Warm Bodies: what our love affair with zombies says about us

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/08/warm-bodies-film-zombie-love-affair

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Warm Bodies, billed as a zombie romantic comedy, is the latest example of an unusual take on a monster that's invaded the popular consciousness. Both zombies and vampires have hit the big screen hard in recent years, with the Twilight series, Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Diary of the Dead and a host of others clamouring for attention in cinemas.

Zombies are useful antagonists, because they're both an environmental threat and a specific danger, wrapped up in an uneasy, paranoia-inducing package. Haitian rituals are often cited as their origin: voodoo rituals producing animated corpses or mindless automatons. But culturally, in the west, zombies can be more easily traced to the films of George Romero, and a resultant broad literature that tackles human loneliness and our ability to deal with disaster.

Vampires, on the other hand, are perennially popular as attractive villains. Dracula, itself drawing on older myths of werewolves and tales of bloodthirsty Slavic demons, spawned a long line of vampire literature. Most recently this has culminated in the wildly popular romance Twilight, which owes as much to Anne Rice's pouting vampiric sexuality as to Dracula's dominance and control.

One popular theory suggests that the relative popularity of vampires and zombies corresponds in part to economic cycles. In boom times, the theory says, zombies become popular in part due to their association with mindless consumerism; in recession, vampires return, with their air of guilty consumption and self-doubt. In recent years, the correlation seems less steady – the flatlining economy might be confusing the relationship, perhaps, or there may be more to the zombie/vampire battle than the economists can explain.

Where vampires are about seduction, heady sexuality and a subtle hint of dominance, zombies are victims, hapless and unlucky, to be pitied individually but feared collectively. Where vampires are about lasting for ever, unspoiled, zombies are about decaying and falling apart. Historically, while vampires are controlling and mesmerising, zombies are controlled and dominated, little more than mindless slaves. A zombie romance, then, seems to invert zombie tropes by jumping up and down on them repeatedly. Who falls in love with the living dead?

But the cultural significance of zombies has changed a great deal in recent years. There is an ongoing epidemic of zombie culture: books, films, games, zombie walks, zombie flash mobs, zombie fitness events, zombie experiences. Last week's ZombieLab event at the Science Museum drew record crowds, with thousands through the doors, enticed by zombies and games set up to explore the theory and science behind consciousness. The event I ran there looked at the ethics of curing zombies, with almost half our audience concluding zombies should not be killed. Zombies are everywhere – and people are having just as much fun pretending to be them as pretending to be scared of them.

Zombies, Run! writer Naomi Alderman spoke at The Event last year about zombies as a cultural lightning rod for our fears and memories relating to the Holocaust – the fact that anyone, at any time could turn; the way zombie stories rely on paranoia, on hiding, on the constant inexorable approach of doom; a virus that spreads like an ideology, infectiously; and the fact that the monsters are always human. In contrast, some film historians invoke Vietnam, which was at the forefront of cultural consciousness when George Romero's Night of the Living Dead was released: zombies turn humans into killers, both the mindless walkers and the survivors forced to take up arms against them.

History aside, zombies can be a reflection of many modern fears. Insidious radiation, a war without clear sides to take, epidemic illnesses, mindless consumerism – they all resonate with zombie stories in a different way. Romero himself has denied that zombies are a metaphor for anything specific, calling them instead simply "a global disaster that people don't know how to deal with". Night of the Living Dead is not about the disaster itself, he says, but the way people respond to it: the choices they make, the way they decide to live or die. Finding love in the ashes of society is not an unusual choice.

Richard Matheson's book I Am Legend – an inspiration for Romero – married what we now see as modern zombie tropes with older vampire stories, creating a race of infected vampiric beings that act on humans much as zombies do. But I Am Legend's monsters are sentient, and work to reduce the effects of their infection, until they effectively become a new race of humans. His protagonist Robert Neville is eventually executed by the new democratic society of vampires he has been hunting for years. While most zombie tales since have stuck to a mindless, unconscious monster, more and more are returning to Matheson's idea and asking whether, knowing what we now know about the mind, these monsters are really monsters at all.

So Warm Bodies joins a growing canon of zombie stories in which the zombies themselves are still human, at a time when in wider culture playing dress-up as monsters is no longer something only children do. Perhaps by humanising the monsters we're starting to come to terms with the darkness in our cultures, and exploring new ways to conceive of and cope with disaster. Or, perhaps, it's just really good fun.