Zombie Plague

Today’s topic was inspired by Stanton Martin, who once took this photo:

Out of all of the scary, scary monsters we have dreamed up over the years, Zombies are the ones who keep popping up.

Resident Evil. 28 Days Later. The Walking Dead. Maybe the reason they are still so popular is because our never ending quest for immortality leads us to ponder what it would be like if things went horribly wrong.

Or it could be because getting eaten by our mindless former friends would be the MOST TERRIFYING THING EVER.

We’ve dumbed down all the other scary, scary monsters. Dracula is overdone. Mel Brooks pretty much ruined any prospect of re-doing the Frankenstein story. Vampires and werewolves have been taken over by pre-teen girls. But reanimated corpses? We still feel like those can happen.

And the reason we feel that way? The idea of the Zombie Plague.

These days, we no longer believe that dead people will come back just to try and eat us. They probably have better things to do than cannibalize.

But science is really scary and could create this. You just KNOW some scientist somewhere is working on a cure to all diseases, but it won’t turn out that way. He’s going to TOTALLY accidentally make a virus that turns people into flesh eating undead.

Common mistake.

In no time at all, half the planet is infected. Because one thing that’s obvious in movies is that we, as people, have literally no clue how to prevent or control situations. We are literally never prepared for anything.

Nationwide viruses that kill everyone? The power going out at a theme park full of dinosaurs and no security? New York flooding/freezing over? All of these things would catch us completely off guard.

So why exactly are we so terrified of the threat of a zombie plague? Is it because we don’t like being unprepared? Maybe it really IS just as simple as us not enjoying getting our brains eaten. I think it’s something else, though.

I think that when we look at zombies, we feel as if we’re looking in a mirror.

Zombies, ultimately, remind us so much of ourselves, just on a simpler level. We have our goals. We have our desires. We have our urges. But we have them under control.

Zombies are what we would be like without control. They have one singular focus, one singular urge, and they pursue it with no regards to anything else.

And that terrifies us.

Our fear of zombies is really just a fear of ourselves. It’s not that we’re afraid that we’re going to just up and become a cannibal for no reason. That doesn’t happen as commonly as we assume.

Really, we’re just afraid of being out of control. But in the process, aren’t we just being control freaks? You see, that is the problem we face: walking that fine line between control and eating somebody’s brain.

We could really learn a lesson from Zombies, though. They don’t stress out. If there is something in their way, preventing them from reaching their goals, they don’t freak out. They just stumble around aimlessly doing nothing. That might have been a bad example.

When it comes down to it, in the midst of our busy lives, where we worry about not being in control all the time and often lose sight of our goals, we could probably stand to be more like zombies.

How do you feel about zombies? What theory do you have as to why people get infected so easily? Have we all forgotten how to avoid being bitten by another human being? Leave some feedback!