Why The Recent Upsurge of Zombies?

In the fantasy genre, supernatural creatures fall in and out of fashion. In recent years, we have seen the revival of the zombie with movies like World War Z, television shows like The Walking Dead and books like White Trash Zombie.  What is it about the zombie that has re-captured the public imagination? They are after all rotting, disease ridden and dead.  Surprisingly this is exactly why people are now fascinated with zombies. They represent our near universal fear of death - in particular what happens to our remains. Unlike vampires who become undead and retain their intellect and beauty and gain superhuman powers, zombies reveal in the starkest manner possible that the sweet phrases we parrot to bring comfort only hide the ugliness and dehumanisation of death.

With zombies come a dystopian world. In almost each instance in which zombies appear currently, the society in which they inhabit has broken down. In fact, we have seen a large resurgence of dystopian world recently. This likely has to do with the ongoing depression and the general sense of social malaise which has become the norm. With no sense of anomie or real hope for change, people have become almost anesthetised.  Each day is struggle to pay the mortgage, or hold onto a job that pays below subsistence wages. In a sense, the economic downturn is the equivalent to many of the dystopians we read about or watch on screen. The zombie then becomes the person who shuffles along, powerless to create change - a cog stumbling with no vision and no hope.

For some, these fictional dystopian worlds are meant to show us that life, no matter how bad it is today, can always be worse. We may be struggling to attain the basics like food, shelter and clothing, but at least we are not being chased by zombies desperate to eat our brains.It represents the constant refrain of it could be worse, which is said to lower classes as a way to pacify them. Yes, things could always be worse but if we have reached the point where we are reaching for zombies to soothe, perhaps things are bad enough. At very least, a zombie dystopian world is so different from our world as to be a far greater level of escapism than we often find in Urban Fantasy

One element of zombie stories that differs from other modern monster stories is that there is very little attempt to “redeem” them into sympathetic or romantic characters. We’ve seen this with virtually every other creature - especially vampires (who have almost lost their status as monsters and are often more tragic - or sparkly -  than horrifying). Vampires, werewolves (or were-anything for that matter), faeries, gods and an entire Greek legend of weird and wonderful creatures; they’ve all started featuring more as romantic heroes, soulful protagonists and bare chested, turgid love interests as often as monsters.

Warm Bodies

If you have seen any of the trailers for Warm Bodies, you know exactly what you’re getting in for. In fact, here’s a trailer now:

That's pretty much it right there, the whole story. There are no spoilers, the trailer pretty much tells you everything that happened and how it ends.

It’s a romantic comedy with a zombie! And corny as that sounds, it works. Not that it’s not corny, but it’s corny in a very fun, cheesy way. It is silly, it’s happily silly, it’s funnily silly. And the acting passes it off really well – I’m impressed particularly by Nicholas Hault managing to be rigid and monotone and still carrying lots of emotional expression (this contrasts the film very well with Twilight, with which it’s often compared, where the actors are rigid and monotone for no good reason and fail to express any emotion).

The plot is cute, in a clichéd kind of way. It’s a new concept, zombies in love, but don’t think the new concept makes the story original. Boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, their love is so precious that it saves the entire world. It’s not original, but as far as clichéd love stories go, it’s one of the better told, better acted and better presented one. It’s also quite nice to see a dystopian that’s so up beat, so much fun and actually has a happily ever after (not a “oh we just survived, but legitimate hope and going forwards).

It’s also funny, sometimes hilariously so. R’s internal monologue was immensely fun and often made me cackle. It really worked.

As a concept and a fun film, it did work. I didn’t mind watching it, I probably wouldn’t see it out, but then, I don’t see out romcoms anyway.

Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

R is a zombie – and he’s called R because it’s the one fragment of his name he has managed to remember. He and his fellow zombies follow the parodies of the living, aping human life but never really getting the reality of it. In between raiding the living to find food and, above all, brains – brains that contain the precious memories of the living that reignite what it means to be alive in the zombies. He lives in the airport, in his plane with his collection of human memorabilia and 50s records trying to reignite his humanity.

On one such raid he eat the brain of a man called Perry – and his brain lit up. He saw Perry’s girlfriend, Julie, and was driven to protect her rather than eat her. He brought her home to his plane and slowly they come to know each other. But, more, R sees more and more of Perry’s life and Perry’s memories, reliving his hopes and dreams – and his descent. The longer he and Julie spend together, the more R begins to wake up, the more he can remember and talk and think. The more alive he feels

And this vitality is spreading – but the Bonies, the most rotten and reduced of the zombies, are ready to fight back

This is a book that’s surrounded by some truly confusing marketing. When I picked it up, I was told by all and sundry that it was another Twilight. I cringed, expecting a vapid, personality-less heroine and a creepy, stalking hero who was supposed to be romantic.

This book is nothing like Twilight

I watched the trailers for the Warm Bodies film and expected a comedy, something funny and light and clever and amusing.

This book is not a comedy, nor is it light.

This book is surprisingly deep, amazingly solid and full of extremely powerful food for thought.

This is a dystopia, but unlike many dystopias, this is not decades after the end of the world, nor is it mere weeks. The remains of humanity aren’t in a desperate second by second battle for survival, nor have they built much in the way of a new society. Humanity is surviving. Day by day, in their secure centres, surviving with little or no real hope for an actual future. Everything is about survival, killing the zombies and surviving. Anything else is a distraction, it’s grim, it’s hard and General Grigio doesn’t accept any deviation from that, not even from his own daughter.

Then there’s the zombies, feeding on human brains for some spark of human emotion, trying to recapture some sense of what they were, unable to even pull up their own names, their own identities. They’re trapped in bodies that find so many tasks and even basic communication difficult, but also find even caring to be beyond them. Lead by the Bonies, rotted down zombies that are the very essence of stagnation and inevitability.

It’s a powerful book that asks what life actually is and what it means. What is the point of life if everything is reduced to survival, is it even living if you’re just living to survive rather than surviving to live and are you even living if you don’t have any hope for the future, any desires or any wishes. It asks what living actually means and what actually matters.

We see this really well portrayed several ways – with Julie’s difficulty with the stifling and repressive and empty life they live in the stadium. We see it with R’s slow growth from his near-mindless zombie state. And we see it really well through the eyes of Perry’s memories, as he grew colder and harder, as he lost his hope, as he began seeking death and how, ultimately, he became a dead man walking – as much a zombie as R was before he began to reclaim the spark of life.