Today we hear from Joe McKinney, one of the best-selling zombie novelists around today. His initial works were big hits and he continues to produce great horror novels.
James Robert Smith: Why Are Zombies Such a Powerful Image?
Joe McKinney: Zombies are the monster world’s equivalent of a
good pair of blue jeans: they go well with just about anything. In recent years, they’ve gone up against
everybody from the police and the military to superheroes, the cast of Star
Trek, vampires and, believe it or not, unicorns. They’ve even taken on Jane Austen.
The living dead have worked their way into our
hearts, one bite at a time.
So it’s not
hyperbole to say that zombies are the hottest thing going.
I don’t want to
belabor the point that zombies have taken over modern horror. You see them everywhere, from the TV to the
internet news blogs. And of course
there’s been a glut of them in print. In
fact, I don’t think a revenant has so thoroughly dominated popular fiction
since the Victorians took up the ghost story.
So I think we can safely say that the zombie is, for the moment,
ubiquitous, and consider the point made.
But how did we get
here? How did a monster with no
personality, no vampirelike sex appeal, and certainly no intelligence, become
such an adaptable, and powerful, image for modern life?
The question has
come up at every convention I’ve attended for the last five years, and I’ve
heard a lot of answers that satisfy with varying degrees of success. But for as many different people who have
tried to explain the phenomena, their answers can all be lumped into one of two
schools of thought.
The first, and
larger of the two schools, touts the zombie’s metaphorical range. No matter what you’re afraid of, be it
illegal immigration, terrorism, disease, economic disparity, you name it,
there’s a zombie for that.
The second school
claims that the zombie is simply a manifestation of our self-loathing, that we
realize how inadequate we are as individuals and as a society, and so we’ve
invented the zombie as both a degenerate version of ourselves and as a
punishment for our society.
Actually, neither
explanation totally works for me. Consider
the metaphor theory. Certainly even
beginning readers are capable of recognizing metaphors. The metaphor, as a literary device, comes
about as close to being hardwired into the way our minds work as rhythm and
rhyme. But to say that zombies have
taken over the popular imagination because of their metaphorical range seems
like wishful thinking on the part of writers looking to legitimize the fun
they’re having.
And as for the
idea that zombies are manifestations of our self-loathing, well, that may work
for the nihilists out there, but it hardly explains why the zombie has crossed
over into academia, so that we routinely hear of economists talking about
zombie banks, and computer experts talking about zombie viruses or zombie
terminals. Even political analysts have
gotten into the game by referring to fringe presidential contenders who refuse
to drop out of the race as zombie candidates.
Something more
than shared misery and frustration is going on here.
But you know what?
I suspect that we’ve all been over-thinking the problem. Zombies are, after all, not that
complicated. They’re dead. They’re dead men, women and children, who
look as gross as prose can possibly describe, and they want to eat us.
That’s pretty
simple.
It’s frightening,
too.
Believe me, I
know. As a cop, I’ve spent more than my
fair share of time in some flea bag apartment where some critically ill guy has
hanged himself and been rotting away inside that room in the middle of summer
with no air conditioning for a week or more.
When you see a body in that condition, and then envision what it must be
like for that corpse to suddenly pop its eyes open and come after you with
nothing but the base desire to eat you, then you get the whole why zombies are
scary question.
Most of realize
this, even if we haven’t been in the company of a week old corpse.
Most of realize
this because we’ve seen approximations of it in the movies.
Or first person
shooter games.
Or from books and
blogs.
And it’s from
those movies, first-person shooter games, books and blogs that one simple truth
emerges: Everyone knows how to kill a zombie.
Seriously. Anyone can do it. You don’t need Van Helsing’s lifetime of
study into vampire lore to kill a zombie.
You don’t need special powers.
You don’t need military training.
You simply need a blunt object.
Apply that blunt object to the zombie’s skull and - Bingo! - you are in business.
The ease with
which a zombie can be dispatched is the only thing that explains their mass appeal,
and their adaptability into so many kinds of media. We (and here I mean everyone, not just horror
fans) recognize that one zombie is a cinch to kill, but a legion of them is
not. We see the same thing in our daily
lives, with all of the various problems we confront. Those of us in dead end jobs get this at the
molecular level. We recognize that
plowing our way through a mountain of paperwork, moving it from Pile A to Pile
B, is a lot like mowing through the endless zombies on Left 4 Dead. The same could be said of working your way
through the hundreds of emails in your inbox on Monday morning. Or through the packing manifests at the
warehouse where you work. Or the endless
line of customers in your store. There
is a tidal motion to the work we perform that is echoed back to us in the
archetypal zombie plot. In killing
zombies, we are working out our frustrations and taking control of our
circumstances.
And for me anyway,
the answer to the question Why are
zombies such a powerful image is just that simple.
You can check out all my books
here:
And find out more about my writing
and what I’m up to here:
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