I have long been of the opinion that zombie story’s are indicative of an underlying dissatisfaction with a treadmill lifestyle. We go to work, we earn enough to get by and not much more, we kind of shuffle along through life with only just barely enough joy to make is not an exercise in total futility and despair.
This was the only way I could understand what seemed to me an inexorable rising tide of Zombie movies in the last 15 years or so. From 28 Days Later to Shaun of the Dead to Fido to World War Z, it was as though you could not turn around without another zombie movie coming at you.
Lately, though, I get the impression that the trend is largely spent and fading out. Am I wrong in this? Are the undead starting to shuffle off into the sunrise?
Not just yet. The good ones are crowding out the mediocre ones, but the shitty ones will keep being made for awhile yet, as long as they remain profitable. Must. Have. Fodder. for TV.
I disagree. I feel the appeal of zombies are that they are a mindless threat. They only have one motivation; they want to destroy you. Unlike vampires or werewolves or aliens or ghosts, zombies can’t be diverted or reasoned with. So for the audience, they represent the personified existence of threats we have no control over. They’re cancer or nuclear war or climate change or drunk drivers; something that can kill you but you can’t defend yourself against. All you can do is hope you stay lucky.
If zombie movies are popular because of the drudgery of everyday life, but are becoming less popular now, does that imply that millions of people’s lives have recently become much more exciting?
Have millions of “Space Bounty Hunter” vacancies been posted on jobs.com, and I didn’t notice?!
I seem to remember some theory that zombie movies are more in vogue when Republicans are in office and vampire movies are more in vogue when Democrats are in office. Or maybe it was the other way around. But the idea was that these monsters are somehow reflective of societal concerns about the herd mentality or moral decadence or what have you.
I feel that all this meta analysis of media trends tend to forget one key detail: sometimes trends are just perfectly arbitrary, there’s a couple of successful works within a subgenre and there’s a lot of imitators trying to catch the wave, and there aren’t really big socioeconomic causes for that.
This. Reading into the trend for zombie movies is as ludicrous as the glib observation that monster movies in the 50s were popular due to fears of the nuclear bomb.
People like monster movies. Certain types catch on, and filmmakers make more of them.
Until they don’t. I attended a writer’s conference in 2016 and sat in on the sci-fi/fantasy agent panel. They basically said, “Stop sending us vampire stuff!” Apparently mermaids were also big that year, along with fantasy novels that began with receiving an herb-gathering quest while meeting in a tavern. Loooool.
Y’know what monster needs to reenter the spotlight? Fairies. Not as we know them now, but the alien, immoral and capricious ones. The ones who swapped your perfectly fine baby and replaced it with a choleric and ill-tempered one. The kind that whisk a lover away to a land where time moves slowly relative to our world, and then kicking their ass out into a world they no longer recognize as their own.
But no, they’ve become toothless and anodyne, just like vampires, werewolves and mermaids after them.
That could possibly be what’s going to happen to zombies as well, sucked into the event horizon that is little girl fantasy, later to be the subject of softcore erotica written by the horny housewives who grew up with them.
“Oh, Alicia,” moaned Brendan, his rheumy eyes watering, “I need your beautiful, immeasurably complex braaaaains, for they give me rigor mortis of the penis.”
Sure. Every trend dies out. That’s why it’s not a good idea to try to write a novel based on the current hot trend: by the time you finish it and start finding publishers, they have moved away from it.
Trends do come back, but only after time passes and someone creates a new take on it.
OTOH, I’d love to see the old voodoo zombies make a reappearance.
I always thought that zombie movies were an examination of what regular, everyday people do when faced with societal collapse. (And NOT about expressing dissatisfaction with the rat race.)
