It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) by Roberts, Adam (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

consider our fears of disease more closely, but it’s clear that zombies have become a vector for contagion – in 28 Days Later (2002) for example, they are ‘the infected’, and they sprint towards their victims with terrifying single-mindedness, an unsettling revision of the familiar ‘slow zombie’ archetype by writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle. There is of course one key difference from the spread of a real-life disease: viruses and bacteria are too small to be seen with the naked eye, whereas zombies, whether shuffling or hurtling after you, can hardly be missed. They make manifest, and thus visually interesting, a process that is otherwise invisible and tricky to capture dramatically. They personify plague. And that plague sweeps through the population at an alarming rate, creating the modern-day zombie horde.

That is perhaps why they are more popular than any other monster – this tendency to swarm. Compare them, for example, to another enduring monster that haunts our nightmares: the vampire. It is a popular and recurring figure certainly, but vampire apocalypse is hardly a genre in the same way. There’s no intrinsic reason why this should be. After all, vampires and zombies both spread their condition by biting, and both are driven by a powerful compulsion to seek out new victims. The combination of these two factors means that both vampires and zombies, were either actually to exist in our world, would quickly lead to apocalypse. In 2008, the University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou calculated that if one vampire had bitten one victim each month in 1600, thereby turning them into a vampire, the law of exponentiality means that it would have taken just two and a half years for the entire original human population to become vampires, with nobody left to feed on. If you imagine a greedier vampire, apocalypse arrives even more promptly.*

But, rather than appearing in the context of an apocalypse, in our popular culture vampires tend to live hidden away in small-scale populations, and only come out from time to time to feed on us. Perhaps the difference is that vampires are rational beings and realise that if they infect all the humans they’ll exhaust their food supply, and so they restrain themselves? Brian Aldiss’s splendidly hokey Dracula Unbound (1990) is one of the few works that portrays what a ‘vampire apocalypse’ might look like: a dusty world under a weakening sun in the distant future, where the vampires that have conquered the world keep a few humans alive as food. However, this is an exception; vampires are generally marginal figures, while zombies are the means by which the world as we know it ends.

It might not be logical in terms of story, but it is in terms of cultural symbolism. The stereotypical vampire is superior, elegant, suave, sexually promiscuous, well-dressed and well-mannered – until, that is, he bites you. We think about vampires in the same way that we think about aristocracy, which is a small-scale phenomenon, if powerful and often malign. Zombies, by contrast, are not posh or sexy.* Zombies are not aristocrats. Zombies are the masses. Zombies are us. They are the mindless hordes of shopping-mall consumers, brains emptied out by late-stage capitalism and social media. Zombies know nothing except that they want, as they shuffle forward (or in latter-day versions, run) at the object of their desire: life. It is about consumption, and the way modernity has infected us all with the virus of consumerism.

There’s a reason why shopping malls and supermarkets figure so prominently in zombie apocalypses, and it’s not just that such spaces can be cheap filming locations for cash-strapped movie producers. Zombies have come to represent how we think about democratisation, consumerisation and globalisation, which are all large-scale mass phenomena. According to the critic Roger Luckhurst:

The remorseless zombie attack was bedded down as a familiar Gothic trope after Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) . . . it leaped host again in 1996, when the Japanese computer giant Capcom released the video game Resident Evil. Since the late 1990s over twenty different versions of the Resident Evil game have been released (along with an associated film franchise). These commodities have made billions of dollars of profit, and have been one of the main vectors ensuring that the zombie has become a truly global figure – arguably the central Gothic figure for globalization itself.*

Take Shaun of the Dead (2004), one of the most successful zombie films of the twenty-first century. It is a comedy – the common ground that exists between the physical contortions of slapstick and the conventions of zombie film-making provide a fertile ground for hilarity. A yell, a blow and a little blood can be sickening, because it speaks to our real-life experiences of violence; the elaborate exaggeration of that experience, on the other hand – a set of operatic screams, overly elaborate and great gouts of blood and gore – moves us in a different direction. Our response to horror is finely balanced, and can tip either into terror or into hilarity. This movie understands how to nudge its reactions consistently in the latter direction. The sequence in which the film’s three leads, Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield and Nick Frost, are trapped in a pub by the zombie hordes outside and beat one to death with snooker cues in time to the beat of Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ (which is playing on the pub jukebox) is as hilarious as it is apposite.

But the real comedy of this movie is rooted in its mundanity, as if the end of the world were not an extraordinary eruption of the spectacular but a repetition of the everyday. In an early sequence before the zombies arrive, Simon Pegg’s Shaun – a lowly electronics salesman – goes to the corner shop one morning and returns to his flat, passing shuffling Londoners who are sleepy, hungover or homeless. The sequence is repeated once the zombie apocalypse has started, and Shaun makes the entire trip without