Zombies!

A few days ago, I went to spend my gift cards that I got for Christmas. Most being for Waterstones, as, for some reason, people who know me well thought I might like to go to a bookshop. So, I went to said bookshop, and bought...a game. Called Zombies, it's pretty self explanatory-as the game says, it's not very nice, but it is a lot of fun. And, after playing it, I can definitely agree with the fun part.

After playing it, I started thinking about zombies, and how popular they have become. Which in itself is kind of strange. I mean, what is there about them that's really likable? They're just walking (well, shambling, anyway) dead bodies. No intelligence, no emotions, no real aim in (un)life-except maybe to eat. And yet, starting from the George Romero films, they have become a bigger and bigger part of popular culture; including board games, card games, TV series, films in various genres (Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead being two of my favourites), and even appear on the CDC website. Apparently when that first appeared, they had so much traffic, the site shut down for a few days. And they still have it up because they reckon if you're prepared for a zombie pandemic, you're prepared for just about anything...

So, they're clearly really popular; but why? If it's not the zombies themselves, it must be something they represent. After all, zombie films are basically disaster movies when it comes down to it (as an aside, what exactly is the difference between a disaster movie and a horror film). So, it could well have something to do with the idea that people like being scared-as long as it's in a safe situation. For example, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, this was top of the charts.

And what could be safer than zombies? Cos, apart from the fact that they're fundamentally unlikely to ever happen; they're also slow. Which gives the possibility of them being played as comedy as easily as terror-note my fave films mentioned earlier. Someone once said something along the lines of 'Comedy is when something happens to you; tragedy is when it happens to me'-i.e. the more of a distance there is between you and it, the funnier it can be.

A bit like going out on a Saturday night, as I did last night. By then end of the evening, you may well see people looking a bit like zombies:-groups wandering/stumbling around apparently aimlessly who can look quite amusing from a distance, but, it's all too easy for violence to explode. Which leads me neatly on to another reason why I think zombies are popular (almost like I'd planned this)-they look like us, but they are clearly not us. The threat, the 'bad guys' in this situation are clearly not how we can ever be described; no, never, not us.
It's well known that George Romero wrote his zombie films as a reflection of how he saw society at the time. You can't exactly call them 'satire', cos that would imply that they were primarily intended to be funny; and that's definitely not a good description-though they definitely do contain a lot of humour. Which may be why the earlier ones are more popular than the later ones-I've seen them, and they're good films. Apart from the fact that they have had longer to get into the public consciousness (including remakes and rip-offs), with the earlier ones, it is clear that those films are describing someone else; that we, as a society are not racist and materialistic like that any more. All the more so in countries other than the U.S.-we can happily watch them in the knowledge that that's what America is like, and indulge ourselves with the illusion that we were never like that. Though with the increasing globalisation of culture, particularly music and film, who knows how long we will be able to comfortably be able to say that...