Diatribe | Issue 21

Diatribe | Issue 21

Zombie Obsession

In case you missed the memo, zombies are the new big thing. They have appeared in fiction, movies, games, poetry, and a few of my sexual fantasies. Screw werewolves, vampires, and fairies who claim they are vampires (that means you Eddy Cullen you sparkly bastard!). Zombies are the new wet dream of the younger generation. What I want to know is, why? What do we find so interesting and romantic about a reanimated corpse that wants to eat humans?

I could rant about how our obsession with zombies reflects humanity’s general apathy towards everything from politics to the fact that millions of small African children are dying while you are reading this article. But if zombie movies were really about apathy, that would mean that the heroes of these movies would be the same as politicians who successfully fought against apathy, or who managed to escape this disease of non-caring, but let’s be honest – whoever heard of politicians as heroes? The idea is more ridiculous than the time someone tried to attack the palace of Qatar and didn’t know where it was.

Maybe our obsession with zombies reflects our deep-seated worry about what it is to be human. They force us to ask ourselves, “At what point did the thing trying to eat my face off stop being my girlfriend and start being the walking dead?” The answer to this question has become increasingly blurred with the emergence of Cloud 9, a drug which makes you want to chew the faces off homeless people in buses, which sounds like a bit of a buzzkill. But again, this just doesn’t make much sense to me. I, for one, don’t stay awake at night worrying about at what point it is ok to kill my best mate when he turns into a zombie. I’m sorry bro, but if you try to take a bite out of me, I’m going to shoot to kill.

In my opinion, the real reason we are so obsessed with the idea of zombies is that secretly we all want to bust out a massive fuck-off gun and mow some zombies down like pro-immigration types in Norway (too soon?), without the rest of the world thinking we are terrible people.
This article first appeared in Issue 21, 2012.
Posted 4:26pm Sunday 19th August 2012 by Caleb Wicks.