The Evolution Of Zombies In Pop Culture

This is a short and somewhat excellent little article by Dana Fredsti about the history of zombies and zombie culture. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-fredsti/zombie-culture_b_1375167.html?ref=books

Zombies have been around for a very long time. Here's two examples she quotes from The Bible:

And the LORD will send a plague on all the nations that fought against Jerusalem. Their people will become like walking corpses, their flesh rotting away. Their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths.      Zechariah 14:12

But after the three and a half days a breath of life from God entered them, and they stood on their feet, and terror struck those who saw them.      Revelation 11:11

This reminds me of what Hershel says in the last episode of this season's Walking Dead. "I believed it when Christ said he would raise the dead. I just didn't expect this was what he had in mind."

Dana misses two important movies and two of my favorites, "Shaun of the Dead" and "Zombieland," the latter having the best Bill Murray cameo ever, but it's a short article and she can't hit everything.

 I believe that the rise of zombies is directly related to the rise, and subsequent fall, of vampires. An older article from Time asked if "Zombies Are the New Vampires," http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1890384,00.html says

It's not easy to put your finger on what's appealing about zombies. Vampires you can understand. They're good-looking and sophisticated and well dressed. They're immortal. Some of them have castles. You can imagine wanting to be a vampire or at least wanting to sleep with one. Nobody wants to sleep with zombies. They're hideous and mindless. They don't have superpowers. Their only assets are their infectiousness, single-minded perseverance and virtual unkillability.

I disagree. I believe that zombies are the anti-vampires. They are the direct result of the popularity of crappy little things like the Twilight movies and books. There's no angst in a zombie flick, no emotion. No pretty boys, or girls, no emotional trauma with the monster. It's just about survival. It's dealing with a never ending struggle against countless odds everyday of your life, to many an analogy of life in the world today, a world they've got no control, a world they feel is against them at every step. It's all summed up very nicely by Woody Harrelson again in Zombieland.

Tallahassee: There's a box of Twinkies in that grocery store. Not just any box of Twinkies, the last box of Twinkies that anyone will enjoy in the whole universe. Believe it or not, Twinkies have an expiration date. Some day very soon, Life's little Twinkie gauge is gonna go... empty.

Oh, and always remember rule #2: Double tap.

And I'll remind you to double tap on the friendly advertisers on this website. Each one brings me a little closer to a new laptop that doesn't take 30 minutes to warm up or shut down. Thanks for reading me.