Fox News Pundit: Zombie Culture Threatens Our Children, Masks Creeping Socialism

10/22/2013

After reading this today, I can’t let it go without a brief notice. Fox News medical pundit Dr. Manny Alvarez warned in a column last week that The Walking Dead is government propaganda aimed at turning children into socialist zombies. I don’t usually watch or read Fox News, so I wasn’t aware of this until the Onion’s AV Club shared the story.

Alvarez claims that even though he may be “paranoid and misinformed,” he fears that zombies are desensitizing children to violence and serving as government propaganda to ease the transition to socialism.

This obsession with the undead in television and other media is quite puzzling. The concept of zombies has been around for decades, and their mythology has even been studied by scientists to prove that such an outbreak can never occur. Yet, whether it be in books or film, zombie popularity has only increased after having originally been popularized by the 1960s film, “The Night of the Living Dead.” […] With this country heading towards a socialized system of government, in which officials don’t want you to think or focus on what is important for your own personal growth, I’m sure they’re more than happy to let you obsess over something as stupid as zombies.

Alvarez’s illogic is astonishing. He does not want a socialist nanny state yet is concerned that the government is “letting” us watch zombie fiction. He also is terrified that The Walking Dead is teaching mostly white children to experience the “thrill” of using “firearms” to take out legions of brown-colored zombies with an “uncontrollable rage to kill” while completely oblivious to the resonance this scenario has for the wish-fulfillment fantasy promulgated on Fox News whereby mostly white men are praised for using their personal firearms to take out perceived hordes of brown-skinned invaders, be they illegal immigrants, Muslim terrorists, or inner-city hoodlums—all of whom are perceived to have an uncontrollable rage and a desire to kill “real” Americans. I have previously discussed the disturbing racial angle of zombie stories like The Walking Dead, which derive from imperialist and colonialist narratives where white heroes survive against irrational hordes of primitive non-white savages.

Leaving aside the politics of it, regular readers will recall that I hate zombies. They are the newest and least interesting of horror’s monsters, capable of little more than serving as symbols of body horror, almost never rising to the level of actual terror. Nevertheless, they are works of fiction and should be granted the same respect as any other fictional creation.

Alvarez is quite upset that fiction would dare to depict something that is impossible: “When you’re dead, you’re dead. Our brains should be less focused on imaginary zombie hordes and more focused on harnessing the tools that we need in order to enhance our lives, whether it be music, education, science or the classics.” Note that art does not fall into his list. Since Dracula and Frankenstein do as acknowledged classics, is Alvarez’s argument that zombies are bad because they are product of the hated, liberal 1960s and not old enough to be respectable? (Invasions of the dead have been a staple of literature since before Babylon, if that is old enough for you.)

I am astonished to find a Fox News commentator telling us to bend our taste to the will of science, but let me be clear: Fiction does not need to conform to scientific laws, nor should fiction be limited only to the possible. When you start excluding areas from art on the grounds that they cannot be, you negate all fiction, for every story that is fictional is by definition not true and therefore invalid, even the “classics.”

In Alvarez’s youth (he was born in 1957), there was a “monster culture” spawned by television stations’ decision to air the 1930s Universal horror films (Dracula, Frankenstein, etc.) in cheap syndicated packages. Children everywhere embraced these monsters, leading to such pop culture phenomena as “The Monster Mash” and The Munsters. Would Dr. Alvarez argue that his peers were forever scarred by these monsters? Or were they OK because Dracula was a titled noble, the Wolf-Man a plutocrat, and the Mummy an Objectivist self-interested actor? Is the trouble the monsters, or the changing face of Western culture they represent?

38 Comments

Gunn

10/22/2013 07:05:03 am

I suppose if one draws this out far enough, it presents a good case for cremation. All human remains would be actively sought out and destroyed. Or, there's always the Soylent Green option....

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/plotsummary

(Always a problem solver.)

Brent

10/22/2013 07:27:57 am

I particularly like the part where he says that Zombie games create a "dangerous" fantasy environment for "young children"...then goes on to point out that said games are rated M for Mature, negating his own point.

