Photo by SWAPNIL VASAVE on Unsplash
Zombies are all the rage from video games, movies, TV shows to costume parties. They reflect a certain popular feeling of disconnection we like to identify with. We seem to be saturated with a preoccupation with life and death, Halloween, Easter or Resurrection Day as some call it, Christmas, Los Muertos; This is not all that bad. Newly Graduate Victoria E. Terlizzese says, “It’s also interesting how in the Bible the resurrection of the dead is a good thing but in pop culture we turn it into something evil and the end of the world scenario, which tracks because for nonbelievers it really would be the end of the world.”[1] In the Christian religion the dead came back to life into new bodies; Lazarus for example or those who came back to life when the graves were open when Jesus died. Christianity is premised on the idea of resurrection of the body and transformation into a spiritual body one that abides in the New Heaven and the New Earth. I once heard a Professor of Humanities at the University of Texas-Dallas profess that “no one can come back to life except for Jesus.”
Haitian folklore says the evil dead, as opposed to the grateful dead, or the righteous dead, would rise from their graves as rotting corpses when hell is full. Director George A. Romero’s canonical unholy trilogy, Night of the Living Dead, 1968, Dawn of the Dead, 1978 and Day of the Dead, 1984 are all premised on this legend. In Voodoo religion Zombies are under the control of a Voodoo Sorcerer who would force them to do his bidding. This belief reflects the fear of enslavement, loss of autonomy and humanity that African slavery brought to Haiti. Zombies represent losing your freedom and self-control, coming under the bewitchments of lights and shiny things. Zombies love fireworks, and cellphones, anything that flashes across their eyes holds attention.
Will there be a zombie apocalypse? Think about it; so far, we have seen the coming of supercomputers, electric cars, rockets, space travel, laser weapons, miracle cures, cyborgs, robots and atom bombs. All once restricted to the realm of science fiction or legend. Why can’t we see the dead reanimated in search of brains? This condition in the movies was a result of scientific error or technological contrivance, such as the T-Virus in Resident Evil, 2002 a genetically altered virus that turns its victims into the undead, or a burst of radiation from outer space caused by the reentry of a rocket, that bring the dead back to life, as in Night of the Living Dead, the original zombie movie. It could happen any day now with a contagion, cellphone radiation; something that wipes out all the people, a horizontal rapture, making them in the image of the crowd or causes them to be horribly mutated and leaves a few survivors. Zombies in the movies symbolize the struggle for individuality and personal meaning of a small contingent of people against mass conformity. We see in Director Romero’s cult classic Dawn of the Dead, in which a tiny band of ordinary people held up in a local Mall and fight off flesh eating dead cannibals and a motorcycle gang of scavengers. The zombies return to the Mall we are told because it was important in life, so it is important in death. The movie was a clear satire of mindless American Consumerism, even the American way of life. One zombie was even dressed in a baseball uniform and catcher’s mitt and many fashionable outfits were on display, so in answer to our question, I don’t believe there will be a zombie apocalypse. I believe the zombie apocalypse already happened! Just go to the Mall to see it or watch it on TV, hear about it over the internet, see it on your smartphone or hear it on radio and read about it in the newspapers. We are living the zombie apocalypse now, in our materialist conformity to the latest trends, mostly media trends. So, in effect the readers or audience are really the zombies. Are you a zombie?
[1] Victoria E. Terlizzese, personal text sent July 14th 2025 9:10am.