There are zombie books, zombie T-shirts, zombie movies, zombie TV shows, zombie memes, zombie video games, zombie party games...
But not all zombies are alike. There are zombies and then
there are zombies. Some zombies are scary, some are pitiful. Some
zombies are serious, some are funny. Some zombies are tormented, some are
just sad.
But there's one thing that zombies have in common: they are
everywhere. That's kind of what they do.
It's a familiar story.
Everything in the world is normal. The sun is bright, the earth is
turning, and people are living normal lives.
All is peaceful except for a few well-placed subtle foreshadowings of
the coming emotional roller coaster complete with disgusting make-up
work, discordant violin hits, and all the visceral fear associated with a full
zombie apocalypse.
But somehow there's a hero. For some reason that writers get
paid to come up with, a small band of individuals are spared from the
mysterious infestation and begin a fight of survival. But things go from
bad to worse. Fragile reassurances of security are systematically brushed
aside by the final onslaught of partially decayed yet fully persistent,
brain-eating living dead. And the last living humans on earth are faced
with the all-too-likely prospect that the human race will soon become extinct.
It's all too familiar. Like a nightmare. Actually,
exactly like a nightmare.
A malevolent threat that throbs in the background colors your
whole world with fear. Feeble attempts
to prepare for it or avoid it are futile.
You try to run away, but it is everywhere. Your feet are like lead and your legs are
bogged down, but it is coming. The end
is near. They are coming.
Some people wouldn't call it a nightmare. They'd call it
fascinating, absorbing, even fun. A zombie movie that efficiently carries
the viewer along a suspenseful plot to an original conclusion is
applauded as "a good ride,” or a masterpiece of “good entertainment.” These people wouldn’t call it a nightmare
because they would call it a roller coaster.
But what happens when you ride a roller coaster a couple of
times? It becomes less intimidating, and
more comfortable. So you look for a
taller roller coaster with more intimidating twists and turns. But then you get comfortable with that, and
need a more intimidating coaster, and so forth.
And the more and more you look for more and more intimidating roller
coasters, the less and less you are able to enjoy them. Can anyone seriously maintain that
deliberately excited morbid fascination with the ugly leads to anything but a
ravenous scavenging for scraps of enjoyment by the pursuit of uglier and uglier
things?
Oh, sure, there is a place for ugliness: it should spur us
to turn away from it and pursue what is beautiful. But that means that we
need to turn away from it. Not plop down
on a La-Z Boy with a bag of chips and a can of beer to glut ourselves with the
ugliness.
Is there anyone who would call this good for the human race?
Zombie ugliness is very powerful. It plays simultaneously on
our fear of death, our fear of being corrupted into something horrible, our
fear of distortions of the human frame, and our fear of Armageddon. That makes for a very powerful emotional
cocktail. And while a balanced, cultured
approach to drinking hard liquor is possible, if you work hard at it and are
very controlled in the way that you drink, the fact is that too many people
take a binge drinking approach. They get
hard drunk.
And when you're drunk, it's very hard to run in a straight line.
I call it a nightmare. It’s scary. It’s revolting. I want to wake up and find myself safe and
sound.
And I am tempted to put a Freudian spin on it. Could it be
that the fascination with zombies is but a subconscious echo of the effects of
sin?
Without God, we become sort of spiritual zombies. Sin kills
the life of God in our souls. True, we
are still capable of moving around and doing things, but we are not truly
alive. We are tortured by a hunger
that we cannot satisfy. We search and
search for true nourishment, sometimes consuming our own intellects and the
intellects of those around us, but to no avail.
We then become contagious, spreading our pain and despair to those
around us, putting them in danger of becoming no better than ourselves. And when we do, we huddle together, not
because we like each other’s company, but because we know that there’s nothing
more we can do to harm each other.
But not everybody is a zombie.
There are those who are actually alive; who are actually human, and
striving to stay so. They have God alive
in them. And they are tasked not with
shutting themselves up in a fortress and blasting away any zombie within a
hundred miles, although that might be necessary for a while until they learn
how to be more precise with the defense systems. Rather, they are entrusted with the means to
keep themselves alive; and even to come back to life after death. And they are charged with reaching out to the
zombies and bringing them back to life too.
At least until Armageddon.
Maybe I’m reading into the zombie mythology too much.
Or maybe I’m capturing it and using it to preach the gospel.
Don't be a zombie.