The Unkillable Popularity of Zombies

Shanny talks about Zombies with Kelly J Baker, a religious studies PhD, editor, and award-winning author of five books, including The Zombies are Coming, and Cary Elza, professor Media Studies at UWSP, who teaches courses on screenwriting, film and media analysis, history and genre.

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Our intro music was written by UWSP music student Derek Carden and our logo is by artist and graphic designer Ryan Dreimiller.

Transcript

Cary Elza: 0:00

I absolutely love that kind of fantasy of you yourself alone, rebuilding the world. And then I think about what I would do if I was the last person on Earth. And the answer is just like sleep. I would sleep. I would read some books and then I would give up.

Shanny Luft: 0:29

Welcome to no cure for curiosity, a podcast by and for curious people. I am Shanny Luft, Associate Dean of general education and a professor of religion in America at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. With Halloween approaching, it seems like a good time to talk about zombies. The first modern zombie movie was Night of the Living Dead by George Romero in 1968. Romero has released a half dozen zombie movies since then, and now there's video games and comic books and TV shows and more movies every year. Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, zombie land, WARM BODIES, World War Z, Army of the Dead. Those are just a handful of movies from the last 20 years on television and film. There are zombie stories for every taste, zombie comedies, zombie procedurals, zombie Japanese period dramas, and of course, The Walking Dead, which has been one of the most popular television shows since 2010. Why are zombie stories so relentlessly popular? And so pardon the pun unkillable. I invited two guests, Kelly J. Baker and Cary Elza to wrestle over this question with me. Kelly J. Baker resides in Florida. She is a religious studies PhD and editor and award winning author of articles and five books including The zombies are coming. My second guest is Cary Elza, professor of Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. She teaches courses on screenwriting, film and media analysis, history and genre, the conversation began with Cary Elza, who reflected on COVID and how different this pandemic experience has been from what film and television has prepared us for.

Cary Elza: 2:01

Thank you so much for inviting me back. Again. This is so much fun, and I love talking about zombies. So I really, really appreciate being included here. Kelly, when I was reading your book, you know, there's so much glee associated with preparing for the zombie apocalypse, right? It's fun, it's exciting. It's a you know, it's kind of a fresh start. And the the abolition of all the rules. We're not getting like this is like, this is not, this is not fun. It's just tiring. And, you know, walking through our empty building or empty office building today and just sad,

Kelly Baker: 2:42

Just Right, right.

Shanny Luft: 2:44

This is not the apocalypse we were promised sucks. Right?

Kelly Baker: 2:48

Right. It's not. No, I mean, and I think that kind of the interesting piece of it too is that like continued like, excitement that you find with these like zombie preppers. Or even like students who are thinking through this as a fun game, right, like, tagged your five people that would be on your zombie apocalypse team, you know, and Twitter on Facebook, when you see these sorts of things going around that Yeah, everybody is like, geared up and ready to go. And I'm with the COVID pandemic, it is sad. We've been preparing and preparing and then you're sort of kind of perpetually stuck. I mean, this is one of the things that I keep thinking about what this pandemic is that, um, that it just the unending this of it, I think makes it harder to manage, where at least zombies it's like society, zombies, something new, right? And with this, it's like, oh, no deal, this thing, tedious, awful thing, right, day after day, you know, as I scroll Twitter, and I'm like, let me look at the numbers of ICU beds in Florida today and the number of cases in my county, right? This is not the future that we were promised.

Cary Elza: 3:52

No,

Kelly Baker: 3:53

not at all.

Cary Elza: 3:54

It doesn't feel like a future either. It's not we haven't wiped things away to have a clean slate. And anyway, all the same problems are really very much still there. So yeah.

Shanny Luft: 4:05

And that was really I think my first question is why does the zombie apocalypse seem like fun? Right? What does it I mean, this is a genre that's been around for decades. Clearly, this genre and specifically this monster has staying power, in a way I don't think is comparable to other monsters. I feel like I'm a big fan of horror movies. There are certain genres of monsters that come and go right devil movies had a moment in the 60s and 70s. Vampires. You can't get enough of them in TV and film after about five, seven years. We're done with vampires with zombies. I feel like it's been 20 years. I've been walking dead has been on for 10 years. And when the show came on, I thought zombies were already passe. Yeah, this it has sticking power in a way that I don't know any other monster movie monster has.

