Dark Dimensions #9

From Terror to Trend

From Terror to Trend

An Article by Grady Richards

An infection has spread throughout the western world. The dead have risen from the grave, ravenous and beckoning for the living to come out of their holes and join the menu. It is the Zombie Apocalypse, although not quite as imagined. Society is not crumbling beneath the chaotic spread of undead citizens; the infection is not in the populace, but in advertising and social media.

AMC's popular zombie show “The Walking Dead” has now returned for its third season, bringing with it a myriad of zombie-related marketing epidemics intended to lure we macabre horror fanatics into purchasing products and services. Scores of lively cadavers roam in search of Subway cold-cuts, hordes of moaning fiends rove the streets for Windows 8 and iPhones. In the last week, I've seen Zombie Pub Crawls, Zombie keg parties, and Zombie 5k races. The Travel Channel aired a special on zombie makeup tricks. The Center for Disease Control has even issued a statement on how to deal with the potential zombie outbreak (or any other emergency situation, for that matter). But why the sudden media interest in one of the horror community's most thrilling antagonists?

Because, right now, zombies sell.

The truth is, marketing executives are behind the times. Zombies have been integrated into the horror community since the latter half of the 20th century, thanks to film directors like George Romero who put a terrifying twist on the Haitian Voodoo zombi slave lore. Authors like David Moody and Brian Keene have pushed the undead agenda with novels like Autumn and Dead Rising, respectively, while video games like the Resident Evil franchise have captured the imagination of the gamer community. The last fifty years have shown a waning in the vein of vampires and werewolves in the horror world, with a cerebral spark taking the zombie from a one-and-done creature feature to an all-out apocalypse of possibilities.

And it's no mystery why. The zombie isn't just a gruesome ghoul sinking its teeth into the collective nerve of the horror audience. It's that, and more. The zombie is a metaphor which operates on many levels, speaking on societal terrors much more subdued and honest than those of contemporary horror fiction. The zombie hordes can represent xenophobia and smaller racial wars. They can represent the fine technological line between civilization and barbarism, and can illustrate how a globally insignificant event can butterfly its way to catastrophe, robbing us of granted utilities, roadways, and supermarkets that make our human existence seem so different from the animal kingdom. In their most basic form, these shuffling masses of zombies can also represent the runaway consumerism that we westerners can see has gone rampant in the millennium.

And almost as exciting as these flesh-eating terrors themselves are the heroes of our sordid zombie stories. Not only do we love to watch them destroy the undead threat one zombie at a time, we love to see how they outfit themselves against the hordes. How they prepare themselves, how they coexist with these monsters. Whether or not the zombies represent the fall of society or the loss of individual humanities, seeing how our heroes build their safe havens and equip their armories may help us to coexist with the monsters in our own world.

Even if we don't look so deeply into the zombie metaphor, it's still pretty fun to watch the kill-by-kill.

Although the zombie craze in marketing and media will burn out, like all advertising fads do, I think the zombie craze in the horror community will hold strong—until something even better comes along. Like creatures from lagoons or crawling eyes, the zombie will eventually slink out of pop-culture and lurk the catacombs of nostalgic cult fame. But after fifty years of exploring the zombie paradigm in fiction, we've only grazed the surface of their artistic potential. And I think the zombie will stick around for a while.

My name is Grady, and I have a zombie apocalypse shelter in my basement. True story.