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Zombie films personify our fears and how our fears have
changed.
The first zombie movies date from the 1930s. Inspired by
Haitian folklore, these zombies were black, mindless and under
the complete control of their masters. Sound familiar?Though slavery had long since been abolished, not everyone in
society was comfortable with the idea of black people just
walking around with equal rights. These early Zombie films
expressed this fear of the autonomous black man - and soothed
it by re-enslaving him.
Along came the 40s, accompanied by terrifying images of
unstoppable Nazi hordes and the walking dead of
concentration camps. The Wartime zombie expressed the
universal fear of invasion and of the rise of inhuman armies.
Convinced communists had invaded 1950s America, Senator JosephMcCarthy put reds under beds and pod people in the greenhouse.
But while the zombied townsfolk of small town America in
Invasion of the Body-Snatcherslost their individuality to an
extra-terrestrial menace, the fears of this period were not of
enemies from beyond, but rather of the enemy within.
In 1968, a year of riots in the streets and the Hippie
Revolution, the zombie went counter-culture. In George A.
Romeros genre-defining Night Of Living Dead, the recently
deceased are re-animated by radioactive debris from a
Government satellite. Romeros zombies are Government-made,spawned from the fall-out of the Cuban Missile Crisis and from
our distrust in our superiors in light of the Vietnam War.
Theyre coming to get you, Barbara!
The 1970s bore witness to the rapacious rise of consumerism,
technology and corporatism - Microsoft and Apple were up and
running and on the march - so when Romeros zombies congregate
on a mall in Dawn Of The Dead brain dead but for the
instinct to shop its not make-up maestro Tom Savinisblood
and gore that disgusts us, but rather the spectacle of the
human race reduced en-masse to lobotomized consumers
Now come the 80s, and an all-new threat was terrorizing
entire populations: a killer virus, communicable through
bodily fluids, was turning its victims into corpse-like
lesion-covered pariahs. Dont Die Of Ignorance warned the
AIDS awareness campaigns, but zombies where in fact getting
smarter. Dan O Bannons Return of the Living Dead marked the
first time zombies swapped their intake of entrails for a diet
of brains
The age of the Internet ushered in its own unique anxieties
inspired by rampant technology and incessant information. In
a modern world harried by file-sharing and frenzied social-
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networking, it often feels impossible to keep pace with the
speed of change. Is it any wonder then that the zombies of 28
Days Latercan run so fucking fast?
With natural disasters, the economic downturn and the very
real possibility of a bio terrorist attack, we certainlyarent short of things to fear. Not surprisingly, zombies
remain hugely popular. TV shows like The Walking Dead suggest
were already infected that we should be afraid of
ourselves, but a look back across the cultural history of
zombies tells us that this has always been so. It was never
communists, aliens, or viruses that scared us not really
it was only ever ourselves.