If you were around in the mid-to-late-aughts, you were aware of the zombie apocalypse fad. Much like the shambling undead hordes it depicted, the trend was inescapable.
As with most pop phenomena, a lot of ink has been spilled on why the zombie horror subgenre became so dominant when it did. Culture critics have yet to produce a satisfactory answer, which suggests that the real reason involves facts we’re not allowed to talk about.
The obvious suspect is Gen Y nostalgia. That answer is a little too obvious, as it turns out, since then-college-age Ys wouldn’t have had strong memories of zombie films from their formative years. The zombie franchises that made the biggest impact in the 80s and early 90s were the Night of the Living Dead series and its spinoff property Return of the Living Dead. Between the two of them, they only had three movies throughout the 1980s and one in 1993, which opened in just nine theaters.
At best, we can call that level of market penetration a cult hit; hardly the stuff of a Star Wars-caliber nostalgia revival.
So the driving force behind the aughts zombie craze must run broader and deeper than mere Gen Y pop cultism.
But what is it?
To find the answer, let’s go digging back into the zombie subgenre’s film origins.
Ask a horror movie buff, and odds are he’ll tell you that the granddaddy of the zombie genre is the 1932 Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie. In addition to being fodder for a 90s band name, this movie typified the zombie concept as it then existed in the Western mind.
Because the initial depiction of zombies in pre-code Hollywood wasn’t as rotting undead cannibals. Instead, they were portrayed as living victims enslaved by voodoo rituals and the like. In particular, White Zombie features a young American woman who ends up zombified when a man tries to steal her away from her husband with a potion obtained from a slaver in Haiti.
Zombies didn’t gain fame as mindless risen corpses until the original Night of the Living Dead premiered in 1968. That was three years after Congress passed the Hart-Celler Immigration Act, but more on that later.
NotLD creator George Romero didn’t follow up on his seminal work until ten years later. The sequel, Dawn of the Dead, famously characterized zombies as compulsive consumers that amble through shopping malls engaged in aimless materialism. A pattern starts to emerge.
In 1985, a dispute over the rights to Night of the Living Dead split the IP into parallel franchises. Dan O’Bannon of Alien fame helmed the first Return of the Living Dead film, which introduced zombies’ well-known penchant for brain eating but also made them intelligent. It’s worth noting that among this film’s first batch of zombies is a gang of punks in open rebellion against society. In sharp contrast to Romero’s zombie conformists, O’Bannon gives us zombies as anti-social elements.
Another puzzle piece falls into place.
Most critics would say that the zombie genre went dormant throughout the 90s and the early aughts. But they fall prey to the false dichotomy that separates fantasy, horror, and science fiction into separate genres.
Zombies didn’t go away. They just invaded science fiction.
One could argue that Romero style zombies were a sci fi trope from the start. Night of the Living Dead makes brief mention of radiation from a space probe recently returned from Venus. Return of the Living Dead states outright that zombification is caused by a hazardous chemical. Since the zombie apocalypse fad kicked off, rabies-adjacent viruses have been the cause célèbre.
But between RotLD and the zombie apocalypse of the aughts, pasty white slaves stripped of their individuality and absorbed into a pillaging, locust-like mob attained new heights of popularity via the sci fi TV institution, Star Trek.
Before anyone objects that the Borg aren’t technically zombies, recall that Lily from Star Trek: First Contact straight up identifies them as such.
By the way, First Contact is another Wrath of Khan remake, only inverted. But that’s a story for another time.
Anyhow, the RotLD sequel from 2005 brings us full circle and bridges both subgenres by featuring trioxin zombies that are unabashed ST Borg ripoffs.
Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis itself counts as part of the zombie apocalypse fad, since it follows movies that kicked off the craze like 28 Days Later and the parody Shaun of the Dead. Both of the latter involve the UK being overrun by zombie hordes with scientific causes.
That formula was brought to America by the IP that embodied the fad’s final form, The Walking Dead. Everybody remembers that show, which started out as a slick Frank Darabont-run production but degenerated into abject wokeslop by the end.
There’s another piece of the puzzle, and astute readers will have already seen the Death Cult‘s fingerprints at the crime scene.
So, what sociological force drove the zombie apocalypse phenomenon?
The fad’s roots in the horror genre tell us the impetus was fear. But fear of what?
That’s the blank which the whole body of zombie fiction fills in.
What’s scary about zombies – apocalyptic zombie hordes in particular?
- They look basically familiar but with easy to identify, distinctive differences. I.e., they’re you, but not you. That contradiction messes with people’s heads on a primal level.
- Chief among those differences is a near-total inability to be reasoned, bargained, or negotiated with. Zombies want what they want, and they won’t be deterred from their goal.
- Even worse, what zombies want is to consume you, your family, and your whole civilization. In large enough numbers, they are indeed an apocalyptic force.
- Worse yet, zombies can be anyone. Sure, the initial batch that just dug themselves out of their graves are pretty easy to spot. But if your friend gets bitten, you may not realize what he’s become until it’s too late.
What then, do zombies represent?
You could argue that they’re manifestations of the fear of Western civilization ending.
And that’s fair. It also explains why the zombie apocalypse was the first ubiquitous entertainment sensation after Cultural Ground Zero. People sensed that our artistic capital was used up, so the only thing people could come together over was the mutual observation that everything was falling apart.
But that’s a major symptom, not the root cause.
The zombies might have been stand-ins for third-world invaders, collapsing social trust, and younger generations’ rejection of tradition. But then what was the underlying ritual/chemical/virus?
It was a force that encompassed all dyscivic outcomes, so it is the sum of all errors and the sum of all fears.
