This is an interesting take on what zombie fiction is about:
> The zombie myth has roots in Haitian slave plantations: they're fairly transparently about the slaves' fear of being forced to toil endlessly even after their death. Then this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic.
Contrast this to Christian Thorne [0], who writes:
> Zombie movies are always going to be about crowds. People-in-groups are the genre’s single motivating concern. Other classic movie monsters are like malign superheroes, possessed of special powers, great reserves of speed and strength. What’s peculiar about zombies, when put alongside vampires or werewolves or aliens, is that they are actually weaker than ordinary human beings. They are really easy to kill for a start, because their bodies are already moldering. Their arms will tear clean off. They go down by the dozen. You’re in no danger of being outwitted. They can kill only because they have the numbers, and so that’s the menace that zombie movies are always trying to clarify: The threat of multitudes.
I've watched/read a fair bit of zombie stuff, and I think Thorne is more on the mark about modern zombie movies. -- lots of scenes of zombies breaking down barricades or tearing people out of their cars (America's favorite refuge against crowds!). But movies that try harder to have a point, like the original Day of the Dead, lay it on pretty thick that we are the zombies (who, even after death, return to the mall to amble around). Which is, I think, more in-keeping with a 'zombies are slaves doomed to eternal toil' reading.
Colson Whitehead's 'Zone One' flips the slave/master dynamic by having a mediocre black protagonist advance in post-zombie society way more than he was ever going to pre-outbreak, because the C student who survives in a low-effort way is more resilient than traditional high-achievers.
I would say it's possible that the zombie myth has been independently reinvented in multiple places. I don't think it's necessarily been "appropriated". Though there is an obvious parallel in that both myths are about lack of freedom.
IMO, zombie movies symbolize a desire that people have to be free from the usual norms of society. More broadly, there is some part of us that desires chaos, and sees it as freeing. In a post-apocalyptic zombie world, there are no jobs, no rent to pay, no worrying about grooming yourself or fancy clothes, etc. Zombies are irredeemable, unsalvageable enemies. It's kill or be killed. In some ways, you could say that's simpler than modern society, with its many parallel games, hierarchies and rigid structures. In zombieland, there are no rules.
Beyond that, zombie movies are also an outlet for people to channel that pent up rage. They like to fantasize that they would be the badass survivor, shooting zombies in the head with a shotgun and chopping them up with axes, in some kind of ultimate "fuck you" to society. But hey, it's okay to kill people now, in that world, it's completely legit, they're no longer people.
Personally, I don't watch zombie movies because I feel like there's enough real drama in the world that I don't need to worry about gross imaginary drama. I also don't think it's the healthiest thing to cultivate violent fantasies where you kill everyone. Your life, your real life, may have its share of problems, but this definitely isn't how you're going to escape them.
The "faceless horde" angle is still in line with the "other uprising" allegory. Day of the Dead's predecessor, and the origin of the modern zombie in pop culture, had fairly overt racial undertones, and its sequel, in its concern with barrier-breaching ghouls, made plain the nationalistic undercurrents by setting the action in a military bunker.
There's really no getting around the influence of real-world race and class attitudes in shaping zombie fiction.
> The zombie myth has roots in Haitian slave plantations: they're fairly transparently about the slaves' fear of being forced to toil endlessly even after their death. Then this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic.
Contrast this to Christian Thorne [0], who writes:
> Zombie movies are always going to be about crowds. People-in-groups are the genre’s single motivating concern. Other classic movie monsters are like malign superheroes, possessed of special powers, great reserves of speed and strength. What’s peculiar about zombies, when put alongside vampires or werewolves or aliens, is that they are actually weaker than ordinary human beings. They are really easy to kill for a start, because their bodies are already moldering. Their arms will tear clean off. They go down by the dozen. You’re in no danger of being outwitted. They can kill only because they have the numbers, and so that’s the menace that zombie movies are always trying to clarify: The threat of multitudes.
I've watched/read a fair bit of zombie stuff, and I think Thorne is more on the mark about modern zombie movies. -- lots of scenes of zombies breaking down barricades or tearing people out of their cars (America's favorite refuge against crowds!). But movies that try harder to have a point, like the original Day of the Dead, lay it on pretty thick that we are the zombies (who, even after death, return to the mall to amble around). Which is, I think, more in-keeping with a 'zombies are slaves doomed to eternal toil' reading.
Colson Whitehead's 'Zone One' flips the slave/master dynamic by having a mediocre black protagonist advance in post-zombie society way more than he was ever going to pre-outbreak, because the C student who survives in a low-effort way is more resilient than traditional high-achievers.
0: https://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/articles/the-running-of-t...