Zombimania

Zombies are everywhere!

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.