They can't be games rated M for Mature audiences AND be for "young children" too. Unless he means kids that play it and shouldn't, but he certainly didn't specify if that's what he meant.

Jason Colavito link

10/22/2013 07:43:18 am

I don't think there was any logic at all in his column. And to think he's a doctor!

Shane Sullivan

10/22/2013 08:26:39 am

That's funny, I once wrote a joke thesis on the Orwellian subtext of zombie movies, with the slow and stupid people who are killed and eaten by zombies representing 1984's Proles, the heroes who survive until the end of the movie representing the privileged Inner Party, and the people who are quick enough to avoid outright death but slow enough to be bitten--the ones who become zombies--are the Outer Party. Like heroes-turned-zombies, Winston and Julia were smart enough to resist their surroundings, but ultimately unable to escape their fate.

I wrote it as a satire of pretentious film students, aficionados and critics who read subtext where there is none, but the Red Scare really did play a role in the development of the modern zombie myth. Of course, whether zombie attacks represented the horrors of communism or the horrors of communist witch-hunts depends on who you ask.

But ultimately, zombie fiction is not now and never was about communism, or socialism, or hating Emmanuel Goldstein; it's about anxiety. If anything, it's taking advantage of people's paranoia of political or ecological upheaval, not desensitizing them to it.

Erik G

10/22/2013 08:48:01 am

For what it's worth: I hate zombies too, but I see no 'disturbing racial angle' there. Zombies may be a metaphor for the class struggle, a fear of ignorant unwashed masses out to take or destroy everything you have. Granted, some whites may see the threat as being non-whites, but I suspect that "haves" would see "have-nots" in all their manifestations as the threat, regardless of race. Imperialist colonialist narratives? I think that's pushing it too far. If you go that route, you could say the same about almost any SF invasion tale or movie. 'The Lord of the Rings' could be castigated on similar grounds. SF horror requires horrific villains, and these days zombies fit the bill. Ask yourself why youngsters love to hate and fear them so much. I don't know the answer(s) to that, but I doubt it has anything to do with politics or race or imperialism.

I believe it's worth pointing out that the protagonist-hero Ben in 'Night of the Living Dead' was African-American.

And I am told by those who study such matters that the title 'The Walking Dead' (both comic-book and TV series) may actually refer not to the zombies but to those humans who remain, alive still but fated to die.

As for Alvarez: who cares? Wertham was there first but comics are still here.

10/22/2013 10:08:09 am

It's not that zombie stories are inherently (or explicitly) racist, but in taking over the Victorian siege narrative, associated with the cavalry vs. Indians Western and with the British vs. Africans/Indians adventure tales, it equates zombies with the primitive Other, which in this context is the Native person. SF invasions are usually not primitive but invasion of technologically superior races; the very primitiveness and savagery of the zombie slots them into the evil savage slot from Victorian literature. George Romero's zombie films tend to be the exception because he is self-consciously making social commentary and therefore is aware of the problems.

Coridan Miller

10/22/2013 09:01:39 am

A better question is what does it say about the world today when a zombie apocalypse setting seems like a welcome escape?

B L

10/22/2013 09:18:03 am

That's it...I'm leaving. In general I have enjoyed your blog, but its time for me to go. I wish you well, Jason, but I just can't take the political commentary anymore. I'm not saying you're wrong (you have a right to your opinion), but your entries are so much more enjoyable without it. And, your conspiracy theories of occult racism are getting more and more wacky...just like Scott Wolter's Sinclair bloodline garbage. It started with a kernel of truth, but now requires more and more of a stretch to buy into. Now people who enjoy a good zombie story are subconsciously drawn to such stories because of their desire to develop and perpetuate a master race? C'mon!!

You claim illogic from Alvarez (I'm not arguing that point), Explain the logic in your own statement for me..."I don’t usually watch or read Fox News, so I wasn’t aware of this" followed later by "the wish-fulfillment fantasy promulgated on Fox News whereby mostly white men are praised for using their personal firearms to take out perceived hordes of brown-skinned invaders, be they illegal immigrants, Muslim terrorists, or inner-city hoodlums—all of whom are perceived to have an uncontrollable rage and a desire to kill “real” Americans."

