Why Zombies Are So Great

An Analysis of the Undead
by Toe-Sock Doug

Ahem. Alright. Let’s do this. Time to inject some testosterone into this dainty girly-blog. Time to finally do our namesake, the mighty Jack Black and his body, proud. I shall begin this, a stirring treatise affirming the irrefutable greatness of the Living Dead, by quoting a character from the work of… uh… Truman Capote? I believe it was his conflicted belle, Holly Golightly, who said (and I paraphrase) “All men like horses and baseball.” To update this to represent the modern man, I would immediately append “as well as dinosaurs, robots, and zombies.” For what man among my lofty tribe can claim to be uninterested in either of these subjects? Not a one, I assure you. So now, without further non-verbal grunting and exaggerated chest-beating ado (but with parenthetical digression a-plenty) I will attempt to explain just why zombies are so great.

For reasons unknown, the dead have returned to walk the land of the living. At first, we hear news of just a few scattered, isolated incidents, but things quickly get out of hand. Cue violence and gore as much brain eating ensues. But all is not lost. A few tattered remnants of humanity remain and a resistance movement or two forms. Cue additional violence and gore and end on uncertain terms. Roll credits and repeat (for in the realm of the zombie there is always room for a sequel or three). Such is the plot of a zombie narrative. A wee bit predictable, you might say. Of all the wack-ass genre stylings, why does this story keep getting told? Just what is it about the Living Dead that horrifies, fascinates, and entertains us enough to keep their decomposing malodorous corpses hanging around?

(Before I go into specifics, permit an opening caveat to the zombie-centric. This is a well-informed but incomplete analysis. Let’s call it an introduction. Zombies 101. I could expound vaguely on the origins of zombies: their African hey-day, how they crossed the Atlantic, arrived in Haiti only to grow intimately involved with Voodoo, were re-imagined in the 60’s by George Romero and were co-opted ever since.

But enough zombie pre-history.) This article is based upon my completely random conglomeration of zombie lore gleaned from some of the most popular and interesting zombie narratives of the last forty years. So don’t go all “How could you forget BrainFeast 7!? It’s such a classic!!” Save your obscurantism, Jackson.* I’ve tried to keep this ungainly project well-rounded by using source material from as many different art-forms as possible. I reference film (Night of the Living Dead, Evil Dead 2, 28 Days Later), cartoons (The Simpsons “Dial Z for Zombie”), the short-story and the novel (Stephen King’s “Home Delivery” and Pet Cemetery, respectively), and the graphic novel (Robert Kirkman & Tony Moore’s The Walking Dead). Having dealt my critics an undeniably mortal blow, on with the show!

Reason #1: Zombies are great because utopias kick ass. All Zombie stories are utopian. It’s etymological: U-topia = “the great place.” Just ask Sir Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Karl Marx, Aldous Huxley and, to a lesser extent, the dudes that came up with Fru-topia soft drinks. In order to establish your utopian community you need a ground-clearing tabula rasa moment, which very few scenarios accomplish quite as well as a zombie holocaust. It doesn't matter why the dead have returned to feast upon the brains of the living; the creative mind is more concerned with their production than their purpose. These hideous creatures are spawned in far-out ways, running the gambit from nuclear radiation, scientific and military experiments gone awry, celestial misalignments, magic spells, Love (ironic, right? and also ingeniously employed with a little help from an Indian Burial ground by both King and the Simpsons) or the fact that Hell is now full and the sprits of the damned are forced to return to their decomposing, corporeal containers for one last dance on Earth.

Reason #2: Zombies are great because destroying existence kicks ass. What the Living Dead effectively accomplish is to destroy existence as we know it. No more morning talk radio, or lines at the supermarket. Your credit score is now somewhat less important than finding food that has not gone rancid, or a place to sleep, safe from the wanderlust of animated corpses. This is essentially the glorious and excessively destructive part of the French Revolution all over again. And it’s only a matter of time before some savvy leader (a white man) gets a posse together to establish some sense of normalcy in a world gone to shit. Normalcy in this case is code for “severely screwing over minorities.” If you are a black man, you will likely get “accidentally mistaken for a zombie” and lynched. If you are a woman, chances are you will also get screwed over, quite literally. And children? Please. Suffer the little children as they fall prey to parental incompetence only to become zombified and return to spade their dim-witted mothers a dozen times in the chest.

True, a utopia has never been a great place for non-white men– but minorities worry not. Like the society replaced by the zombie-engendered utopia, white men will still heap sufficient troubles upon themselves, all on their own. For this foundling utopian community is by no means a sure thing. Just ask the Jacobins who may not have had flesh-eating zombies to deal with, but still found themselves fighting off one counter-revolutionary movement after another with the help of their good friend Capt' Guillotine.

Reason #3: Zombies are great because they must needs ultra-violence in order to be dispatched and, as Alex from A Clockwork Orange taught us, excessive violence most certainly kicks ass. Guillotines being scarce in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, many survivors opt for shotguns, which just as effectively sever that intimate bond between the head and the rest of one's corpus. Having established the zombie narrative’s proclivity for utopias, we can also affirm: Zombie culture is a critique of Late Capitalism. A rather transparent and unflattering critique, at that, which leads to… Reason #4: Zombies are great because Late Capitalism decidedly does not kick ass. What are zombies if not the perfect embodiment of the lower middle class American blue-collar wage-slave? Zombies exist only to consume and reproduce, and the American middle class appears to be doing a bang-up job accomplishing this task as well. Granted, this treatment of the average man is deeply jaded and hopelessly elitist, but who can disagree with at least the pretenses of this analogy after witnessing just two minutes of the stock footage from any Wal-mart at 5:00 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving? Soylent Green isn’t people— zombies are people!

In order to firmly link the character of a zombie with the admittedly stereotypical lower middle class American, perhaps this is a good time for a zombie character trait summary.

I. Zombies are completely mindless. They cannot solve even the most rudimentary logic games. Some movies and stories exploit this fact to brilliant black comedic effect. (Reason #5: Zombies are great because comedy engenders laughing and every time a child laughs a fairy is born.)

II. Zombies are creatures enslaved by their basic animal need to consume. They have no other desires. Be careful– it is easy to surmise that zombies actually try to reproduce or conversely, destroy things that are not zombies. But don't be fooled, these are the mere side effects of the zombie's sole drive to consume. If a zombie didn’t have to eat, it most likely would be on the lazy boy watching the game, trying to ignore your pleas for attention while you slave over the hot stove, fold the laundry, or burp Junior so that he doesn’t vomit all over the place.

III. Zombies are dead. The bodily functions of a human that has died and become a zombie have ceased. Therefore, zombies do not need to breathe and they cannot feel pain. The young people of today will try all sorts of illicit substances in order to achieve just such a physical dislocation. (Reason #6: Zombies are great because they beat you at your own game. Sorry, young-people-of-today.)

Well I’m running out of time, space, and energy and, very zombie-narrative-appropriately, I have not planned any sort of formal conclusion. As such, you might find any number of sequel articles re-postulating the greatness of the zombie, from Reason #7: Zombies are great because they can’t have children to Reason #29: Zombies are great because they blaspheme religion by making the ‘afterlife’ somewhat less than heavenly, straight down the line to the oft overlooked Reason #104: Zombies are great because in the moonlight they dance better than you do. Thank you for indulging this old man’s fondness for the Living Dead and like the topic on which I’ve preached, I’ll more than likely return to eat away at your brains with more mindless musings.

*Eds. Note: Toesock Doug is not specifically referring to a reader named Jackson, but is using the name as a general address, much in the manner of "chief," "scout," or "dude."