In honor of this year’s Easter holiday and (hopefully not coincidental) AMC’s The Walking Dead’s third season finale falling on the same day, I wanted to take this opportunity to explain why slow zombies are better than fast zombies.
This may be my most important blog to date.
Zombies represent many things to many people. Our rampant consumerism. Mindlessness of pop culture. Anxiety about national security and terrorism. I’ve even heard them compared to Nazi’s and the Holocaust. All of these may be perfectly reasonable interpretations of the popularity, especially recently, of such a savage monster that devours our brains and bodies without remorse. Zombies are everywhere from film to TV to comic books to novels. Even [easyazon-link asin=”B004HW7E6U” locale=”us”]Jane Austin’s classic Pride and Prejudice got a zombie makeover[/easyazon-link].
But for me, zombie stories are not really about zombies at all. They appeal to me because they are entirely about how humans respond to what I consider the worst case scenario event: The end of the world as we know it… with zombies.
The answer to the question how do humans living comfortable, modern lives cope with being thrown into a world where most people they’ve ever known are dead, and the structure of civilization has collapsed, is a compelling mystery to ponder. For this reason, I love most apocalyptic and dystopian stories. But zombie stories are the ultimate cause of the apocalypse, and the most fearful antagonist because the added element of the dead rising to eat us, and subsequently turning us into the very monsters we fear, makes it nearly impossible for humanity to fully recover. Or at recovery will be delayed for a very long time, possibly until the world has changed dramatically in the process, and we have lost specialized talent, knowledge and expertise along the way plunging us back into a simpler time, and into a more brutal existence.
Zombies add an extreme element that goes unmatched by other causes of the apocalypse, such as “normal” plagues, asteroids, global warming, nuclear war, or even the Rapture. As a student of history with a particular interest in ancient Rome and how its fall lead to the Dark Ages, the zombie tale is a modern allegory for what it may have been like to live in those centuries following the immediate aftermath of the sacking of Rome in 410 through the centuries as civilization became fractured, knowledge was lost, literacy declined, and Rome itself crumbled to ruins. 
I’ve often wondered what it was like for a peasant living in the 9th century– to pick an arbitrary moment in time — to see ancient Roman monuments, wondrous feats of engineering, and ask what magic must these men have had within their power? What stories with supernatural explanations that peasant must have told his friends and family to make those mysteries make sense in the context of their vastly different world, where technologies like steam power, and running water would not be rediscovered for another several hundred, even a thousand, more years. Would he have called the ancient people mystical, or imbued them with godlike powers? What might a Roman of Julius Caesar’s time, have thought of society’s interpretation if he’d been transported through time a thousand years? “It’s not magic! Its math!”
Zombie stories also help us imagine what it might have been like to live through the Black Death, when one third of Europe was felled by plague. That’s as if more than 2 billion people in the world, or 115 million Americans, were to die. Now imagine those 115 million rising from the dead to eat you, adding even more victims to the rolls!
Worst. Case. Scenario. Ever.
So, back to my original thesis that slow zombies are better than fast zombies… In movies like the remake of Dawn of the Dead, the upcoming World War Z, and 28 Days Later (though not really about zombies), the zombies become the focus point. The movies become just another monster tale, action flick, showing how the humans eventually prevail (or are completely destroyed). That’s fine and all, but you can tell that story with any monster. You don’t need zombies.
What I have loved about The Walking Dead is that it gets that. The show’s title itself refers to the living more than the dead who are trying to eat them. The creator of the comic book the television show is based on, Robert Kirkman, has said he turned down many offers to bring his stories to the small and big screen because nobody understood that the show was about the survivors more than the zombies. They wanted fast, “exciting” action, for what they perceived was a mindless audience. I’m so glad he held out, and that finally Frank Darabont came along and understood Kirkman’s vision. The show’s third season has been especially fun because more than any previous season we see the humans coping with the zombies almost as if they’re the background. 
They’re still enough of a threat that the survivors can’t truly rest, and rebuild, forced to always be on the run, but the real stories have been told about how the new world will be organized. How do humans interact with each other? How do our innate inclinations of tribalism and distrust of strangers contradict our more enlightened sensibilities of justice and peace? That struggle has been highlighted by the different strategies between the two faction’s human leaders, former Sheriff Rick Grimes and his band holed up at a weakened prison, and heavily fortified, Dystopian Woodbury’s sociopathic, meglomaniac The Governor. You can’t tell those tales with fast zombies, because they always demand to be front and center. The Walking Dead hasn’t been perfect in its three year run, but my favorite moments have hinged around these ideas of dealing with a changed world.
Thank goodness they kept those zombies nice and slow. Happy Zombie Day to all!