If you don't read or watch FOX News then how would you be privy to any "wish-fulfillment fantasy promulgated" by them? How logical is that? Maybe YOU should check your primary sources.

Keep debunking ancient aliens and diffusionist history...I love it when you do so. I would hope that someday if you ever came into my business that you would not be made to feel uncomfortable by me pushing my political views.

Safe travels!

10/22/2013 10:04:39 am

I've said something vaguely political something like five times in three years, hardly pushing an agenda. You might note that last time I also posted a piece criticizing left-wing ideology vis-à-vis Howard Zinn and his agenda-driven rewriting of history.

It's not that zombie stories are inherently racist, but they take over siege narratives from Victorian literature, particularly cowboy vs. Indian stories and British tales of Africa and India. They carry over the dehumanization of the Other, which in the American context is too often associated with race. In the past, I wrote specifically about the way the Walking Dead uses the tropes of the Western and therefore equates the zombies to Native Americans; this isn't a conscious decision, but it is a plausible reading of the story.

Varika

10/22/2013 04:01:06 pm

No offense, Jason, but I can't entirely agree on this one. The "spaghetti Westerns" were just the latest in a long, long, long line of small-band-of-heroes fiction. The concept of overwhelming monster forces bearing down on a small handful of saviors is hardly unique to Victorian racism--which you should know, considering that a certain JASON that you have written a book about had to fight hordes of skeletal warriors during a certain quest? As I recall, he survived due to his own cleverness and their stupidity--pretty much exactly the same storyline as most zombie survival stories.

Mind, I'm not arguing that those cowboys-and-Indians tales weren't racist, because they totally were. But what tropes did those stories create that zombie stories also use that aren't a natural extension of the Last Stand type of story?

I understand that it's YOUR reading of these stories, but I'm not sure "plausible" is quite the right word in this case.

The Other J.

10/22/2013 07:52:27 pm

Varika, I take your point. But just to bring it back around to race and zombies, the history of the zombie narrative really begins in film, and started out as weirdly racialized.

For the sake of argument, let's just pretend most people only think of White Zombie as a rock band. The name comes from the 1932 film (which was based on a book written four years earlier) where Bela Lugosi runs a sugar mill in Haiti operated by black zombie slaves. The crux of the story revolves around a white woman being made into a zombie. That was the start of the zombie film, and it laid out a pattern where the Other (zombie) was a racialized exotic thing to be feared, and they were often controlled by a white master. That's not exactly new, but the context is (fear of African power in the Caribbean and how to control it via their own exotic means). It also vaguely echoes race tropes from films like King Kong, where a white woman is in peril amidst native Others.

This was the backdrop of most zombie films until George Romero came along and turned the trope on its head into an allegory of consumption. But Romero arguably challenged the previous dispensation by making his hero black and in the mindless way his hero dies.

I know something like The Walking Dead offers homages to Romero, but I'm not sure how aware they or other zombie flicks are of the cinematic context against which Romero was making his film. Because you don't see too much engagement with that earlier context, and that can sometimes lead to a re-enactment of it, like with Serpent and the Rainbow where black voodoo priests are the big bad; or the way The Walking Dead seems to have a quota on how many black humans can be in the group (as opposed to black zombies), which reinforces a kind of white fear of the other (by not really showing more than a few token minorities also being in danger); or in the way Peter Jackson reiterated some of the racial tropes of the original King Kong.

By the way, the original film White Zombie can be seen online at archive.org. I'm not saying it's good, but it's free, and you get what you pay for.

https://archive.org/details/white_zombie

10/22/2013 11:29:23 pm

I concur with The Other J. Zombies, in taking on the Haitian-Voodoo tropes, were born of racial exoticism. The Walking Dead specifically paints itself as a Western and therefore uses Western tropes, but seems to do so without acknowledging the racial context of the early Western narratives it reproduces.