Kelly Baker: 4:56

I mean, I just am always impressed at how malleable zombies are. Right, like they just can stand in for anything, right? Like they absolutely work for consumerism, for terrorism, for concerns about epidemics, environmental disasters, like they just work in this way for all kinds of things. And so people can use them often in combinations of those ideas to like, they appear in pop culture, and I keep waiting for them to end. Like I keep having these moments where I'm like, we just can't keep going on with it. And I just knew that when Disney had a zombies movie, which I've watched 30 times with my tween, I was like, oh, like Disney has zombies like we're clearly done.

Shanny Luft: 5:37

What's the what's the Disney zombie?

Kelly Baker: 5:39

Oh, gosh, it's Disney's zombies. It's a musical. It's cheerleaders. It's zombie.

Cary Elza: 5:44

Oh, I know of this one. But I haven't seen it yet.

Kelly Baker: 5:48

It has so many ear worms that I'm always like, parents beware, you're going to be thinking the song about a girl on a zombie for like years to come. And now 33 My husband like that, it's you that I was like, oh, did they can use zombies like we're done? Right? Like they reached like

Shanny Luft: 6:03

Peak zombie.

Cary Elza: 6:04

That's the nail in the coffin.

Kelly Baker: 6:05

But it's not the case. Like it's still they still work and you still find people using them. And you know, I just watched army of the dead on Netflix. And I thought like, it's another zombie movie. What can it do? And then I was like, oh, no, it's really good.

Cary Elza: 6:19

Lots of stuff. Yeah.

Kelly Baker: 6:20

Like, there's lots of stuff going on here. And I'm super fascinated, and I can't wait to write about it. And then I was like, oh, no, I'm never done with zombies. It's a perpetual thing. I'm kind of like the monster is perpetual. Like it is just kind of strange to me. And folks try all the time to get me to predict like the end. And I'm just like, I don't know if there is one.

Cary Elza: 6:41

Yeah, I so I teach another class on vampires. Oh, one of the other reasons that I really wanted to talk to you, Kelly is because I know you teach an apocalypse class. And I also teach an apocalypse class.

Kelly Baker: 6:51

That's awesome.

Cary Elza: 6:51

Yeah. So it's apocalypse in film and television. So it's specifically from the media studies angle, rather than the religious studies angle, do I think that we cover a lot of the same topics? And so I do zombies in that class. So I'm with you on the idea of the metaphor, right. Zombies can be anything, any kind of mass of people who aren't thinking for themselves. And so I'm not going to I'm going to say nothing. But I think that we can think of a lot of great metaphors for today about masses of people who are letting other people guide their thoughts. And I don't think that that concept, the kind of autonomous mass without, you know, freewill is going to go away anytime soon. Whereas the vampire, with whom I've been in love, for many years, you know, the vampire is about repressed sexuality. The Vampire is about the dark side, if humanity but if you kind of lighten it up too much, if you make it sparkle, if you if you define it in all of these different ways that the vampire has been defanged, loses its own for a while. So I do believe that the vampire will come back. But But it needs it needs to start a new cycle,

Shanny Luft: 8:03

right?

Cary Elza: 8:03

The zombie doesn't have that problem. It's an infinitely malleable metaphor, like you said,

Shanny Luft: 8:08

zombies might be particularly resonant for the last 20 years, because of the two or three major social life, they tap into two or three specific kinds of fears. There's kind of a global warming, climate change kind of end of the world fear, right? What do we happen when, you know, we run out of certain kinds of food or parts of the globe become uninhabitable. And then of course, viruses, those two things seem to be two of the most resonant fears of the moment. And zombies, I think just seem really perfect for that.

