Zombie Times

Halloween these days brings out more zombie wannabe's, for this is the age of fascination with zombies. Now zombies are all the rage. There are more zombie themed movies and books than religious ones. Perhaps the zombies have area chanting "God is dead'.  Anyway, I think you'll see more zombie costumes at Halloween than the traditional ghost or pumpkin outfits. Sigh....those zombies are even killing off the sexy French Maid costumes that I like.

Interest in this kind of zombie appeal may partly reflect a need to escape real fears by imagining a worse one. Since the world lives in uncertain times, facing economic, environmental, political and spiritual problems that seem insurmountable replacing the real worries with zombies is an alternative. The zombie narrative shows us concrete fears that we can face vicariously through the survivors trying to fight off the zombies. There's an appeal in that. It's not fun to fight real enemies because we have no control over what they may do.
I think people want to be a zombie for the day because they are more fascinated with the end of the world now than in the past.  We do live in a spiritual and emotion doom, detached from reality by our electronic devices that created a shallow and distorted orientation of what is real. Our collective visions of the future have changed drastically, so we escape the world by becoming zombie and other apocalyptic characters. Those Halloween costumed zombies may no longer necessarily imagine the type of positive future that was more prevalent in centuries past.

Zombies are the most vivid manifestation of a painful end of the world.  There is now a cultural fixation on fictionalizing our own death, very specifically the mass scale destruction that zombies represent.  We use the zombie fiction not only to emotionally cope with the possibility of the evil and doom we feel awaiting us, but even more to personally escape reality. Yes, I know zombie affection is also just adult play. But as Freud would say, we are what we are obsessed with.  The old institutions and ways now failing us were once stable and reassuring but are now mostly gone. So zombies and other escapism's (need I cite cell phones as one).
The increase in zombie appeal Zombies are important as a reflection of ourselves. Even a simple Halloween costume reflects us, sends a message about what we think about. 

But even, in contrast to the zombie script,  if as a society we have lost a lot of our belief in a good future and instead have more of an idea of a disaster to come, we still think that we are survivors. We still want to survive in some form.