Personally, I think the thing that makes studying zombies so compelling a subject matter is the uncanny parallels to our present existence.  Zombies are compelled by some mystic force or idea to form swarming armies intent on eating the brains and entrails of the living, even though zombies are dead and they gain no benefit from eating anything. Zombies are fueled by the mystic powers which animate undead things, whatever those may be, cosmic radiation, evil, something we don’t understand, not calories from brains, flesh or entrails.  Why do they do it?  Why do they want to eat the living, the vibrant?  Well why do WE do it?  Why does our society, consume and consume but end up no healthier or happier?  What benefit do we derive from swarming to and from unrewarding office jobs each day?  Why do we eat the earth out of its ability to be green, vibrant, diverse and living?  Why would the zombies, eat every last human on earth if they could? Humans are their only means of reproducing the zombie species. Wouldn’t it make sense for zombies to let some humans live to breed new humans for the zombies to then bite and spawn new zombies and thus replace the ghouls that simply rot away with time?  Why aren’t the zombies a sustainable lifeform?   Then again, why aren’t WE?!!! 

We are ourselves a zombie race, a fundamentally non-logical lifeform!  Our predominant culture tells us me must grow and grow and GROW and we must assimilate any non-conformers and we all must contribute our own power our own blind lust to the swarm that is devouring life on our planet.  We don’t get much benefit from it, an office is a terrible place to spend one’s life, and like the zombies who will ultimately eat every last human and no longer be able to reproduce, we will eat the verdancy and life clean off of this planet, that very verdancy and diversity that gave birth to us and sustains us.  Zombies need humans and humans need the biodiversity of our planet, yet something mystical is driving us to destroy what we need.  This is the great enigma, the story and mystery of man and zombie.

Think then upon this.  What are some of the most iconic images from zombie culture?  For me the image that comes to mind is that of business men and women in their suits commuting to work in a great and claustraphobic city, business men and women turned zombie.  The image has double impact, the madness of their zombie agenda reflects the madness of their business agenda, the hollow emptiness of their lives buring hour upon hour in a fundamentally dead and unrewarding cubicle environment compelled by an insane or evil force to channel all their capacity to pursuing the growth of a culture and economy hell bent on ending life on earth, or at least enough of it that it will make life on earth horrifyingly miserable for humanity, like the zombies, no more capacity to grow, nothing left to conquor or perpetuate our greatness, doomed to wander as half-animate corpses in a dead world waiting to be rotted away by the ravages of time.

But it never ends this way does it?  The zombies never win to just end up rotting away.  The humans prevail against the hordes, someone survives, they find a way to beat the zombies but eventually everything is just as likely to repeat itself as it ever was.  Fundamentally nothing ever changes, we beat the zombies back, stopping both their glory and their demise, but they can still come back to stop both our glory and our demise.  We never do figure our how to break the cycle, how to undo the force that compells the zombies to their non-logical lumbering march to destroy both our world and thus their chance at survival and we also never discover how to undo the force that compells us humans to devote ourselves to the systematic conquoring and destruction of nature and thus ourselves. 

As our civilizations grow and crash and grow and crash and rinse and repeat we always think that we just weren’t good enough at growing, that we simply made a mistake in doing it or that we were doing well and were then thwarted somehow or corrupted by an evil that brought us to failure, and so we try it again only to have the same results over and over again. Never have we once stopped to think that maybe the idea of growing forever itself is in fact our fundamental mistake and that a force that drives us to grow against all logic of sustaining our species is the evil that is always present and will one day rise from the earth and swarm over us in a horrifying tide of blood, entrails and masticated limbs.

The story of the zombie is the story of civilization’s great mistake.  Our great failure to exist logically and preserve that which we need.

And it is a marvellous thing that we at least realize this on a collective subconscious level, enough to make movies telling the tale of our great mistake over and over again.  Perhaps then it will not be too many thousands of more years and crashes of civilization before we start to talk about this out loud and even begin doing something about it.

There may be hope yet for humanity.