Recent interactions on X revived the evergreen debate over which genre Star Trek belongs in.
Writer Isaac Young sparked the discussion with this incisive thread.
But it was user Brainwright who introduced a related topic that bears on today’s meditation:
Related: Star Trek—The Motion Picture
Miles of page inches have been spent pondering why zombie horror rose to dominate pop culture in the late 90s and early aughts. Film critics have yet to devise a satisfying answer, which suggests that the real reason involves facts we’re not allowed to discuss.
The usual suspect is Gen Y nostalgia. But that answer is a little too obvious because Ys are nostalgic for childhood entertainment product, and the zombie craze peaked in their college years. Sure, zombie horror produced some cult hits in the 80s, and the subgenre’s roots go all the way back to the 30s, but George Romero’s films didn’t achieve anywhere near the cultural penetration of 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead.
So if Gen Y popcultism can’t explain the aughts zombie fad, what can?
One clue lies in zombie horror’s early film origins. Because Hollywood didn’t originally portray of zombies as rotting cannibals. Instead, they were depicted as living victims enthralled by black magic. The great granddaddy of zombie films, White Zombie, features a young American woman who ends up zombified when a plantation owner tries to steal her from her husband with a potion he got from a white slaver.
Zombies only gained fame as shambling corpses when Night of the Living Dead premiered in 1968. And no, it’s not a coincidence that Congress had passed the Hart-Celler Immigration Act just three years prior.
Now consider that Night of the Living Dead director George Romero followed up with Dawn of the Dead, which notoriously made zombies an allegory for mall-addicted consoomers.
Seeing a pattern yet?
Related: “Hollywood Is in Shambles”
In the mid-80s, a disagreement over the rights to Night of the Living Dead split the IP into rival franchises. Dan O’Bannon of Alien fame spun off the first Return of the Living Dead movie, which introduced the brain-eating zombie trope. It also made them intelligent.
Among Return of the Living Dead‘s new zombies is a bunch of punks rebelling against society. In sharp contrast to Romero’s undead conformists, O’Bannon shows zombies as dyscivic wreckers and provides another piece of the puzzle.
Many film buffs would say that zombie horror went moribund in the 90s. But as alluded to earlier, Star Trek is a horror franchise with science fiction trappings. And it gave zombies a sci fi makeover.
Before you scoff, Romero’s and O’Bannon’s zombie films had sci fi elements from the start. Night of the Living Dead briefly mentions radiation from a recently returned Venus probe. Return of the Living Dead advertises that zombies are caused by a hazardous chemical. The later zombie apocalypse fad preferred the equally SF plot device of rabies-like viruses.
But between the zombie genre’s 80s shlock and its apocalyptic revival, we had no shortage of deathly white thralls divested of all personality and forced into a ravaging mass. And it was all courtesy of Star Trek.
In B4 “Ackhsully, the Borg aren’t zombies.” Star Trek: First Contact begs to differ.
Related: Star Trek—First Contact
Want more proof? 2005’s Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis bridges both series by featuring zombies that are brazen Borg knockoffs.
And Necropolis followed films that kicked off the zombie apocalypse craze like Shaun of the Dead, in which the UK is overrun by “scientific” zombies.
But it was an American IP that would perfect the formula.
You remember The Walking Dead: the Frank Darabont zombie series destroyed by invasive wokeness.
That leaves one more clue to zombie horror’s true nature, and sharp readers will have already detected the Woke Cult’s DNA at the scene.
What cultural force drove the zombie horror phenomenon?
Being grounded in the horror genre, the fad’s basis was fear.
But fear of what?
What’s scary about zombies—especially apocalyptic zombie hordes?
Four things:
- They look human but with easily identifiable deviations. They’re you, but not you. That’s the uncanny valley, a paradox that causes primal level CogDis.
- Among the biggest of these differences is the total inability to be pleaded, reasoned, or negotiated with. Zombies go after what they want, period.
- What do zombies want? To consume you, everyone you know, and your entire civilization. And they’ve got the numbers and tenacity to do it.
- Even worse, zombies can be anyone. Maybe the first wave that escaped their coffins are easy to notice. But if they bite your friend, you may not realize what he’s become until it’s too late.
