A Texas road sign displays warnings about zombies in January 2009

Zombies are everywhere at the moment: a book mashing up the living dead with Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) is a best-seller, numerous zombie films and games have been recently released or will come out later this year and even Woody Harrelson justified hitting a photographer recently because he thought they were a member of the living dead: “I was startled by a paparazzo,” Harrelson said, “who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie.” So why is there a cultural zombie invasion at the moment? What is it about the living dead that means they are popping up at on every corner?

Contemporary Anxieties

This increased prominance to the living dead has not gone unnoticed by the press. The Daily Telgraph asks in an article published today Zombies and vampires: why do we love the undead?, The Arizona Republic’s article notes that Zombies are a Rising Trend, while Time magazine claims ‘Zombies are the New Vampires‘. If anything, Vampires were staked in the heart by a zombified Van Helsing years ago and in their place have risen up an army of the undead who have plagued our tv screens, games consoles, movie theatres and books.

All monsters play on the fears of their contemporary audiences: vampires depict fears regarding sex and sexuality; Frankenstein’s monster highlights anxieties relating to modern science and Werewolves symbolise man’s fear of its own animal passions. Zombies are very much a reflection of late 20th/early 21st century fears, representing a complex range of contemporary anxieties. However, even though zombies symbolise death, disease, de-humanisation, and the fragility of both ourselves and our society, this is not the reason why they have become so engrained in our culture.

It’s because zombies are fun.

Chainsaws and Shotguns

Zombies are a loveable punchbag to offload our frustrations out on; the zombie apocalypse appealing precisely because the old rules of society have collapsed, thereby allowing us live out survivalist fantasies. Moreover, there is no guilt in dispatching a undead walking corpse with a shotgun or chainsaw, only the pleasure of seeing their blood and brains explode. What isn’t there to love about the living dead?

Lost Zombies is a social media initiative, where contributors send in clips for a community-based documentary about a zombie apocalypse. Elsewehere, zombie flash mobs appear in cities, with people dressing up as blood-splattered undead. This is an alternative reality where zombies are real and the post-apocalyptic world is already happening; the boundaries between real and virtual blurred, with zombies a tool to undermine established society and culture. The axiom of Dawn of the Dead where zombies are us, us them is no more apparent: we want to be the mindless zombie and live through a zombie apocalypse.

Apocalyptic Gallows Humour

The very nature the zombie apocalypse is inherently ambivalent: a preposterous unreality (the dead coming back to life and eating the living) effectively a meta-joke that both shies away from, and at the same time implicitly addresses, more possible apocalypses such as pandemic viruses, environmental disaster, economic collapse or even nuclear holocaust. Nearly all these cataclysms are a product of man’s folly and potential to destroy itself: ultimately they are as ridiculous as the zombies that mock them.

More than comedy-horror escapism, zombies are a form of contemporary surrealism; an apocalyptic gallows-humour that parodies our fears of the future. The complex duality makes the zombie continuingly engaging and relevant for contemporary audiences. There is a winking post-modernism associated with zombies, so instead of openly fearing the living dead, we embrace them as old friends. By laughing at zombies we are literally laughing in the face of death and of the absurdity of humans causing a post-apocalypse sometime in the future.