[POLL] What is main factor in popularity of zombie genre?

[JackRiddler]

(NOTE! ON EDIT! OPTION G HAS BEEN REPLACED. BUT I CAN'T EDIT THE CHOICES. CLICK ON "G --MINDLESS GORY ESCAPISM" IF YOU LIKE WOMBAT'S ANSWER. THANK YOU.)

This poll accompanies another thread, "The Zombie fascination in century 20.1" at viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30465.

Full text of the following is also cross-posted at viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30465&p=488738#p488738

Please reply there. I will keep bumping this thread to get some responses.

QUESTION

What do you believe is the most influential factor in the current popularity of the zombie genre in the United States?

OPTIONS, A TO H: DECODED

It would be good if ranking was possible but in this format you must pick your ONE best answer, even if you also agree with other answers. These answers are indicative of veins of thought, not exhaustive.

A - People fear they are zombies, or may have a zombie element. It's a catharsis to watch living, willing humans resist the zombies. Even if they lose. Zombies represent cookie-cutter consumers, believers, parroters of myths and propaganda, work drones, constant media consumers -- in other words, us.

B - People want to be zombies. A part of us desires to surrender the vexations of free will, the need to think or choose or be a responsible individual. We want to be a mindless part of a shambling herd. Thus the popularity of zombie marches and cosplay.

C - It's fun to think about killing everyone. It's even better when it's a moral imperative to kill everyone as a condition of species survival. We fantasize (or truly desire?) an opportunity to kill every last motherfucker crowding around us, without regard to age, sex, creed, color, ideology, or elaborate discourses on right and wrong. Reload!

D - People hate zombie-others. Things have gone to hell and WE must fight back. But first we must recognize the threat, discover our common identity, and unite against the threat. Lower classes or hostile foreigners or inferior races or white trash or immigrants or crazy subcultures or alienated violent youth or religious fanatics or femme-extremists or extraterrestrial invaders or brain parasites or undeadbodysnatchersofmultiplefantasyspeciesfromfairiestovampires or commie liberals or criminal gangs or sexual deviants or mind-controlled drug addicts or demons or diseased pathetics or whatnot are taking over and destroying everything worthwhile! The good guys (in US productions usually signified as middle class, mostly white, professional, serious, law-abiding and hard-working, strong and responsible, love-seeking, nuclear-family-oriented people with just a hint of mainstream Christianity and some past trauma or hidden addiction or other psychological block to overcome) need to band together and fight the mobs in their own defense, and learn the hard lesson (usually at the cost of many of their number dead) that it's either US or THEM. With us or against us. Horrible measures are necessary and must be taken without hesitation and always with a clean conscience, etc. Those who have stocked up on arms and essentials will be at an advantage.

E - Psyops prefiguring the real-world future - as planned. Any of the above can be true as far as the appeal of the material to an individual consumer. But all of it proves secondary if we consider the zombie narrative as a function of an underlying game of power. What's most important here is a propaganda trend, doubtless influenced and promoted by psyops, toward preparing us for real-life scenarios in which we will all be effectively designated as "alive" or "zombie," with the former to be deputized under a state of exception in a civil war, while the latter are to be rounded up, defeated, excluded, deported, drone-watched, drone-bombed or exterminated.

F - Pop-art prefiguring the real-world future - as coming regardless of any master plan.

G - EDITED TO ACCOMMODATE THE WOMBAT ANSWER: "MOST COMPELLING FICTIONAL SURVIVALIST SCENARIO MAKES FOR EASY DRAMA, PATHOS AND SCALE" -- Wombat says: "I really do think the main appeal is 'what would I do? how could I survive?' and watching protagonists who exist as avatars for the viewers work through the permutations, one casualty at a time." IGNORE WHAT THE POLL SAYS, CLICK ON G IF YOU AGREE WITH WOMBAT ANSWER.

H - Other. (Please explain, but if it's a combination of the above, PLEASE PICK ONE OF THE ABOVE as your number-one answer.)

[Wombaticus Rex]

H. "MOST COMPELLING FICTIONAL SURVIVALIST SCENARIO MAKES FOR EASY DRAMA, PATHOS AND SCALE" -- I really do think the main appeal is "what would I do? how could I survive?" and watching protagonists who exist as avatars for the viewers work through the permutations, one casualty at a time.

[JackRiddler]

Dude! Please move your reply to the original thread, where I have also posted the poll with answers.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30465&p=488738#p488738

Your answer is good by the way. Frustrating that I didn't think of such a major option. But I've come to view the arts and entertainments as more often being ersatz emotional experiences than discourses, games, puzzles or decipherings of meaning.

[beeblebrox]

Some combination of all the choices, with answer "A" (we fear we are zombies) being probably the single most significant individual factor, followed closely by "C".

Nobody likes to think of themselves as mere mindless money, food, and sex grubbing automatons, or as "cookie-cutter consumers, believers, parroters of myths and propaganda, work drones, constant media consumers". The impulse to fight this perception of self, to rage against the machine so to speak, is strong. Which leads to answer "C", the desire, or fantasy, to "kill every last motherfucker crowding around us, without regard to age, sex, creed, color, ideology, or elaborate discourses on right and wrong. Reload!" in an attempt to project, or distances ourselves from our inner zombie.

[Bruce Dazzling]

For me, this sums it up quite nicely.

