Z-DAY: About walking dead and the end of days

Does that gibbering guy in the park, walking on you and having his hands widespread, look like he has rigor nervorum in terminal phase? The streets are blocked by abandoned broken cars? Do you see bloody palm imprints on walls of shops and glass doors of cafés? The air is ripped by Civil Defense sirens? Congratulations, you’ve just got involved into a very interesting event – this is a zombie outbreak!

First of all, let’s make things clear and dot all the “I”s (at least the majority of them). The very idea of zombies originates from occulted voodoo rituals. But now things have drastically changed. Modern zombies aren’t created by Haitian witchcraft or by Divine Scourge (“…and the dead in Christ will rise first”, 1 Thessalonians 4:16). Risen from the dead is a purely modern product, although there’s something apocalyptic here indeed. So why are the undead so popular in contemporary culture? Natably, its popularity isn’t caused by religious fears or pagan superstitions, its origin lies in culture entirely. And it would have been a different matter, if only the youngs were attracted by that subject, but even quite serious and sometimes elderly people continue to develop the “Z”-theme.

It’s time to stop considering the zombies to be just a scary theme for teenagers and horror-movie fans. The living dead are a metaphora, though a rather kinky one. The movies or books themselves aren’t able to reveal the full depth of this topic due to the peculiarities of pictorial means, but the amount of food for cogitation is immense. Social and sometimes even philosophical subtext is such that it is the reflection of social fears of a global cataclysm, apocalypse, epidemy – of every real threat to the humanity on a global scale. By projecting our own anxieties on a vague and mystic image from West-African pagan rituals, we meditate upon the extent, to which a human soul will crop up if the boundaries of society disappear. Perhaps, there can’t be a more banal question, but still… “What will we become, if no one watches the abidance of law and morality? How will a human change, if the one and only valuable thing in the whole world is his own life?”