A Zombie prowls the streets before the Village Halloween Parade

I’ve been enjoying the AMC series “The Walking Dead” which a monstrous cut above your usual Zombie Genre.  It has, however, made me wonder why we are so obsessed with apocalyptic entertainment and Zombie Apocalypses specifically.    Sure, there is a long history of Zombie Risings in American entertainment but not until recently has the Zombie become a Pop Culture Fixture.  Zombie Crawls, Zombie Survival Manuals and the History of the Zombie War (an excellent book, examining more about human nature than the subject implies).

If I were to guess, though I am sure there any number of scholarly papers better researched than my pondering, I would posit down times breed apocalyptic entertainment.  During the boom years of the late 90′s the end of the world wasn’t on a particular radar, Y2K excepted.   In a world with terrorism, two protracted wars and economic craptastic shenanigans dominating the national psyche we can look at something like a world ending Zombie plague and say: “Well, it could be worse, there could be the animated corpses of our loved on consuming our living flesh!”

Actually, that is really depressing now that I think on it.  Things are actually so bad we have to pick The Walking Dead to make us feel better about the way things are.