Preppers. Zombie Movies and our love of apocalypse is fascinating. Repping is similar in some ways to Cosplay, I think. It's a hobby intertwined with the way our fantasy obsessed minds work. It enables people to keep engaging with their fantasies. In this case, the weirdly persistent apocalypse fantasy.
When I was about 14-15, I loved Stephen King's "The Stand" and some of my friends liked it too. The youth fetish culture didn't really exist in that time and place, but the book and its post apocalypse world fascinated us. We talked out what we'd do and how. Find an island. Rescue damsels. Train dogs.
It's a persistent sort of a fascination. Interestingly so. It would be fun to find out more about the art history of zombie apocalypses.
Under this, in some way, is the fact that major catastrophes and cultural "rebooting" plays a pretty substantial role in human history. I find the idea that the world's flood myths (Noah, Atlantis..) relate to catastrophic flood events. Religions tell us about past catastrophes and promise future ones. There are some pretty interesting suggestions that the early fertile crescent civilizations' (eg Egypt) sudden rise are actually rebuilding events following the catastrophic demise of earlier (EG Gobleki Tepeh in Turkey) civilizations. There's also a lot of genetic evidence of major population collapses at several points.
There's also post war baby booms and some other bits and pieces suggesting that we are hard wired to think apocalyptically.
Why is the "zombie apocalypse" so popular? because we have a surfeit of ways the world will likely die, and zombies are less likely than the insect/animal extinction, climate catastrophe or tweets launching nukes, so it's almost comforting in an escapist way.
I love the genre because, by far and large, because it creates a reality that works very counter-intuitively. Sure, zombies are a threat, but bigger picture, they're just a background concern compared to the threat that other people present, and that's where the meat of good zombie apocalypse media resides: human interaction.
The scenario allows for an accelerated skewing of human interaction that extends not to just distrust of strangers, but absolute loyalty to anyone that's proven their trust. Anyone showing slight signs of mental instability is now a huge threat to your livelihood, and anyone not pulling their weight may have be killed or left for dead (which is effectively killing them yourself.) What, in our world, are the slightest of concerns, become large factors in a zombie infested world.
-Favorite zombie media?
Night of the Living Dead (which is public domain and free at
http://www.archive.org/details/night_of_the_living_deadhttp://www.archive.org/details/night_of_the_living_dead_dvd
And Romero's others (Dawn, Day, Land, just not Diary.)
Shaughn of the Dead,
Zombi II (Shark v Zombie; how can you go wrong there? Otherwise blah)
28 Days Later (Yeah, yeah, whatever. Listen to the commentary. They know it's a zombie flick.)
and the UK show Dead Set was worth watching too.
Most other zombie flicks just aren't that good.
The comic The Walking Dead is without a doubt some of the best zombie media out there (I collect it in TPBs, and need to grab the latest.)
Max Brooks' books World War Z (interview-like retelling of the Zombie War with veterans,) and Zombie Survival Guide (Almost like a 'for Dummies' book) are must-reads.
Personally, I think zombie movies reflect 'fear of societal collapse' more than 'fear over the absence of technology'. (The absence of technology is certainly part of a societal collapse, but societal collapse is more than just the absence of technology.)
Sudden, unpredictable, uncontrollable events - large stock market fluctuations, 9/11, the housing crisis, almost certainly the upcoming sovereign debt crisis - have made people very uneasy.
Zombie movies give people an opportunity to think about what they'd do in a societal breakdown, reassuring them on some level - since unlike a sovereign debt crisis, the zombie apocalypse isn't going to happen. Thinking about barricading the windows and aiming for the head is fun; thinking about total market failure is horrifying.
There's also a certain segment of the population, the underclass that's being left behind, who sees nothing in our society for them and would love a hard reset. For them, zombie movies feed into happy fantasies about their rugged gun-toting individualism. (The hero-protagonist in a zombie movie is never, say, a stockbroker from New York.)
This seems rather made up. In the last years there was also a rise in vampire and zombie literature, but that doesn't mean that a zombie apocalypse is becoming more likely.
Kind of related - most people probably don’t know, but the first studies around “zombie apocalypse” were just that, simulations of a bad virus outbreak.
True, but isn't this pretty much the case for post-apocalyptic literature in general? The protagonists are usually threatened by zombies, radioactive mutants, or roving gangs of punk rockers but not so much by starving to death, which would be a more realistic (if less interesting from a dramatic perspective) fate after the collapse of civilization.
Yeah, I think people have this assumption because it’s been portrayed that way in fictional media so many times. In actual real-world disaster situations, people don’t instantly revert to murderous zombies—they tend to band together and act altruistically.
The 'Zombie Apocalypse' to me is more about being stuck somewhere(life/work situation) fully surrounded by living people who don't use their mind. And then you go about gathering a merry band to fight the mindless herd.
One might argue that the internet is the source of a real zombie apocalypse. I see people walking - staring at their phones constantly. Seems pretty zombie like to me.
When I was about 14-15, I loved Stephen King's "The Stand" and some of my friends liked it too. The youth fetish culture didn't really exist in that time and place, but the book and its post apocalypse world fascinated us. We talked out what we'd do and how. Find an island. Rescue damsels. Train dogs.
It's a persistent sort of a fascination. Interestingly so. It would be fun to find out more about the art history of zombie apocalypses.
Under this, in some way, is the fact that major catastrophes and cultural "rebooting" plays a pretty substantial role in human history. I find the idea that the world's flood myths (Noah, Atlantis..) relate to catastrophic flood events. Religions tell us about past catastrophes and promise future ones. There are some pretty interesting suggestions that the early fertile crescent civilizations' (eg Egypt) sudden rise are actually rebuilding events following the catastrophic demise of earlier (EG Gobleki Tepeh in Turkey) civilizations. There's also a lot of genetic evidence of major population collapses at several points.
There's also post war baby booms and some other bits and pieces suggesting that we are hard wired to think apocalyptically.
Interesting stuff.
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