Cary Elza: 8:38

It also taps into our kind of need to think about global crises in terms of masses of people, if that makes any sense. You know, we have a hard time getting thinking things specifically, we can hear these human interest stories of, you know, people being affected by you know, major environmental catastrophes, you know, war, all of these things. We have all of this information coming at us all the time. And we just, we kind of get numb. And so it's I think that we start thinking in terms of masses of people, too. And I think that the zombie kind of taps into that. I don't know, I think it's a very human thing to do. But I think the zombie expresses that too maybe

Shanny Luft: 9:17

taps into it in a really specific way. Kelly, recently, I saw Zack Snyder's army of the dead part of the plot was the government built a giant wall around Las Vegas, and basically, the zombies just stayed in there. They kind of created like a zombie culture inside of that wall. And after I saw that movie, it suddenly struck me, there are lots of zombie stories about walls. George Romero's 2005. Film Land of the Dead is almost the same exact plot. It's about the government building a wall to protect humans from zombies, World War Z, there's a giant wall around Israel designed to protect zombies in that show The Walking Dead, they have to build a wall every time they move.

Kelly Baker: 9:55

Right. Right.

Shanny Luft: 9:56

So I was really interested in your thoughts about that because the last 20 years of zombie story seems to have prepped Americans for thinking about how to keep out hordes. And then suddenly, that became central to presidential politics.

Kelly Baker: 10:10

I didn't decide to take that on. But I think it's such a good point about the way over the last 20 years, so much of American politics in particular has been about creating an other and like having this idea of an axis of evil, right, that then becomes hordes of refugees or immigrants or these sorts of things, right, and like what we can do to protect ourselves from this and some kind of way. And so I definitely think it is something we should pay attention to the very us versus them nature of these zombie stories. And I think the Walking Dead does this, especially in the earlier seasons remarkably well. So if you're a part of this group, then like we have your back, anybody out fair game in some sort of way, and will handle you differently. And I think that that's so baked in to the way Romero imagined zombies, you know, like, that was like my favorite quote by him, right? It's what we're most afraid of is the neighbors, the people that we have to deal with here, you know, and so yeah, like, zombies are scary, but like, really, what we have to worry about are other people. And I think with this wall impulse, you see that again, and again, we're not necessarily afraid of the neighbors, but we are afraid of all these other people that we've marked as different from us or threatening or that our politicians have done a really good job of as marking as other threatening dangerous. And so yeah, I think it is kind of interesting that that became such a central point of the Trump administration, right, like it's we're just going to wall ourselves in and, and I also think of all the people that are like building bunkers, were the end of the world to right, who were like walling themselves in and like covering it, right, and trying to create these spaces where they don't have to worry about all these other people. And they can just protect the people that they want that I would also use that as an extension of what you're talking about as well.

Cary Elza: 12:03

This is making me think of this kind of distinction that we see between recent representations of walls, and the sort of stuff that we see in like the 1950s and 1960s, about bunkers, that it's your responsibility as a citizen to create a bunker for yourself and in your family to create a fort that that nobody can penetrate. But it's just for you, right, it's your individual responsibility. And yet we fin seeing these walls of communities, but there is something different, right, because we you know, there's the wall and warm bodies, there's the wall in Zombieland, too. So there's these attempts to create these kinds of utopias, but their communities. So the wall is, is something that a group of people do together now, instead of it's just your responsibility.

Shanny Luft: 12:54

Yet the wall over and over again and these zombie movies represents saving civilization, and also demarcating civilize from uncivilized and healthy from diseased Americans are primed to think walls are how you save a culture. They're how you keep your people alive, your community alive. And So lo and behold, that idea seems persuasive.

Cary Elza: 13:16

They're how you maintain the status quo. So there's, it's how you maintained vestiges of the old world, right? An individual alone can't do it. It's only a group of like minded people who can maintain the old order, for better or worse,

