Читать книгу Real Zombies, the Living Dead, and Creatures of the Apocalypse - Brad Steiger - Страница 26

While George Romero brought the zombie into contemporary consciousness with The Night of the Living Dead, it seems unlikely that anyone could have predicted the enormous popularity of the creature in today’s culture. Large numbers of our current population have gone “Zombie Nuts,” which hopefully will not lead to anything more than role-playing and gathering in large groups to dress, dance, and act like the zombies do.

In today’s zombie films, the mangled undead are much more agile than Romero’s lurching creatures, who shuffle, drag their feet, and extend their flopping arms for balance. Today’s zombies can run, fast.

Not only are the zombies becoming more agile on screen, you may encounter large numbers of pseudo-zombies dancing at the local mall. Even on days other than Halloween, large groups of the undead may appear everywhere from town squares to prison exercise yards to perform the famous “zombie dance” from Michael Jackson’s music video “Thriller.”

On Halloween 2008, 1,227 of the undead filled the Old Market Square in Nottinghamshire, England, to set a new world record for dancing zombies. The previous record for zombie choreography had been set in Monroeville, Pennsylvania on October 28, 2007, with 1,028 participants. BBC News quoted Margaret Robinson, one of the organizers of the Nottingham zombie event, as saying that on that night the dancers were all zombies, all undead. She was covered in blood and very happy to be so.

On December 3, 2009, officials at the University of Colorado at Boulder warned that students who were caught walking around campus dorm buildings with Nerf guns could be arrested. More than 600 students had signed up to play the popular game “Humans vs Zombies” in which humans shoot the zombies with the sponge Nerf balls. When the Nerf guns were banned, the “human” participants in the battle resorted to using rolled up stockings.

The enormous popularity of the zombie in contemporary times has no doubt confused many individuals who try to balance their religious beliefs with a growing fascination for tales of a monster from the world of Voodoo and the undead. How should they respond to the ever-growing Cult of the Zombie? Is it possible that millions of people could become “zombified” after a great apocalyptic event? In the great majority of current motion pictures, books, games, and other media expressions, the zombies are themselves initially the victims of a great biological warfare, a mysterious virus, or some kind of mass pandemic that first kills them, then resurrects them with the uncontrollable desire to chomp on the uninfected and to create one big gory family.

Many of us who were reared in one of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—were told from our very early childhood that one day the graves would open and free the dead to face a day of judgment. Many of us who learned of this coming event in quite graphic detail were quite likely left with nightmares that convinced us not to walk through any cemetery at any time—night or day—for we were advised that this sudden raising of the dead could happen without any warning. No one—not even the wisest adult—knew the exact time when this awesome event might occur. As children, some of us envisioned terrible images of decaying corpses and skeletons pushing aside rotting coffins and reaching up through graveyard dirt to begin to run around in a kind of Halloween gone mad.

Because of our early religious conditioning, some of us, at some level of consciousness, have long expected a sudden onslaught of the undead rising from their graves.

And now, in a vast number of contemporary films, it seems as though the zombie is bringing on the Apocalypse, heralding Armageddon, the last great battle between the forces of Good and Evil—and if these zombie films are accurate, there won’t be many unsullied humans left to fight the undead who will pursue them for their blood and their souls. To make matters worse, in these many dramatic presentations of a Zombie Apocalypse, there appears no sign of help from the promised legions of angels who are to arrive like the heavenly cavalry and save humanity from total destruction.