Same here. The book did a great job of relaying the size of the threat. In the millions. And the fact that zombies who fell off of boats or out of planes or whatever, would simply walk on the floor of the ocean until they reached land. And you could be swimming OVER them, and not even know they’re there.
::shudders::
Again, so many great reasons have been given. Building a bit and adding my own:
Judging by my dreams, zombies are a great metaphor for the multitudinous, relentless demands of modern life. All our tasks, chores, responsibilities, items to be remembered, people to be called, and so on are like zombies - individually they are laughably simple to deal with, but get enough of them banging on your door, and it’s a fight for survival.
Zombie fiction allows for that most dramatic of situations: someone you love dearly becomes a deadly monster. Do you have the steel to off them? How does it make you feel if you do? Actually, when combined with Mr. Excellent’s point, this may represent a dilemma that is another powerful metaphor. In a crisis, human decency is critical, but can we also suffer from too much of it? Cooperation is needed, but so is putting down the infected and perhaps leaving a mate behind if they are overrun.
Plus, I have to agree the violence is cathartic. The other day was stressful, and let me tell you, it was really fun playing Left 4 Dead and mowing down zombies, bonus if their heads explode or whole limbs get blown off. I guess sometimes I’m not as evolved as I’d like to think.
That’s a truly bizarre idea. I could see being washed ashore wherever the current takes them, but walking on the floor of the ocean sounds like the person who came up with it didn’t think about the concept any longer than it took to look at his goldfish bowl.
The other one on this list is 3) Killer Robots.
All easily dehumanized in a story until it’s easy for the protagonists to waste them in large numbers without a thought.
The other thing is that “Zombies” as Bad Guys™ don’t get “dated” in the sense that it movies from the '70s and '80s featuring The Russians as the Bad Guys seem a bit… quaint to modern audiences.
Zombies are timeless, and so you can always use Zombies as antagonists and not have people cringing at the awful stereotyping 20 years later.
FWIW, the only Zombie film I’ve ever really liked was Shaun Of The Dead, and that’s because it was more a piss-take on the whole concept anyway.
I offer Bladerunner as a counterexample (although I suppose Das Boot could put the lie to my idea, anyway).
Like most horror concepts, zombies are interesting because they allow us to face our innate fear of death. But zombies do so in a fairly unique manner. Slasher flicks are about being killed. They’re about the fear of being brutalized and violently murdered. Ghost stories are about what happens to you after you die. They’re about the fear that you can be hurt by something even after you’re dead. Vampires, of course, are about death being desirable. Even if it makes you evil, being turned into a vampire also makes you cool, stylish, and sexy. Zombies aren’t about any of that. Zombies aren’t about dying, they’re about being dead. They’re not romantic figures, they’re rotting, imbecilic, faintly ridiculous corpses. They’re about death as a physical process. They’re about loss of self. And they’re about the loss of dignity inherent in death. They’re the reminder that you may have been Elvis in life, but in death, you’re just a dead fat man on a toilet with his pants around his ankles.