Humans inevitably turn on one another, which only accelerates the spread of the living dead. It’s a Hobbesian view of life as nasty, brutish, and short. Romero was the godfather of the modern zombie, and if there is a constant in his films, it is that human cooperation breaks down in the face of an undead threat. With the important exception of the rom– zom– com subgenre, zombie narratives are extremely pessimistic about how the human race can respond to the threat posed by the living dead. Unfortunately, the zombie genre can explain more about the first phase of the coronavirus pandemic than anyone should be comfortable with.Īlas, their response tends to be poor. The interesting part of any zombie narrative is not the flesh-eating ghouls but how humans respond to that threat. With such a simple, uninteresting motivation, the zombie genre has been historically viewed as the lowest of the low-rent genres.
We cannot reason, negotiate, or bargain with zombies like a virus, they have no agency. In contrast, the living dead are almost always portrayed as a mass of decaying corpses with the simple and baffling goal of eating living human flesh. This is because other archetypes of horror-vampires, wizards, werewolves-tend to produce soulful, sympathetic characters. Of all the baddies in the horror genre, zombies are the perfect metaphor for a pandemic. The zombie genre is overly pessimistic about the adaptability of human beings. Fortunately, there are key differences between what happens with the living dead and what the rest of 2020 will look like. This would seem to bode ill for human civilization: With a few exceptions, the zombie genre always starts with civilization and ends with a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Unfortunately, the zombie genre can explain more about the first phase of the coronavirus pandemic than anyone should be comfortable with. So when Foreign Policy’s editors asked what the zombie genre tells us about this crisis, it seemed appropriate to return to where it all began. That led to two editions, a spinoff article, and a TEDx Talk. The first glimmer of Theories of International Politics and Zombies appeared as a Foreign Policy blog post more than a decade ago. I should know, since I wrote an international relations textbook based on that premise.
#ZOMBIE DROP Z WITH EQUAL SIGN SERIES#
A week-long series on horror and folklore around the world that examines what popular stories and tropes can tell us about a society’s greatest fears, grimmest challenges, and darkest fantasies.
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