So the final question is “What do zombies represent?”
The fear of Western civilization ending?
That would explain why the zombie apocalypse was the first mass entertainment sensation after Ground Zero. There was a feeling in the air that we’d burned through our cultural capital. So all that was left for atomized consumers to do was celebrate the collapse.
And yet, that was a major symptom, not the cause.
Perhaps the zombies stoof for mass immivasion, imploding social trust, and Millennial hatred of tradition. But if so, what was the contagion’s vector?
Related: Death Cult Sacraments
It was the germ of all dyscivic crises; the sum of all errors.
In a word: Modernism
The heretical ideology so virulent that we call its adherents the Death Cult.
Think about it for a second. The zombie is a perfect symbol of the Modernist. Falling prey to the Cult’s mind plague frees him to pursue forbidden urges at the price of his humanity.
For decades, Modernist heretics promised a shiny, sexy utopia right around the corner. All we had to do was abandon time-tested Tradition.
Then, inevitably, Cultural Ground Zero came. And people began to realize there would be no bugman Heaven on Earth. Instead we got ransacked Walgreens, drug hobo shanty towns, and torched cities.
It makes sense that the real-life zombie plague would arise from a heresy. “Apocalypse” was a red flag.
By the way, apocalypse means unveiling. Zombie horror got popular with the Cultists because they saw themselves on screen.
They could always turn away from their error and turn back to the Gospel. But the way back is hard, since it’s not cosmic radiation, hazardous chemicals, or a pathogen keeping the Cultists enslaved. It’s their own despair—the one unforgiveable sin.
That’s why those mired in the Death Cult aren’t to be hated. They’re to be pitied.
And prayed for.
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That would explain why zombies have fallen off so hard in the past decade. It’s hard to make them represent mindlessly falling for the Current Thing when you have to keep up the pretense that the Current Thing is good and it’s dissenters who are evil and should be punished.
It’s why current horror movies have become ponderous, depressing, slow, and muddy, focused on meditations where the supernatural might actually just be in your head or one aspect of mortality. It is now about the self and how the horror personally affects you–the outside world doesn’t matter so much.
Might explain why it’s so popular among older viewers while the young have turned to analog and found footage horror. Very different focus between the two.
Your theory checks out. Even aughts style zombie horror would be too on the nose after Corona-chan.
“It’s why current horror movies have become ponderous, depressing, slow, and muddy, focused on meditations where the supernatural might actually just be in your head or one aspect of mortality. It is now about the self and how the horror personally affects you–the outside world doesn’t matter so much.”
From what I’ve seen, most horror almost always revolves around the idea of ‘That Which Ought Not To Be’. It’s about something unnatural upsetting the general order of things and wreaking havoc, whilst forcing people to band together using their combined strength to stop it. That’s the traditional approach, which works very well if done properly.
Another option (call it the ‘Lovecraftian Approach’, if you will), is often a more personal one in which an individual is forced to confront something that’s not merely a physical threat, but that also (intentionally or not) warps his perception of reality and pushes his very sanity to the limit as he’s forced to confront some shocking unknown truth about reality.
What these two have in common is that the concept itself is the same, it’s just that the scope is different (collective vs individual). I think that’s what current horror movies fail to understand. Fundamentally, you’re always dealing with a certain grounded reality that exists outside of your own head, and being put outside of that (intentional or not) is what’s truly scary. A story where you read about a man being confronted with some kind of cosmic monster which makes him lose his mental footing before he spirals into complete insanity will always be more terrifying than one that’s merely an allegory for mental illness. One involves the descriptions of a mind utterly terrified by some horrific revelation, the other often degenerates into self-indulgence and outright misery porn.
One story shatters the very bounds of existence, the other’s merely focused on the self and nothing else…
Excellent point JD. Zombie media thrived in the Bush-early Obama era when the leftist Hollywood establishment could sell you on the idea that they were some sort of oppressed freedom-fighters going against the mindless groupthink, but progressives are so obviously in control of the levers of power that even the dumbest people don’t buy that fantasy anymore.