Jason, incidentally, was not overrun with hordes of the undead; he had to battle the Spartoi, who were humans (skeletons only in the 1963 movie), and who were not invading anything. A better parallel might be the Trojan War or a medieval siege narrative, but in the former case the two sides were roughly equal in technology and intelligence, and in the latter the Saracen was already a semi-racialized Other who is seen as subhuman.

Paul Cargile

10/25/2013 02:33:13 am

What's interesting is that if "the wish-fulfillment fantasy promulgated on Fox News whereby mostly white men are praised for using their personal firearms to take out perceived hordes of brown-skinned invaders, be they illegal immigrants, Muslim terrorists, or inner-city hoodlums—all of whom are perceived to have an uncontrollable rage and a desire to kill “real” Americans" is perceived as a Fox News bash, then it too is an example of Otherism.

10/25/2013 02:38:18 am

Every media outlet conveys narratives. Whether you consider it a "bash" to identify those narratives depends on whether you agree with the narrative and consider it "natural" or "normal."

10/22/2013 11:27:53 am

I, too, have wondered from the beginning of my association with this blog, why you, Jason, seem to want to paint everything with a racist hue. When I first came here several months ago, I felt like I had to defend myself for being both white and interested in the local history here in MN at the same time.

I think it may be because of an inferiority complex connected to your self-identity, if this makes sense. Right, I know, it shouldn't make any sense. But, see, I think you may be a latent yet outspoken "Christopher Columbus" defender, out of this somewhat racially determined inferiority complex.

In other words, your feelings have been hurt, and you endlessly feel the need to defend Columbus while defending your own self-identity; hence, your preoccupation with preserving the status quo, which favors yourself and your buddy, Columbus.

Ha! Ha! Just joking.

10/22/2013 11:37:28 am

You know that I'm only half Italian. Does that mean I only half-defend Columbus? The "preoccupation" you see with race is not my projection (anyone who knows me knows that racial politics is my least favorite topic, and one reason I hated much of college with a fiery passion--race, class, and gender was all anyone ever talked about), but rather these racial ideas are inherent in the Victorian colonial and imperial narratives modern speculators are reusing, largely uncritically, and sometimes without realizing it. They don't usually realize that they are reusing race-based ideas, though in the case of Scott Wolter, he actively absolves Nazi sympathizers from racism. When the Walking Dead assumes the style of Western, and our heroes are the cowboys/cavalry in their fort, what are the zombies except the Indians against whom they have circled their wagons?

Only Me

10/22/2013 02:32:22 pm

I'm curious as to why, when you point out the racial overtones behind the Victorian narratives (and, as you state, used uncritically by later speculators), that people come out of the woodwork to raise hell. The defensive posturing, the indignation (though no one was specifically named) and the accusations of obsession or preoccupation seem to be the court of last resort for those who have bought into the idea of "white guilt". Otherwise, why would such people take the position of victimization?

10/23/2013 05:18:59 am

I would see it the other way where walking dead is a positive evolution of the genre. They can tell those heroic stories without being disgustingly racist as the westerns were.

10/23/2013 05:58:26 am

Only Me, one doesn't have to buy into the idea of white guilt to recognize its symptoms. I see the white guilt trip attempt, but choose not to participate in it...but rather, to help expose it.

When I first came to this blog several months ago, I was astonished by the degree of "whitey" crap I had to endure, I think, still, partly generated by the half-Italian host. I had to back these attackers down to their respective doggy bowls. People were quick to whack me over the head with a charge of racism...basically, because I'm white and I'm checking into "white history" here in MN.

Only Me, if you are referring to Yours Truly, there is no white guilt victimization, only a seemingly repugnant pointing out that the host is quite obviously perplexed about racial issues. There is a victimizing, chalky, cave-dwelling "whitey" behind every tree. (Scandinavians?)

I stepped out of the shadows to voice opposition to this madness whenever possible, and I will continue to ponder about Jason's weird colorizations when mixing people with history.

