Digital Birdhouse
Want in on a little secret? If you ever want to start a popular TV show, a long-running comic book series, or one of the most-watched movie trailers in the history of YouTube, just put zombies in it. Zombies are a pop culture phenomenon, and have been for decades. More than any other monster invented by man, zombies have legs.
Don’t believe me? AMC’s “The Walking Dead” TV show ran for 11 seasons and spawned at least 6 spinoffs. The comic series of the same name began publication in 2003 and lasted until its final of 193 issues was released in July 2019. The trailer for “28 Years Later” (2025), the third in a series of cult-classic zombie movies, has racked up hundreds of millions of views since it debuted online, making it one of the most viewed teasers in history.
What is a Zombie?
Zombies are reanimated corpses that hunger for human flesh. They are usually slow, shambling, groaning, walking dead people. Imagine a roomba with teeth. If they bite you, you become infected with some zombie virus, and will soon, as a result, be turned into a zombie yourself (if there is enough of you left after the other zombies have had their fill). If you destroy a zombie’s brain, they die again. They go from undead to dead-dead. Those are the zombie rules.
Like ice cream or frozen yogurt, zombies come in many different flavors. There are the classic, slow-moving George Romero “Night of the Living Dead” zombies. Then there are the fast, rabid zombies, like those featured in “28 Days Later” and the recent “28 Years Later.” Whatever the variety, the idea is generally the same: you don’t want to get caught by them, because if you do, you are going to have a bad time.
Zombies are not complex. They do not have deep motivations, a captivating backstory, or a unique ability that makes them particularly vexing or difficult to handle. They just have a hankering for human flesh, and they tend to group up. They are often used as a metaphor or catalyst for societal collapse in storytelling, and serve that role very well.
The Allure
There are few climactic scenarios more attractive to the imagination than a zombie apocalypse. You have a clear-cut enemy: zombies. You need to eat, fight, and survive. You get to wear rags and shoot crossbows. If you can speed walk long enough, you’ll probably be able to get out of most run-ins with the undead without a scratch — or bite — on you. What’s not to like? Zombies’ simplicity is also their allure. They give every character in a story a shared antagonist and obstacle to survival. It makes everything simpler — albeit more terrifying — and in our complex modern world, that can seem morbidly appealing at times.
