. By the mid- to late s, new turmoil emerged in the United States, and with it, the modern zombie was born. In the midst of it all came a movie that entirely changed the zombie film as we know it: Night of the Living Dead.

A zombie stumbles forth, and she runs through the countryside, taking refuge in a farmhouse. Here, she encounters a young black man named Ben and a small group of other survivors. Released just five months after Martin Luther King Jr. Racially charged interactions are woven throughout the film — mainly between Ben and Harry, a white authoritarian whose power is increasingly threatened. As the final shot fixates on a raging fire reminiscent of a Ku Klux Klan ritual, we hear the sound of barking police dogs echo in the distance.

It was shown in Greenwich Village among radical student groups, and was showcased in the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a form of political filmmaking. For the first time, many Americans were being exposed to the wide-scale horrors of war. Graphic video footage of the Tet Offensive and piles of dead bodies were routinely broadcast. Here, a zombie apocalypse rakes the United States, leaving urban centers — largely populated by lower-class minorities — especially vulnerable.

SWAT teams bust through the doors of housing projects, killing dozens of living humans who pose a potential infection risk. In the final moments of the film, zombies overrun the mall — escalators on, music playing, fountains gurgling — and we see little difference between a typical holiday weekend shopping crowd and a zombie apocalypse.

The zombies in Dawn of the Dead underscore the fears of capitalism and mindless consumption that racked the late s. Contagion soon joined the ranks of voodoo and radiation as an explanation for how zombies are reanimated. In the widely popular video game Resident Evil , a major pharmaceutical company, the Umbrella Corporation, secretly experiments with bio-organic weaponry and develops the "T-virus" — a mutagenic virus that brings corpses back to life. The film 28 Days Later follows a similar arc: Apes infected with a highly contagious, rage-inducing virus escape from a medical research lab, and the infection spreads throughout the world, resulting in a dystopian collapse.

In recent years, the zombie — and its new medically induced origins — has been appropriated by hardcore survivalists. That same year, the C enters for Disease Control and Prevention famously released "Preparedness Zombie Apocalypse" — a guide on how to prepare for a widespread epidemic outbreak.

The campaign was so wildly popular that it was expanded into a blog, promotional posters, and a novella. In both cases, a small contingency of the public — no doubt, those with very real fears of apocalyptic doom — took the ideas of Schlozman and the CDC very seriously. After pulling an Orson Welles and jokingly passing off his theories as truth on a national radio program, Schlozman got inundated with terror-stricken letters from listeners.

How do I keep my house safe from the zombie onslaught? The idea that mass contagion could start a zombie apocalypse was soon appropriated by a new survivalism fantasy — one predicated on ample weaponry, rugged individualism, and a fear of globalization.

We have seen incidents that are very close to it, and we are thinking it is more possible than people think. A number of other militias — including a faction of the Michigan Militia — have followed suit, using the pandemic-themed zombie apocalypse as justification for gun rights. The post-apocalyptic world is dotted with tribes interested only in their own self-preservation; all other life is considered disposable. He maintains an off-the-grid mentality, relies on nobody, and is never caught without his crossbow, a gun, and at least three knives.

Night of the Living Dead , with its decisive black hero and cowardly Bourgeois White Dad figure, was as counter-cultural as they came. The white snipers ranged across the horizon in the closing scenes were indistinguishable from a shambling row of zombies. In , Dawn of the Dead famously took aim at the aimless crowds of shoppers who pollinate malls across the world. The undead have at times been argued to represent the underclass, as in Land of the Dead , communism and fears of globalisation.

Then of course there's The Big One. As Simon Pegg put it, "Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.

You can use zombies to take potshots at mortality, government ineptitude, bioengineering and unchecked technological advance, slavery, capitalism, exploitation, social division, anything you like. It's no coincidence that a common, contemporary image of the zombie apocalypse is a hand-held camera viewing a surging crowd of civilians and soldiers, shot in a modern city with fireballs and black smoke in the sky: it's the news , made palatable by its fantasy context.

Because simplicity is the appeal of the zombie. They don't have complex motivations, they don't have a goal, they don't have an arc. They seek out the living and they eat them, that's all they do. Kill them or they'll eat you. They're not even the real antagonists of the stories they occupy, they're just a means to an end — what they do is cut to the heart of our human problems by stripping civilisation down to the bare essentials.

When there are enough of them, society collapses. Humanity's web of intricate nuances — all the noise of social networks, political compromise, corporate hierarchy, conflicting identities, faceless terror threats and branded infotainment — it all collapses too, and we're left with some really simple questions. In fact, The Walking Dead asks those very questions on the back of each volume of the comic:.

The question we cannot help but ask when watching a zombie movie is: "What would I do, if that were me? In this way, the zombie movie occupies the same place in the movie-going psyche that the Western used to. The post-apocalyptic landscape is one of isolated communities and no rule of law, where strong men almost always men can terrorise the weak with impunity, and faith in blood and friendship is all that keeps anarchy at bay. What would I be willing to do in order to survive?

Research in mice suggests that the mammalian brain processes aggressive, violent behavior the same way as it does other rewards, Live Science previously reported.

And considering that aggression is a highly conserved trait in mammals, it's likely humans crave violence, too, Kennedy said. People enjoy watching their greatest fears come to life in a fictional story, Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, told Big Think. Bloom's theory is that fictional tragedy and imaginary horrors help prepare people for real life by delivering moral truisms. There's not as much to learn from a story about an average person, living an average life and in an average place, Bloom said.

The alternate realty of a zombie apocalypse allows people to briefly escape the stress of social pressure and information saturation they encounter in their everyday lives, said Douglas Rushkoff, author of "Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now" Current, The zombies in AMC's series "Fear the Walking Dead" are the kind that shuffle along slowly, with limited coordination, and they clearly lack cognitive abilities.

They can be deadly , but it's not like a professional fighter coming at you. Fighting zombies is easier if there's teamwork, Smith previously told Live Science.

There are typically at least a few survivors during a zombie apocalypse, and that gives the audience hope that things might work out even in the toughest of times — maybe they'll figure out a way to overcome the zombies!