Our Insatiable Techno Zombie Love

Over the last decade or so zombies and their apocalypses have shambled into our lives everywhere: in movies like Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, and World War Z; video games like Resident Evil and The Last of Us; board games like Zombicide and Dead of Winter; flash mob zombie walks; and in the hit TV show based on comic of the same name The Walking Dead. A quick look at Wikipedia’s long list of zombie films reveals that over half were produced after 2001.

Why do we love (and love to hate) zombies so much? Why have they dethroned those sexy Transylvanian bloodsuckers that ruled the horror roost before 2003 – when Mark Zuckerberg was tinkering with Facebook at Harvard and the first Walking Dead comic appeared – in games, films, and TV shows such as Blade, Interview with a Vampire, Bloodrayne, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Indeed, in the large European horror film industry from the late 1950s to the ’70s, vampires clearly dominated, from Christopher Lee’s numerous interpretations of Dracula for Hammer Films to Mario Bava’s seminal Black Sunday (1960) and Jean Rollins’ languorously sexy, surreal opus. Mummies, werewolves, and zombies were mere afterthoughts for these European filmmakers.