Rotting flesh and mindless hunger. What exactly attracts so many people to see zombie movies? Lets break down the genre a little to help us understand why we love to watch dead people eat live ones.

Unlike most horror movies, zombies have no ulterior motives. They aren't killing us because their mothers abused them as children. Nor are they out for revenge. There are a plethora of reasons why living humans would go out and kill other humans. There is one reason and only one that the dead walk: the mindless craving to eat us.

I think that is the main appeal to zombies as the baddies in movies. Every other movie monster can we worked around. They each have some motive that can be dealt with or a need that can be satisfied. Even in real life, criminals and murderers normally seek something that can only be replaced by some terrible deed. When it comes to zombies however, there is no reasoning with them. Zombie movies almost never have a happy ending either.

Almost every movie you watch has a happy ending. The bad guy always gets it in the end and the hero always gets the girl. Not so with the zombie movie. No matter how many you take out, they still win. Humanity always comes to a halt when the dead need to feed. We love the apocalypse, no matter what the form. Zombie movies are a direct confrontation where everyone, hero or zero, must fight or die. But we still get our small victories.

Every person, rich or poor, dumb or smart, gets their opportunity to be a part of a zombie movie. Sometimes its a sniper on a rooftop taking careful aim and picking off undead one at a time. Other times its some woman with a golf club wailing away, whacking walking meat-sacks in the head until she escapes or falls in a mass of clawing hands and gnashing teeth. Either way, we love to see the exotic and mundane being used to save humanity, or just our own hide.

I suppose in the end, we love zombie movies because of the "what-if" factor. What if the dead did rise? We watch the film and quickly decide what we would do. We decide what equipment we would carry, if it happened in our world. In a zombie movie, the very thing we are turns against us. The final frontier of death becomes blurred and we find in the end, we are fighting ourselves.

Learn more about this author, Mark Murphy.
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