My tongue is loving the taste of skin between my teeth. It's a dead masquerade so come and dance with me.

The scene on TV is of a family sitting around a dining room table eating dinner. The mother rings a little bell and a man shuffles out of the kitchen. He is carrying a bowl with beans and carrots in it. He is dead. He is a zombie. It’s the new reality TV series the government has come up with to help the public deal with the situation.

The "situation" is that the dead are up and walking around, but there's no place to house them. So the government came up with the idea of housing a zombie with each person for a week. They are using the show to let the population see that there's “nothing to be afraid of”. The idea for the show is that every week they show how a new family is dealing with their week of having a zombie living with them.

Andrew and I watch it every night in the hopes that when our zombie comes, I don't start screaming and can't stop. It isn't helping. I sit huddled on the couch holding onto Andrew's arm crying. I can't stop. At least I'm not screaming yet. The zombie on the TV is throwing a ball around with the son. They come in and the son gets a snack. The mother has been nervous all week, and now as she hands the zombie a glass of milk, she smiles a trembling smile that doesn't reach her eyes. She mutters nervously as she approaches the zombie with the glass held out in front of her, "there's nothing to be afraid of, is there? You just want a snack, right?" The zombies smiles and reaches out for the glass. He grabs her hand and pulls her in and rips her throat out with his teeth. Screams, shouts from the TV and static fills the screen. That happens at least once a month.

I’ve always been scared of zombies.  I used to have horrible nightmares about undead plagues sweeping the world and getting ripped apart by grasping, dirt stained hands.  These dreams would keep me up at night; I suffered from zombie-induced insomnia.  The blurb above is one of the most reoccurring nightmares that I had.  And then I found out that Simon Pegg was making Shaun of the Dead, and really wanted to see it.  The commercials made it look really funny.  So I read the spoilers, so I knew what to expect.  And then I started reading other things on zombies.

I figured if I learned enough about them, then they wouldn’t have such a hold on my subconscious.  And I was sort of right.  I no longer have nightmares about them, but I’m obsessed with zombies in general now.  I’m fascinated by the place they’ve started to hold in our cultural zeitgeist. 

And now I’m about to spew that at you.  Feel free to stop reading if you don’t care about what I think about the interesting position zombies hold in the social subconscious.

I just feel that the zombie holds such an interesting place in the horror genre.  They don’t really provide a morality tale like Frankenstein or Dracula, and they aren’t as smart as werewolves or ghosts, and witches just don't scare us anymore.  But zombies... they are completely unique.  They began as stumbling, groaning, muddy horrors from George Romero’s original Dead trilogy, became images of blood and gore stained, rabid, human-like characters, and are returning to the slow-moving, moaning hordes once more.  Why does this frighten us?  The zombie is apart from us, separated by death, the ultimate “other.”  They can stand in for whatever fear is most prevalent to the viewer: biological, political, socio-economical.  They travel in packs, their threat remaining in their large numbers.  One by one they’re easy to kill, but coming at you in dozens, hundreds, thousands?  They just destroy and kill.  And what about what the zombie does?  Makes you one of the faceless hordes, and rapes you of your individuality and humanity.   

Zombies have no discernable race, as they are covered with either blood and gore, or the dirt from their graves.  This allows the filmmakers to make a racial point without using a particular race.  We put our own fears onto the zombie.  It is such a non-person that it can literally stand in for any person, any fear. 

Zombies are portrayed as this homogenous group of flesh eating monsters.  As a society, we value our individuality and any invading force, but especially of zombies, whose only purpose seem to be to kill and destroy in the search for sustenance, threatens this sense of individuality in particular. 

The destruction of the self is probably the bit about zombies that I find the most interesting.  I haven’t read too many books or seen too many movies that focus on this fact, but when somebody from our side of the war is killed, they join the other side whether they want to or not.  Most of us strive to be different, to be individuals.  We dress differently and listen to different music and read different books.  We don’t want to be the same.  The zombie is part of a horde.  You don’t have free will anymore.  You move with the pack, feed with the pack. 

(I’ve always assumed that my zombie dreams had something to do with my fears of fading into the background, losing myself.  Or perhaps they were a warning that I was already fading, losing myself in someone else.  Since the breakup, the only z-dreams I’ve had involve me as a hero.  But back to my informal essay...)

So why destroy?  The use of zombies in horror films gives the director an opportunity for destruction and violence that they lack within less horrific genres.  The zombie traditionally travels in a large pack, and their strength is in their numbers rather than superhuman strength or abilities.  (In some movies/books, the zombie has superhuman strength on the theory that they don’t hold anything back; but I’m a purist, a zombie is necrotizing flesh, it’d fall apart if it tried to lift a car to get at you.  And I won't get started on the difference in z-types either.)  In order to get at the humans who have boarded themselves up the zombies must destroy a building to do it; they cannot kill quickly or by stealth.  Because of their extreme “otherness,” the viewers of zombie movies are free to ignore the logic behind the mayhem and destruction and just concentrate on the action/adventure/mystery involved in eventually ridding the world of the walking dead….or not.

But that’s just a bit about why I think zombies are so very interesting.  I’ll probably hit on this topic a few more times before I stop boring you with my blog.  I mean, I could probably write a whole essay on zombies and the loss of individuality, and I haven’t even touched on the topic of the zombis that DO for real times exist in Haiti...