The idea had something of a renaissance after Trump was elected but crashed precipitously after The Last Jedi sparked a widespread cultural backlash to the Hollywood-as-victims narrative.
Just as important is the pivot from Question Authority to Do Everything The TV Tells You, which had been started with the Fake News gaslighting agenda, and fully realized with the Covid agenda, BLM/Mostly Peaceful Protesters, and Russia Evil campaigns.
Zombie media and Question Authority were just a step on the ladder. Once the progs consolidated control, the programming changed to what would further the agenda.
Zombies are always White and usually male but act black; so its to brainwash White women to transfer blackness to White males in their mind. (If zombies are ever depicted as black, like that one time Resident Evil got set in Africa, the Synagogue comes down hard on the company that made it.)
“…an individual is forced to confront something that’s not merely a physical threat, but that also (intentionally or not) warps his perception of reality and pushes his very sanity to the limit as he’s forced to confront some shocking unknown truth about reality.”
Rod Serling added “fear of the unknown working on YOU but which you cannot share with others.” (See: The Twilight Zone episode “And When the Sky Was Opened.”)
Some years ago, it occurred to me that something like the Borg and the Cybermen could be what the non-Americans who moved here and were disinclined to assimilate would compare us to even without consciously acknowledging it: We will absorb you! We will change you, via your children and grandchildren, more than you change us. The only force that tends to prevent this is a porous border policy such as we have now.
In 1998 it occurred to me that my mental pictures, stereotypic images, that popped into my head at phrases like “young people,” “kids these days” were very often of a Latino or Latina. A few months later came the announcement in the news that white non-Hispanics were no longer an absolute majority in California, meaning that while they constituted the largest single group they did not outnumber the others put together. My inner landscape had altered to fit the changes.
I was then interacting with many of these young people in my junior college computer programming classes and in my senior college office work. I chatted with them about more or less American things. There was none of the chip-on-the-shoulder La Raza stuff I remembered from the ’70s. Gen X Latinas had even made the ‘Valley Girl’ style of speech that spread in the ’80s somewhat euphonious. (For a sample of how Southern California girls sounded in my youth, see the low-budget sci-fi film Peter Fonda directed, “Idaho Transfer.”)
But then, I’m harkening back to the time you call the Cultural Ground Zero, right? Something of a brief Antonine afternoon.
It probably also explains The movie franchise Terminator. Your 1st 2 points on the Zombies sounds like the 1st 3 Terminators films. The 4th point is cover in the 2nd and 3rd films when the shape shifting Robot can look and sound like anyone, even to those that are close to you.
2 always get sent back, one the Body guard (1st one a human and after that a Robot) the Target and the other an Assassin (always a machine). They come from a future where humans are almost killed off by Skynet but a man John Connor united the Human race and beats the Machines.
The mission of the Assassins Robots is to kill John Connor (Sarah in the 1st film) and therefore will change the future where human race is killed off.
This line sounds like how the Left has keep explaining and winning since the 80s
“That Terminator is out there, it can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop… EVER, until you are dead!”, Kyle Reese.
I will also point to another thing about the 2nd and 3rd films and even the 4th film (yes Salvation). The son craving a father figure and quickly becoming attached to the body guard and only to lose him at the end of the film. In the 2nd film left with only his mother at the end, 3rd left with a girlfriend and 4th left with a Tribe (Human resistance led by John Connor).
Something that started to happens a lot to Sons and Daughters of Single mother homes in the 80s to the 00s. The father, Step fathers and other father figures (Teachers, Coaches, Uncles) that would become apart of the children lives only to leave or get kick out by the mother.
The fact that both films (2nd and 3rd) the body guard who John Connor looks to is a machine is also interesting. Probably relates to Gen X and Gen Y and why they fell in love with video games, PC, especially the internet. It was the replacement for a father.
Zombies are a mockery of the resurrection promised in Christianity, where our bodies will rise along with our souls. Zombie horror inverts ghost stories, where the body will animate, but the soul is gone.
Another reason why Modernism is the sum of all heresies.
Which is one of the many reasons the “Zombie Jesus” meme is so offensive.