Zombies Represent National Fear of Terrorism

From The Daily Athenaeum:

by Kevin Shap
The Pitt News (U. Pittsburgh)

Lousy, good-for-nothing terrorists. As if it isn't enough that al-Qaida do annoying stuff like blow up train stations and fly airplanes into buildings, they've now decided to hit us where it hurts: in our horror movies.
This was a hypothesis I read in The New York Times Sunday Styles section - their motto being, "Look at these rich, rich, socially connected people who are getting married. Envy them! Envy!" The argument was that horror movies are a sort of a Rorschach test for the national unconscious, and this test is coming up positive for terrorist influences.

Seriously, let's look at the evidence we have before us. Horror movies are a cyclical thing. Certain themes tend to dominate. What this theory suggests is that the monster that dominates the box office is the monster that represents the national fear.

The vampire, always my favorite, enjoyed a brief blood-soaked reign in the late '80s/early '90s. Perhaps there were other horror films at the time - probably dreary sequels with terrible one-liners and half-naked teenagers - but the undead were enjoying a moment in the pop culture spotlight.

Look at what Americans were afraid of and obsessed with in the late '80s/early '90s. AIDS, a blood-borne and incurable virus that was striking the young and turning sex into death, was raging uncontrolled in this time period, still stigmatized as a gay disea se and still viewed as a death sentence. Androgyny was falling off Calvin Klein billboards to appear in malls, transforming the hearts and minds of the American youth. And the combined 12 years of two Republican regimes had produced an angry alternative generation that demanded a different lifestyle than that of the noxious money- and cocaine-addled yuppies of the '80s.

The vampire boom had to happen because the vampire image - bloodsucking, overtly sexual, frequently homoerotic and decadent in a decidedly non-bourgeois manner - dovetailed perfectly with that period in time. It's just like the big werewolf movie boom of the '80s. Everyone then was obsessed with money - greed was legendarily good - and yet everyone felt bad about being greedy. The '80s were a time when no one felt comfortable with what they were doing, so a monster that lived in a constant state of duality was born, one part good human, one part raging id that did whatever it needed to, no matter what the circumstances.

Terrorism is what we worry about nowadays - the exterior threat instead of the interior. No one cares about AIDS - Bill Gates will come up with a vaccine, right? - so what do we worry about? We worry about terrorists. And that's why we have zombie movies.

Zombies, as the article pointed out, are the ultimate stand-in for terrorism because they do not signal that the system is under attack, they symbolize that the system has been destroyed. If you call the police, there is no response. The police can become the zombies. The ability to survive the zombie lies mostly in how many boards one can use to reinforce the doors of the house in which one is making a last, desperate stand. Zombies are fear and, as such, are a lovely stand-in for the forces that menace our society.