What’s So Scary About the Undead?

Zombies. They haunt my dreams. They always have. Ever since I wandered into the living room late at night as a kid, turned on the TV, and saw Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. After that night, I became notorious for sleeping in our living room window seat, keeping a ready eye on the cemetery a block away from our house. I thought to myself that if I could see a zombie coming, (this is back when they were still slow) I could wake up my parents and we could all pile into the family station wagon in time to make a getaway.

Ever since then, zombies have been something of a strange obsession for me. I would watch George Romero’s movies by myself. I went to see 28 Days Later and watched the entire movie through my fingers. I even played a zombie in a little short film I did in college, assuming that it would be some kind of cure for my completely irrational fear. It wasn’t. But eventually, I gave up zombie movies. I quit cold turkey. The nightmares they always gave me simply weren’t worth the adrenaline rush anymore

I could never figure out what it was about zombies that made them so scary to me. How did they wriggle into my sub-conscious and grow roots like that, all the way past wolfmen, ghosts, and vampires? In other words, why were those the monsters that really freaked me out? Freddie and Jason never held a candle to those hordes of the undead, even if they were dreadfully unconvincing onscreen. Even when I could see where the makeup lines were, and when bad actors pretending to be the living dead looked right into the camera or smiled…I still got goosebumps. It was always a mystery to me, until this week.

My husband told me about a dream he had, and it lead me to an epiphany. (Yes, the all elusive spouse-induced dream epiphany. Jealous?) Jake and I (that’s the husband) are filmmakers and all-around movie buffs. One morning this week over coffee, he told me that in his dream the night before we were walking a red carpet at a glamorous film premiere. In the distance, a large fence stood tall, holding back hordes of the undead who were screaming, “We’re hungry” over and over again. He related that this movie premiere was taking place as usual, and nobody was paying any attention to the mass of zombies trying to break in and eat everyone.

And then something clicked for me. I suddenly knew why zombies were the monsters that had terrified me my entire life, over and above all the other monsters. Zombie movies hit too close to home. Seems like an unusual diagnosis since they’re not real. But it actually makes good sense.

For starters, I’m not a big fan of apocalyptic films. And zombie movies are always about the end of the world. There’s Lifeforce, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead…the list goes on and on. But each one of them is about a group of survivors trying to stay alive while the world as they know it ends around them. Quite frankly, as a Christian, I hear enough talk about the end of the world. It’s become a topic of conversation as easy for us to discuss with each other as what happened in the last football game we watched.

We sometimes make a game out of trading theories, “Who do you think the antichrist is gonna be?” we ask each other. It’s almost like uttering the password “swordfish” at a speakeasy. If we can talk to someone we just met about the end times, we know they’re in our club. They’re safe, and we’re probably in agreement with them in all our adopted spiritual perceptions.

Entire ministries have sprung up around the fact that the world is ending. Don’t get me wrong, I do think it’s important to be educated about what the Bible says about the end times. I’m not suggesting we simply ignore the prophetic books. That would be just as foolish as fixating on them. But, this topic sometimes gives Christians license to completely disconnect from the present and dwell on all their opinions of biblical prophecy surrounding the end times. Instead of asking God to use us day by day, we obsess on the mysterious and looming end. It’s a comfortable distraction for some.

But the thing that really hits too close to home when it comes to zombies, is the fact that we are living in a world full of the dying and the dead. Yes, there’s the obvious metaphor about people being spiritually dead inside. But there are also people living in our very own cities, and all over the world, who are starving to death. They are hungry, needy, and sick…and it all happens under our own noses while we continue about our lives. And that’s truly terrifying.

I’m not a big proponent of living in guilt. We are born where we’re born, and into whatever financial situation our parents are in, and there’s nothing we can do about that. But I do think sometimes there is that nagging feeling inside of us that tries to tell us to help. And we push it down, because we don’t know how to even begin to help our poor, starving, and dying neighbors. And because they aren’t stumbling around, bloody corpses in our street, we can easily ignore the problem.