Upstate zombie fans can't get enough of the living dead
They come in swarms.
With bloody, pale heads cocked to one side and arms extended limply, they slowly stagger like drunkards toward blood.
They hiss. They groan. When they reach their defenseless, living targets, many watching the intense scene developing on screen are likely to cover their eyes or cringe.
Zombies are scary on a couple of different levels.
"Obviously, no one wants to get eaten by a zombie," said Dr. Raymond Merlock, professor of film and journalism at USC Upstate. "But one of the things that scares us the most about zombies is that they cause us to lose ourselves. If I'm taken over by a (zombie), I'm not going to be me anymore."
And zombies affect those we love, causing us to put our own protection above our emotions.
"What do you do about your loved ones who are zombies now? You still want to protect them, but you have to realize they aren't the same person anymore."
Christina Tuten, an 18-year-old zombie fan and student at Converse College, agrees.
"It scares people because it's not just aliens coming down and taking over the world. It is our friends and neighbors being taken over by an unknown disease that makes them want to kill us," she said.
Despite the fear zombies evoke, their consistent appearance in television shows and movies implies that we just can't get enough of them.
We have a certain fascination with the living dead.
Caitlin Jones, 24, from Boiling Springs, is a fan of zombie movies and shows, such as "28 Days Later" and the AMC television show "The Walking Dead." She said the appeal of zombie flicks lies in the fact that it puts the undead into a world with the living.
"It makes you wonder how regular people would handle a complete breakdown of society and makes you think ‘What would I do?' " she said. "We have a clear idea of what it means to be civilized. Zombies kind of toss that out the window because it's still ‘us,' but an us that has now transformed into a ‘them.' "
Dillan Trojan, a freshman at Wofford College, said he loves the genre because it makes you think about the future of society.
"It could be the next super-plague," he said. "A good zombie movie should make the apocalypse seem like it could happen. Make the setting similar to one someone would encounter on a normal day. Give the people real-world obstacles. Have some stupid characters that make mistakes. Kill off characters that viewers would think could live. In a world of zombies, you never know what's going to happen."
Merlock, who cites his favorite zombie movies as the black-and-white "Night of the Living Dead" and the comedy "Shaun of the Dead," said that while zombie movies have always been popular —since the 1940s — they might have hit a resurgence after 9/11 and the recession.
Dr. Peter Caster, film professor at USC Upstate, said that zombie movies, historically, tend to focus on what society fears the most.
"For several generations, from the 1950s through the end of the 1980s, the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union was the paramount concern. And that really dominated our culture's imagination of how the world would end," he said. "In the 1990s and into the 21st century, what became the primary concern was an environmental apocalypse, such as global warming. Another one of the United States' greatest fear has to do with viruses, for a lot of reasons."
Films like "28 Days Later," "The Stand" and "I Am Legend" merge together this fear of viruses and the fear of zombies, Caster said.
Glenn Brent, lecturer and artist-in-residence at Emory University, who formerly taught at Converse College, said that zombies aren't the only aspect of a zombie movie that make them so fascinating.
"We love zombie stories because they are not about zombies: They are about people. The people struggling to survive while hopelessly outnumbered and relentlessly pursued."
~goupstate.com
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