10/23/2013 08:08:02 am

No, Gunn, I'm not referring to you, or anyone, specifically.

It was a general statement, about how those who are uncomfortable with acknowledging that racism played a heavy role in both historical and literary works, are usually the first to decry Jason's efforts to address such realities. Ignoring the less than noble parts of the past, is, essentially, a form of historical revisionism. No one can claim that society has progressed in terms of race relations, if every effort is taken to ignore or bury the fact that racism was prevalent and commonplace in times past...especially when whole bodies of work in various disciplines were influenced by it and still available to the current generation.

As to the racial attacks, I'm sorry you had to endure that. No one should have to face such claims due to dissenting opinion...and that goes for Jason, too.

Steve St Clair

10/22/2013 05:32:39 pm

Race-baiting: Attempting to cloud logic and facts by appealing to emotion through false accusations of racial discrimination.

10/22/2013 11:31:38 pm

Are you suggesting, Steve, that early cowboy-and-Indian narratives are not racist? I'd love to hear your explication of Western tropes in the Walking Dead. Do tell.

10/23/2013 04:52:29 am

I think some people see racism everywhere they look and are quick to accuse others.

Wikipedia has a massive list of zombie movies and their creators. Are all of them racist for continuing to create zombie story lines?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_zombie_films

10/23/2013 05:11:02 am

I see you have an astonishing grasp of literary and film criticism. Symbols have meaning independent of those that use them, and the text exists outside its author's intention and can lend itself to projecting meanings the author did not intend. To put it in terms more familiar to you: Are Henry Sinclair partisans guilty of being anti-Italian when they repeat and reuse the claims of Thomas Sinclair, who was explicitly trying to dispossess Italians of any right to settle in the United States? Most have no idea where the ideas they repeat come from, but that doesn't mean the ideas have no history or meaning.

10/23/2013 05:14:39 am

Please answer that question for me Jason - "Are Henry Sinclair partisans guilty of being anti-Italian when they repeat and reuse the claims of Thomas Sinclair, who was explicitly trying to dispossess Italians of any right to settle in the United States?"

But let's cut to the chase. Am I a racist if I am a 'Henry Sinclair partisan?'

10/23/2013 05:27:43 am

No, Steve, you wouldn't be a racist. Just wrong. You seem to have trouble distinguishing between the individual's intention and the symbolic or practical effect of the ideas advocated.

10/23/2013 05:43:59 am

Thanks so much for your opinion, Jason.

I just wanted you to clarify that to someone who watches Fox News where 'mostly white men are praised for using their personal firearms to take out perceived hordes of brown-skinned invaders' from time to time.

Since we're swapping opinions, I think you need a break, Jason - a few weeks away from the blog. You're showing signs of burnout in many of your recent blog posts.

10/22/2013 09:00:51 pm

With reference to those early 'white-woman-in-peril' movies: I think we have to take into account the audiences for those movies and the context of the times. Audiences in the USA were mainly white. That's where the box office was. Of course the endangered heroine would be white. Halle Berry, say, instead of Fay Wray would not have been much appreciated. Hollywood has always followed the money, and the money was white. In those days, just as in the dime novels and pulps, non-white races were a convenient 'Other', which is what zombies are now -- because there always has to be an 'Other'. Subconscious racism? Perhaps. But let's not find racism in everything. It's usually just about the money.

10/23/2013 04:08:43 am

Mostly true, but it's not quite as simple as that. There's a long history in pop culture (down to advertisements and cartoons), legal findings, town planning, etc. that plays on the 'dark other coming for your white womens' trope. (I know people who've done PhD work on this stuff, and the amount of material they can pull up -- first-hand artifacts playing on the trope -- is frankly astonishing. It was just sort of in the air.) Even 'To Kill A Mockingbird' confronts that trope.

