Why the Living Dead Are Still Terrifying

Written by John Edward Betancourt

I still remember the long and sleepless night that I experienced mere hours after watching the original Dawn of the Dead. I told myself it was just a movie, zombies weren't real and to go to sleep, but the instant I closed my eyes, those blue-gray faces were staring back at me and that was it. I was awake, I was terrified and as I look back now, I realize that the living dead are still to me the most terrifying monster on the planet.  

Yet on the eve of the premiere of AMC's Fear the Walking Dead I've seen a few articles concerned that we may be experiencing a zombie overload. That the living dead are overexposed and that this may mark the end of their popularity. For one I think that's just silly, The Walking Dead franchise as a whole is showing no signs of slowing down, and I think there's good reason for that. It goes beyond the gore and the awesome zombie kills that we enjoy week in and week out. The fact of the matter is...the living dead are terrifying for all of us and still relevant today.

In fact these creatures have been on quite an evolutionary journey when it comes to storytelling. In the George Romero era of living dead filmmaking they were merely the device to exposing a larger problem in our world. They helped to symbolize consumerism, geo political conflicts, you name it. They had become quite literally, our problems personified as soulless, flesh eating corpses. But modern times call for a modern zombie and what makes them so scary today...is that they represent fears that are more grounded in reality. 

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What The Walking Dead has managed to do, is focus upon perhaps one of our greatest fears of all time...our fear of death. The living dead in Rick Grimes/Daniel Salazar's world personify a bastardization of our natural purpose in life to go out, live a good life, say goodbye to our loved ones and pass on so that we can be remembered fondly. This new universe denies the world of that foundation to our society, and now these poor people have to not only fear the end of their lives, but the horrible fate that waits for them after they pass away. That cerebral concept and take on the genre is why these creatures make us shudder.

But I also think it goes a little further than that. The living dead now represent as a whole, the horrible events of our world, the unstoppable forces of nature that we all fear will badly disrupt our lives and our societal norms, allowing us to shiver in fear of seeing it all come crashing down and then return to the safety of a world that may be on the brink at times...but still has hope for a future. In so many ways, the destruction of these creatures, the fight for survival by a handful of people represent that hope and the struggle to bring order to chaos. 

Truthfully I could go on for hours about how the zombie has evolved over the past few years, but maybe we will save that for another time. The important thing is that after so many years of lamenting in the darkness of VHS these powerful creatures are now at the forefront of pop culture, entertaining us and scaring us all at once and while some may think they are outstaying their welcome or have become boring, I have a feeling tonight's companion series to The Walking Dead will prove otherwise as it brings new life to the already rich mythos of the living dead and no doubt finds new ways to terrify all of us. 

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