TW- Zombie Horror Research

Sunday, 23rd November

Why are we afraid of Zombie Horror?

Nowadays, nearly everybody is obsessed with the 'zombie' sub genre of horror, whether its 'The Walking Dead' or even 'Frankenstein', people have always had a large interest in the undead and these 'zombie' based films have provided a huge increase in box office profits worldwide within the past 10 years. But what is the obsession with watching these movies and TV series'? Well, past studies have shown that when humans are faced with, for example, a robot that slightly resembles the human form and perhaps a doll or a clown (much similar to the human face and form), that humans give much more fear towards the character that resembles the human most.

This effect was discovered in the 1970s in research into whether giving robots human features would make them more reassuring to humans working with them or using them in the home. "A consistent finding of the survey was people's reactions to images where the face was convincingly human but with lifeless eyes or where eerily human eyes appeared in a non-human face," said Mrs Lay, one of the members of the research team. These were perceived to be the most uncanny and disturbing of all the images and explain why characters such as zombies in horror films unsettle people to such great effect.

When people see these characters in zombie horror films, it sets an uneasy reaction to how the human brain reads faces, this is why audiences are then left with something that did not match their expectations, making them focus on this and begin to crave this within movies and TV series very often. This is also why it is particularly effective in psychological horrors and roots this instinctive fear of faces that are almost human, according to a psychologist.

Other important reasons we love the zombie scenario

There are various reasons why people are attracted to the zombie Apocalypse scenario, leading to people thinking they would love the zombie situation but would truthfully probably would not. The first reason of this is because people believe they could survive it, due to the way it has been shown to us by film and TV, and even books for years. The scenario challenges people into wanting to experience it themselves, this has also been down to gaming in recent years, for example 'Dead Rising' and 'Left 4 Dead', and more popularly 'Call of Duty- Zombies'. The human kind has always imagined themselves in diverse situations and always wanted to challenge themselves into being in the particular situation, this includes: the Plague Scenario, The Post Oil Depression/Ecological Wasteland Scenario, the Nuclear War Scenario and the Rapture Scenario. This is triggered by the way zombies are often represented as weak and beatable, apart from exceptions such as 'I Am Legend' (Lawrence, 2007), and humans most often prevail in these games, film and series, giving the impression that the viewer could handle it.

Another important reason why we love the undead scenario is because it puts people in a situation where nobody has any power, there are no rules and you have freedom in your actions. This allows people to imagine themselves in a world where you can do anything (an idealistic world) and the media helps to continue to put people in the situations and increasingly more popular worldwide.

This then leads to people imagining a world where everything is free, they are free to make actions upon people which suits them, more importantly these Zombie Scenarios mainly appeal to the lesser parts of human nature. They satisfy the needs that people do not often like to display, our egotistical, greedy and violent sides. However, they also allow people to imagine their heroic, compassionate, and valiant sides. Basically, they just continue to allow us to imagine how we would personally cope when the earth is given a sudden restart.

The birth and development of Zombie Horror 

The first ever zombie film created was called 'The night of the living dead' (Romero, 1968), right around the time the vampire sub genre was starting to phase, this new, frightening idea of flesh eating undead created a sudden hype across all many medias. This frightened people more than vampires, showing much more explicit and horrific things, again creating a large surge upwards for the devote zombie fan-base.

Personally, I believe that zombies are not very interesting as characters in horror, due to the fact they have little room for improvement, their characteristics can be of different speeds but mostly weak, slow and useless, so what is there that can be interesting about them? Often, people are attracted to the people in the post apocalyptic situations, not the zombies, this is why the audience gets hooked on wanting the characters to survive and make it to the end.

We always very quickly work out each character in zombie horror representations such as the hero, the villain, the survivors and the victims, and due to these everyday people being suddenly placed in this zombie world with no technology or privileges triggers our animalistic tendencies of instinct for survival to take over , immersing fans into another way of life completely.

Here is an interesting point of view which inspired some of my thoughts