nobody likes you when you're dead

[intertribal]

Chuck Klosterman has this interpretation for why we're living in a zombie moment (I remarked upon this a couple nights ago, when I noticed two different zombie video games being advertised on TV):

In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork, or following Twitter gossip out of obligation, or performing tedious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche. The principal downside to any zombie attack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principal downside to life is that you will be never be finished with whatever it is you do.

I'm pretty sure zombie fiction is popular because it's an adrenaline rush to live vicariously through people who are slamming axes through other people-not-people's heads.  That had to be part of what it was for me.

Five years after 28 Days Later blew my mind, I think I'm exhausted of the genre.  I just don't think much can be done with it, after all.

Comments

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I grew up with Chinese jumping vampires (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Shi) (which behave way more like zombies than vampires), so I've always been able to "get" fear of zombies to a certain extent - for me, it's the ol' "everyone else has gone insane/changed, leaving me behind (or making me a target)." So the zombie apocalypse in 28 Days Later was intriguing to me for appealing to those themes of, well, abandonment and isolation. But I don't necessarily see it going any farther, no. As monsters they just aren't very interesting, you're right.

No problem!

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Wait, I thought jiang shi were zombies. Yeah, it says "'stiff corpse' or 'zombie'"? Oh, I see that they later came to suck blood too. But everyone here just calls them Chinese zombies.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Ah, I used to call them that and was corrected at some point (I don't know by who, possibly the anonymous internet). Anyway, good to know.