by Thomas Plante

Created on: November 03, 2010   Last Updated: November 05, 2010

Zombies are everywhere these days.  They not only appear in horror movies, but also books, video games, and even television with AMC's new series "The Walking Dead."  By now, they are a legitimate pop culture phenomenon, but what is the appeal of these rotting, shambling corpses?  On the surface they aren't as interesting as other monsters like vampires or werewolves; they're really nothing more than mindless beasts that (usually) move too slowly to be threats to anybody.  Still, I have to admit that there is just something about zombies that makes them appealing horror movie monsters.

Perhaps part of the appeal that zombies hold has to do with the fact that they're almost always portrayed as acceptable targets for our hatred, fear, and aggression.  In most works a zombie's only desire is to feed on human flesh, and it will only stop looking for food when someone puts a bullet in its brain.  There's no reasoning with it, so a zombie confrontation becomes a kill-or-be-eaten scenario.  Plus, people can't feel any remorse when a zombie dies because it's already dead.  There's no moral ambiguity in a humans-vs-zombies scenario.  Vampires can think and usually have enough humanity left to be sympathetic or even heroic, and werewolves spend most of their time as humans.  Zombies are just dead flesh that happens to be moving around.

Zombie movies have also been used as allegory, with the zombies representing whatever the filmmakers want them to represent.  George Romero's classic horror movie "Night of the Living Dead" was released during the Cold War, so the zombie hordes in that film represented the threat of Communism.  He later made "Dawn of the Dead," with its scenes of zombies mindlessly milling around a shopping mall, as a none-too-subtle dig at consumerism.  Other films have followed Romero's example.  The "Resident Evil" movies show zombies as mindless puppets of an evil corporation, and the zombies in Edgar Wright's excellent horror-comedy "Shaun of the Dead" represent Londoners mindlessly going about their daily lives (in fact, one of that film's greatest jokes is that the heroes don't know they're in the middle of the zombie apocalypse until we're over a half-hour into the movie).

While part of the appeal of zombies lie in their ability to stand in for real-world threats and become acceptable targets for the heroes, horror movie monsters need to be scary in order to be truly effective.  While some works like to portray otherwise, zombies usually are too slow and too stupid to pose much of a threat to anybody unless they're in large groups.  A monster that can be outrun by someone walking at a brisk pace isn't that scary, yet zombies can be scary for another reason: they used to be human.  Simply put, zombies are people who have died, and everyone dies sooner or later.  No matter how smart, compassionate, likable, or attractive a person is, he or she is destined to end up as a mindless soulless, undead flesh-eater.  One could even say that looking at a zombie is like looking at the future of the human race.  That's a frightening thought, and it provides a great atmosphere for a horror movie.

No matter what the reason, it's clear that zombies are very appealing to fans of horror movies.  They feature monsters that can be anything the filmmaker or the viewer wants them to be, and they seem to be a bit more believable than most monsters.  They're also a lot of fun, and even a bad zombie movie still has some charm.  There will be zombies as long as there are people, and there will always be countless horror movies made about them.

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