The Undead as Us: How Zombie Lore Reflects Our Fear of Loss and Regression
For decades, the zombie has shambled its way through our collective consciousness, evolving from a symbol of Haitian folklore to a ubiquitous figure in modern horror. But the enduring appeal of the zombie isn’t simply about scares.Beneath the gore and the chase sequences lies a surprisingly potent commentary on societal anxieties, particularly our fraught relationship with loss, change, and the seductive, yet ultimately destructive, pull of the past. Zombie narratives, at their core, aren’t just about surviving the apocalypse; they’re about confronting what happens when we desperately cling to a broken version of what was, and the dangers of prioritizing nostalgia over progress.
The Pathology of Preservation: Loss Aversion and the Zombie Impulse
The power of the zombie lies in its depiction of something fundamentally wrong with the idea of resurrection. It’s not a glorious return, but a grotesque imitation. In this very way, zombie stories tap into a deep-seated human fear: loss aversion. We instinctively recoil from losing what we value, and the zombie embodies the horror of a corrupted, diminished echo of that value.These aren’t simply inferior substitutes for humans; they are a warning against settling for “brainless facsimiles, for shoddy reproductions, for shambling reanimated corpses of what we once loved.” The genre implicitly asks: is any continuation preferable to no continuation, even if that continuation is a monstrous perversion of life itself?
This isn’t merely a philosophical question. The zombie’s destructive nature reveals a critical undercurrent: a critique of reactionary violence. Consider Danny Boyle’s 2002 film, 28 Years Later (a spiritual successor to George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead). The film depicts a Britain ravaged by a “rage virus” that transforms its citizens into homicidal psychopaths, effectively plunging the nation into a new dark age. The stark contrast with the rest of the world – a world embracing technological advancement and social connection - is deliberate.
Brexit, Backlash, and the Viral Grip of the Past
28 Years Later is almost inescapably read as an allegory for Brexit, a sentiment echoed by scholars like Corey Robin. The film’s protagonist, young Spike, exists in a bleak, pre-industrial landscape, clinging to a romanticized vision of “old Britain.” The film’s iconography – a digitally recreated ancient tree,a tower of skulls referencing Shakespearean tragedy – and its use of distorted Kipling poetry,all reinforce this sense of a nation fixated on a lost golden age.
Robin argues that all reactionary movements stem from a fear of loss. Boyle’s england,then,becomes a chillingly literal manifestation of that fear. The infected aren’t just monsters; they are the Brexiters, driven by a desperate, insatiable hunger to restore a past that never truly existed, or that existed only for a privileged few. Furthermore, the aggressive, primal nature of the infected embodies a warped and decaying form of traditional masculinity – a perversion of the warrior ideal, stripped of its honor and purpose. The virus isn’t just a biological threat; it’s a metaphor for the corrosive power of nostalgia and the violence inherent in attempting to forcibly resurrect a bygone era.
The Zombie as Perpetual Child: Regression and the Loss of Responsibility
What makes the zombie genre so compelling is its ability to pinpoint what we fear losing. As Ben Tarnoff observed in The New York Review of Books, figures like former President Trump exhibit a “reactionary infantilism” – a desire for carefree existence and a rejection of the responsibilities of adulthood.This concept resonates deeply with the zombie archetype.
Unlike true conservatives who seek to preserve the best of the past through established institutions and traditions, zombies don’t reinstate custom or ceremony.They demand a regression to a state of primal need,a self-justifying power born of unreasoning hunger. They’ve devolved, inevitably, to a state of infantile dependence. (The darkly humorous example of explosive diarrhea in some zombie lore underscores this point - a literal return to the bodily functions of infancy.) Zombies are perpetually hungry, preverbal, and incapable of rational thought.
This connection between zombies and infancy explains the surprising moments of tenderness that occasionally surface in zombie narratives. 28 Years Later subtly frames the zombie outbreak as a failed bildungsroman – a coming-of-age story gone horribly wrong. The film explores the parts of ourselves that refuse to mature,that remain trapped in a cycle of need and dependence. Spike’s eventual empathy for