Plus white economic power wasn't the case everywhere in the country in the 19th and early 20th century: First you get into the tricky question of what was considered "white," but second you also get into the question of regional differences. During the Depression, one of the wealthiest people in America was George Herriman, the creator/artist of Krazy Kat. He was Creole from New Orleans and his birth certificate had him down as "colored." So in Louisiana he was basically a high-caste black man, but he passed as white outside of Louisiana by claiming he was Greek and wearing a hat to cover his hair. At one point he made more than President Roosevelt off his comic strip. And in Creole parts of the country -- although not as wealthy as Herriman -- many Creole people did better than white people. Then you head out west, and more people with economic power back then were Spanish and Mexican.

So broadly, yes, white people had the economic power during the original days of cinema, but more to the point cinema was mainly available in places where white people had economic power. Plus early films were often based on pre-existing stories which were already part of the culture that spawned the 'dark other coming for your white womens' trope. Just google 'gorilla carrying white women' and you'll see more than enough examples of the imagery from cartoons, ads and posters (some pornographic) from the early 20th century.

10/23/2013 05:42:28 am

Other J -- Didn't know about Herriman and Krazy Kat, so thank you for that. I did know about Hispanic economic power out West, but wasn't that kept pretty low-key? As for movies -- even up to the 1970s, Hispanics weren't exactly welcome as featured stars on Hollywood movie posters. For example, Raquel Welch's Latino roots were kept mostly concealed by the studios. We could argue about this for ages, but it certainly wouldn't be worth it.

Myths take a long time to fade. Westerns are an American myth. Cowboys and Indians, with Indians as the Other. Spaghetti Westerns put a new spin on this. Perhaps because it was easier for casting purposes (most of the films being shot in Spain), in these movies the Other frequently became villainous Mexicans. Indians as the Other began falling away. Let's not forget 'The Alamo' either, which may have had some bearing on this. 'Soldier Blue' took the side of the Indians. Since the 1970s, Westerns with Native Americans as villains have been few and far between.

The fascination of white women in the grip of a giant gorilla is something I just do not understand. Maybe the wheel will turn, and zombies will be replaced by apes. Oh, but I forget -- the 'Planet of the Apes' series of movies... based on a French novel at that! We just can't win.

Just to be contrary (or perhaps not -- the trope could have similar roots to that of the gorilla scenario) what about the exotically beautiful and almost always 'dusky' princess that our Western adventurer falls in love with, so prevalent in the pulps and adventure stories of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries? Yes, Ayesha was white; so was La of Opar; but the others? I suspect that the 'Other' can generate both fear and horror -- but also attraction. It's a complicated affair and certainly fertile ground for PhD theses. But me? I'd rather enjoy the adventures as adventures and as nothing more...

10/23/2013 07:30:02 am

Erik G --

No arguments here, on any of those points. And I think you're right about Hispanic economic power being kept low-key; that's sort of what I meant by cinema being made available where white people had economic power, in the industrial north and eventually LA.

As for the gorilla grabbing white women trope, that gets into a really complicated hall-of-mirrors effect. A standard slur against most minorities of any sort, for centuries, was to compare them to an ape. In a class I taught, we looked at some 19th century newspaper cartoons showing just that -- Asians as apes, Africans as apes, Irish as apes, etc. Usually these were done just to slur the minority, but sometimes there was more of a political statement being made: One we looked at showed a black man as an ape staring at an Irish man as an ape, and they were mirroring each other (aping each other), looking almost exactly the same except in the shade of their skin (which wasn't all that far off from each other).

So part of the fear emerged from exotic ethnic minorities becoming desirable partners for ethnic majority women, which threatened ethnic majority male power. (I don't want to say "white" here, because many Irish are pretty damn pale, but they were subject to much of the same treatment.) So step one was the fear of the ethnic minority threatening the masculinity of the majority in power; step two was casting those minorities as apes as a way to dehumanize them, thereby symbolically reducing the threat (and by proxy making them the kind of prey the Great White Hunter may confront); and step three was using actual apes taking white women as a kind of visual synecdoche for the threat of the ethnic minority emasculating the ethnic majority.

