Cultural Phenomenon: Zombies

In honor of the season finale of "The Walking Dead", I decided to write this week's essay on...

Zombies!

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Zombies have become such a large part of our culture, from video games and movies, to television, comic book and t-shirts. It is said that during economic down times zombie themes get popular (probably due to the idea of everyone walking around aimlessly trying to get by). I personally don't really like the zombie genre but I do like the idea that it brings out incredible human moments and it is nice to get a reprieve from all of the vampire nonsense lately.

Movies like Night of the Living Dead, World War Z, Resident Evil and 28 Days later grew the genre into what it is today. It is interesting that now there are even "romantic" zombie movies with things like Warm Bodies (which was a book, then got adapted into a movie). People even use 'zombie' as a colloquial term to describe how they feel early in the morning, at night or when they are generally struggling, which also shows how big this culture has gotten. The CDC even has a zombie apocalypse preparedness guide that you can check out here.

One of the biggest influences on the genre in recent history has been the Walking Dead series by Robert Kirkman. It started as a popular comic book series (still-ongoing), that grew into a critically-loved show on AMC that is now a huge popular video game series (see picture above). I have been told countless times that the appeal of the show/comic book/game is first for the human element, as we can see what happens psychologically when everything falls about and also for the action of killing the zombies or seeing other people get killed. Some people out there do fear a real apocalypse happening due to the immense population which would help the ease of the spread of a certain disease, so that underlying fear and future could be plausible. For others, I feel it is just a quality television show, in the veins of Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones (many of those share the same fans coincidentally) that has great stories and characters that keep them coming back. I feel like the idea of facing morality is a huge part of dealing with the zombie apocalypse and it creates interesting and difficult situations out of it that keep the fans enthralled.

Another huge influence on the culture has been the growing success of zombies in video games. Games like Telltale's The Walking Dead, Naughty Dog's The Last of Us have added the powerful human element to the genre to make them more than just killing as many zombies as possible. Of course, if you want to do that there's a zombie mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops II.Other games like Resident Evil and Dead Rising have been around since the 90s and still have huge audiences flocking to play their stories.

The only reason why I haven't watched the show The Walking Dead is that I already spoiled myself on big events, so I will probably just wait until the hype dies down and then binge-watch everything on Netflix (like I'm doing with Battlestar Galactica). Or I may start with the comics since I prefer reading over watching most days. It's safe to say that (for now, at least) zombies are here to stay.