[Luther Blissett]

I just returned from seeing Warm Bodies and I think they've interpreted the genre extremely well. I guess my synopsis will include spoilers (or whatever), but there weren't really any surprises if one has seen the trailer. The general theme is that the zombie virus began due to lack of love and empathy amongst humans. In one of the only scenes in which the Most Sensitive Zombie in the World (key plot point) fantasizes about what life was like before the apocalypse, he longs to feel and to interact with others, and pictures a scene at an airport where all the living humans are playing on their cell phones, not looking at one another. Obviously love is the anecdote to the virus. The hero is the first to reignite his heart because he loves the heroine, and the other not-so-far-gone zombies witness this and feels it too. Love spreads, as Ian Brown (to whom the hero bears a slight resemblance) would say.

I think it's a pretty good answer to say that it was a fear of inhumanization and loss of empathy in whatever aspect of the modern era people imagine that begat the genre, going all the way back to the anti-racist message of Night of the Living Dead.

My girlfriend thinks that the zombie genre, above all others, taps into chase dreams featuring an unrecognizeable and blurred assailant, a near-universal aspect of human life.

p.s. I chose option A.

[brekin]

My preliminary vote is for the tension betwixt A. and D.

Zombie movies play on the fear that we will be consumed and lose our individuality which strangely also plays on our desire to be engulfed by a mass greater then us.

A - People fear they are zombies, or may have a zombie element. It's a catharsis to watch living, willing humans resist the zombies. Even if they lose. Zombies represent cookie-cutter consumers, believers, parroters of myths and propaganda, work drones, constant media consumers -- in other words, us.

D - People hate zombie-others.

Cannetti in Crowds and Power lays this out very cleanly. I was reminded while reading his book about the young Jewish boy (I think in the book Nazi Culture) who use to go to Nazi street rallies because he loved the warmth of being in the crowd and the shared exuberance even though the ideology was one that was potentially harmful to him as an individual.

Here's Cannetti from Crowds and Power:

The Fear of Being Touched
There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic. Even clothes give insufficient security: it is easy to tear them and pierce through to the naked, smooth, defenceless flesh of the victim.

All the distances which men create round themselves are dictated by this fear. They shut themselves in houses which noone may enter, and only there feel some measure of security. The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.

The repugnance to being touched remains wiht us when we go out among people; the way we move in a busy street, in restaurants, trains or buses, is governed by it. Even when we are standing next to them and are able to watch and examine them closely, we avoid actual contact if we can. If we do not avoid it, it is because we feel attracted to someone; and then it is we who make the approach.

The promptness with which apology is offered for an unintentional contact, the tension with which it is awaited, our violent and sometimes even physical reaction when it is not forthcoming, the antipathy and hatred we feel for the offender, even when we cannot be certain who it is – the whole knot of shifting and intensely sensitive reactions to an alien touch – proves that we are dealing here with a human propensity as deep-seated as it is alert and insidious; something which never leaves a man when he has once established the boundaries of his personality. Even in sleep, when he is far more unguarded, he can all too easily be disturbed by a touch.

It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose physical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count, not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a crowd seeks to close in on itself: it wants to rid each individual as completely as possible of the fear of being touched. The more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other. The reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest.

The tension between A and D is probably a second level narrative though. I would have to say first my choice would be H. Other. Zombie movies play on our ancestral heritage of trying to survive in a hostile environment in small bands when we were more prey then predator.

I'm talking Paleolithic shit son! For thousands and thousands of years humans were prey to all manner of predators and even other encounters with humans could be deadly. Only by getting together could larger predators be combated. For a band to turn on an individual, or to be pursued by a rival band, (to say nothing of a pack of wild predators) has to remain one of our greatest fears. Because mindless, blood hungry mobs who would chase you down to eat you was a reality for humans earlier in our history. The Zombie movie plays on this to great effect. In fact, most zombie movies run out of steam (Walking Dead comes to mind) when the predator/prey chase slows down and the zombies become more of a social/political dilemma or stylistically those being pursued seem to be over-matched for the pursing zombie hoard (Resident Evil franchise).

[JackRiddler]

Fuck! How did I miss the most obvious answer of all?

It's about the tendency in capitalism to render an increasing majority of the population superfluous.

Well, anyway, it's represented in some of the other options.

Here's a post where I'm having fun on FB:

https://www.facebook.com/stephen.brooks ... ment_reply

Stephen Brooks
41 minutes ago ·

STOP ALL THE WALKING DEAD SPOILERS, this isn't twitter... give me at least 24 hours, damn...
Like · · Share · Unfollow Post
3 people like this.

Joel Biske There are zombies in it.
40 minutes ago · Edited · Like · 1

Nikos Evangelos It's about the tendency in capitalism to render an increasing majority of the population superfluous.
17 minutes ago · Like

Stephen Brooks that was the theme of dawn of the dead and land of the dead... but not every zombie property is about capitalism
11 minutes ago · Like

Nikos Evangelos It's about the anxiety of the white-identifying bourgeois a la Americain that they are being overwhelmed numerically by every form of feverishly imagined Other.
8 minutes ago · Like

Stephen Brooks and that would be day of the dead
6 minutes ago · Like

Nikos Evangelos It's about the desire of the alienated atomized post-modern individual to freely kill - kill as a moral imperative, even - all these crowds with whom he (she, but mostly he) cannot connect, and who burden him with their meddling and smells and incessant minor demands and just by being in the way all the time.

[norton ash]

Nikos Evangelos It's about the anxiety of the white-identifying bourgeois a la Americain that they are being overwhelmed numerically by every form of feverishly imagined Other.
8 minutes ago · Like

Right, and you get to feel good and justified about shooting them.