It's head-spinning nonsense.

spookyparadigm

10/23/2013 11:35:47 am

Erik G, regarding dusky princesses, in a number of cases, there might be two native women in such tales, and the lighter one was usually the more chaste and the one the hero ended up with, while the dusky one was usually more sexually explicit and attractive, but ultimately had to die (see also Bond movies).

But more importantly, they were a colonial commodity to be won. This is explicitly discussed in this work

http://www.amazon.com/Colonialism-Emergence-Science-Fiction-Classics/dp/0819568740

I recommend it.

I'd also suggest you see the same thing in early mummy stories. We're used to the idea of a mummy being a villain or a curse focus by the late 19th century, but even into that period, several of the important early mummy stories were romances were the younger of a pair of archaeologists would dig up the mummy of a beautiful princess, and ultimately she would be resurrected and then won over to become the bride of her finder. So basically, it's a combo of necrophilia, sexual exoticness, literal objectification of women, and colonial exploitation, and it doesn't take a radical reading to see as such.

10/23/2013 05:41:37 am

I've watched one episode of The Walking Dead; it was good, but I don't care for zombies. That said, I always viewed the show, and the latest craze of zombie movies, as being a metaphor for socioeconomic collapse, whereas the zombies represent the hordes of starving urbanites invading the agrarians for food. (The show about the loss of electricity seemed to be of similar vein to me.) In that viewpoint, it leans heavy toward self-reliance, those capable of surviving the fall of civilization defending themselves against those too dependent on the comforts of the modern world.

BigMike

10/23/2013 10:46:24 am

I can see your point about the Western tropes carrying a stigma of racism with them, but like with any fiction boiling down the entire work (and they are beginning the fourth season and fast approaching fifty episodes) to one trope is just an easy way of dismissing it. The fact is that Walking Dead uses more than just the western trope. There's also the biker-with-a-heart-of-gold trope in the form of Darryl, the lone samurai trope in the form of Michonne (who is the most bad-ass hero-type of the show, by the way, and is also a black woman) and season 3 was all about the corruption of power. To sum up the entire show as a just another western trope is like saying claiming that Beowulf is about a bar fight.

I understand that you don't like zombies. My best friend can't stand zombies he thinks they're just stupid. I personally like my monsters a bit more clever, but I do understand the horror aspect of the modern interpretation of zombies. It's not about a single zombie. a lone walker (to borrow a term from the Walking Dead) is easily avoided or dispatched. The horrifying aspect of these zombies is the faceless, soulless, inescapable mass. To be caught in it is death or worse, a complete loss of individuality.

From the aspect of psychology this is especially disturbing to older adolescents, teenagers, and early adults. People of the age group ranging from around 15 until the early to mid twenties (the primary demographic of horror films/television, btw...) are still engaged in a stage of development called adolescent ego-centrism. This is essentially the stage of mental development where human beings are really coming to terms with their own individuality. The thought of the loss of that individuality is often more terrifying than death.

10/23/2013 11:19:46 am

"To sum up the entire show as a just another western trope is like saying claiming that Beowulf is about a bar fight."

!

Bill

10/23/2013 11:58:53 am

I think you are reading a lot more into the modern zombie trend and the walking dead than is actually there If you want to see it in terms of race that's fine but that's not the way the people producing and viewing the media see zombies. If the walking could be a western allegory but many of the themes in it are common to more than the American West/Victorian periods. The only real complaint I have about The Walking Dead is there are not enough black people in the cast (both zombie and survivor) for a story set in middle GA.

Heidi

10/24/2013 02:29:27 pm

I think what the commentator is not articulate enough to express, is that there is a nexus that sees art as connected to a view of religion that is more sociological than historical. It's a bias to be sure. But I hope that tid bit fleshes some of this out. I had not considered the angle that zombies denote a kind of body horror. If you ever need a woman to throw herself at your feet Jason, just ask and I will oblige! you and your website are a priceless gem!

JaredMithrandir link

7/5/2014 07:36:19 pm

"Alvarez’s illogic is astonishing. He does not want a socialist nanny state yet is concerned that the government is “letting” us watch zombie fiction."

As a Libertarian, I feel ya.