The answer is Modernism and its disastrous consequences.
Stop to think about it, and you’ll see that the zombie is the perfect avatar of the Modernist.
Succumbing to the apocalypse vector frees him to indulge forbidden urges, but at the cost of his humanity.
For decades, Modernist heretics promised us that a bright, sexy utopia was just around the corner. All we had to do was change one little part of the Church’s Tradition.
Then another.
And another …
Cultural Ground Zero was when people started to realize that there would be no shiny earthly paradise. Instead, they’d sold their inheritance for antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis and hobo camps.
Of course the real zombie outbreak would take the form of a heresy. It’s right there in the “apocalypse” keyword.
“Apocalypse” means “unveiling”.
A lot of folks saw their true selves in those movies and despaired.
But there’s always time to turn back and embrace the Traditions the West abandoned in our hubris.
It’s tricky, though. Because Christ will forgive any sin but despair, because despair is the refusal to accept that mercy is possible.
So most people are stuck in this downward spiral, and the rest of us are along for the ride.
Until reality slaps the sociological zombies so hard they come back to their senses.
Pray that day isn’t far off.
And arm yourself with the knowledge to live your faith in the chaotic times ahead.
2020 was a zombie apocalypse. We’re still dealing with the fallout.
All of these factors did come to a head then.
The entertainment industry seems to doing a ham-fisted tour of The Last Four Things.
I recall Bishop Barron talking about how the vampire craze was a secular expression of our hard-wired sense of death and immortality. I remember thinking that the apocalypse (zombies or otherwise) craze could be our hard-wired sense of judgement. Hell? I haven’t watched, but I seem to see several demon-based shows. Will we get a Heaven phase?
Iirc, it was also Bp. Barron who pointed out that in the 19th century, Catholic culture self-detonated, fragments landed all over, and the only part of the mainstream where they remain is in the horror genre.
Self-detonated, hmm…
Under the twin impacts of Darwin and Garibaldi?
Zombies = Modernists. Exactly! They LOOK familiar, like they’re one of us, but they just want to consume and tear everything apart.
A nugget of trivia: the pre-1968 depiction of zombies as humans enslaved by black magic is much closer to the traditional Voodoo view of them (and no, I don’t care what they say, I’m not calling it “Vodun”).
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You likely already know, but Tim Powers’ “On Stranger Tides” is a great (Catholic!) fantasy novel with traditional zombies.
I have some experience in this area, so to clear it up, Voodoo and Vodun are two different, but related religions. Vodun is just what they call “witchcraft” in West Africa. Its cradle is Benin, where the slaving empire of Dahomey was based (there is still a king of Dahomey who sits on a throne made of human skulls).
Voodoo is what Haitian slaves made by taking what they knew of Vodun and combining it with mockeries of Catholic rituals they learned from their masters. Actual Vodun witch doctors had their tongues cut out when enslaved so they couldn’t cast spells, so no Vodun experts were capable of teaching them.
Dahomey never had a shortage of slaves, so magically enslaving people would be a waste of resources. They just killed them. Therefore, zombies are more a Voodoo.
If I open a youtube page on a browser with no history most of the faces don’t read to me as human. MrBeast is probably the worst in this regard, but pretty much every “approved influencer” has weird not quite human facial expressions. (Often ridiculously exaggerated mouth expressions with dead, dead eyes.) Even getting past the faces, the things that they are promoting usually seem like something that aliens would expect humans to do.
Honestly being told that these people were infected by a zombie virus or replaced by pod people would be the more comforting alternative.
A lot of the “influencers” do seem to reside in the Uncanny Valley.
I just tried your Youtube thing. You’re absolutely right. That was freakish.
I guess zombie media was trendy in the 2000s, but to me, there’s exactly one media thing that feels like the definitive last pop cultural phenomenon, in the way we recognized it from Star Wars up until the end of the 90s: LOST. Time to go a little off topic!
Although largely derided today for its make-it-up-as-you-go plot, there’s no doubt this show was a huge deal back in the mid-2000s. Everybody I knew watched it; a lot were obsessed with it. That was the last thing I remember being a really widespread, cross-demographic and community hit. It was one of the first things I recall having huge, speculative online fan communities.
It was probably a combination of factors that resulted in it being arguably the last of its type: social media changing how entertainment is consumed, atomization of communities and less cross-appeal entertainment in general, growing cynicism and impatience with big, overwrought network TV shows that had been building since other shows like The X Files failed to give a satisfying conclusion before that, the migration of fan interest to prestige cable shows like Breaking Bad.
As a result, when I think of “2000s pop culture,” or whatever passes for it, LOST is one of the few things that comes to mind, and it’s just surprising to me I don’t hear this from anyone else. What’s funny is that its lasting influence seems to be a lesson in what *not* to do, as mystery-box plots have largely avoided its pitfalls ever since; for Pete’s sake, Gravity Falls, a kid’s show, has a vastly more coherent mythology than LOST ever managed. Although I was never as obsessed with it as others I knew, I felt the show got unfairly judged based on clunky mythology that couldn’t live up to expectations when it really wanted to be a character-driven drama.
LOST was always a bit of a shell game, though it had some episodes that worked great individually. But from the season 5 finale and the entirety of season 6 it was just the writers mocking the fans for actually expecting the promises they were given to be delivered on.
(And I’m not talking about the increase of “faith” based messaging; those seeds had been sown in the first season. I’m talking about continually revealing that characters who were supposed to know the secrets actually knew nothing, and that the one guy actually setting the rules thought that said rules were completely pointless and arbitrary, in universe.)