Kelly Baker: 13:32

You know, I think about the season of The Walking Dead, where they find the suburban community behind the wall, you know, and like, there's a really amazing thing that always stuck with me is like, you know, they're clean, they have houses, they have easy access to food, you know, one of the like, suburbanites is like, Oh, I was really deeply worried that you wouldn't like the food. You know, one of the survivors is like, this is what you people worry about. So that like the distinction between, you know, the people that are like fighting for survival, versus the people that have just created this enclave where they're very safe and very comfortable, and everyone else is not. And you find this in Romero movies to the people that are able to like, who are wealthy right and can kind of live in an apartment building and be safe while everyone else scavenged is and I think it's so important to that it reflects communities that we inhabit, in our day to day lives to the people that can afford to live behind the gate or can afford to live in the neighborhoods that have resources versus the people that don't. And the pandemic right now is really showing that to us. That was there but now is hyper visible, and I think is really important as well. One of the things that I kept thinking about during this pandemic is we knew there was a structural inequity, we knew this kind of stuff was happening, but like now because of who has access to the vaccine, right, who can be protected who has to go to work every day and doesn't have the privilege of staying at home. You see -- you can really see this kind of stuff playing out

Cary Elza: 15:00

You're a lot higher up on Maslow -- Maslow's hierarchy.

Kelly Baker: 15:05

Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah.

Shanny Luft: 15:07

The other thing about walls in zombie movies is that, and this is a lesson, I guess, the public in general has not learned or a lot of people have not learned is, while some zombie movies never work, right, the point of the wall is it always gets torn down, there's always a crack in zombie movies, the thesis seems to be it is impossible to keep this wall maintained, there's always going to be a crack, either from inside or from outside, something's going to go wrong. And in every one of those, that this is why in The Walking Dead every season, they have to find a new community is their wall breaks down. And so they have to find a new civilization somewhere.

Cary Elza: 15:44

And the problem is never structural. The problem is people. Like teenagers sneaking out people not paying attention when they're supposed to be looking out. It's always people, people are the problem. That's I mean, of course, that's Romero's big point.

Kelly Baker: 15:59

Well, and it's interesting, me too, because I've read a number of really interesting zombie short fiction that kind of thinks through this too. And there's a great story about teenagers rebelling by climbing the fence, right, like so the idea is that everybody's supposed to be safe. So what are teenagers going to do? Well, they're going to go out and get bitten by zombies to rebel, like having this kind of perfect, and a lot of ways like it's a great short story. But this idea that, like you said, it's not so much that the problem is those were keeping out, right? It's like we've contained everybody and in the system just can't exist like this, because people are contradictory and messy, and do all these things and don't think good consequences. And that's what I think is intriguing about grasping it to the current political situation, right. And this sort of discussion with the Trump administration about a wall, as if that fixes everything, like you just brick it up, and then you don't worry about anything anymore. And it's like, oh, no, it has to be maintained, right? There are always things that can go wrong. Like, it's never as easy as you think, separate people from people and all these crises and problems, it just it doesn't work.

Shanny Luft: 17:01

What does zombie movies teach us about? Who doesn't survive? Like, what are the qualities of a person that basically gets them killed off?

Cary Elza: 17:10

Don't be an asshole.

Kelly Baker: 17:11

Yeah, I think that is definitely one I would tell students to to not be a feminist. You're this strong woman figure who like refuses to go back to these traditional gender norms, you can almost guarantee it, you're just going like, it doesn't take long. I think the genre still is entrenched in the sort of racist stereotypes of Hollywood too. And that people of color do not do well, in these environments.

Cary Elza: 17:36

From the jump, right? I mean, just right, from the jobs end of night of living dead, we established that trope.

Kelly Baker: 17:42

Yeah, and and that just very much continues through and, and I talked about this in the book, and how the walking dead in particular, and some of the earlier seasons, have these really gruesome deaths for black characters, right, like some of the most painful, awful deaths to watch are these black characters. And how problematic it is that that black pain is okay to be spectacle, but a lot of the other white characters get these off screen or like funeral esque kind of death. And that that, of course, is still a problem genre, and is very much there. But yeah, you see that kind of thing happen, as Carrie said, you know, the people that deserve it. And I thought this while I was watching Army of the Dead, there was one particular character that I was like, oh, yeah, you're going down, and I'm ready for it. vincible enough watcher to be like, okay, yeah, let's see what happens to this person. And that that is baked into it in some sort of way.

Shanny Luft: 18:38

The issue of gender roles in zombie films, I wanted to ask you both about that.

Cary Elza: 18:42

I was just gonna say it seems to be a method of survival, not just in zombie films, but in a lot of post apocalyptic films for women to take on these traditional roles. And I mean, you can think of it as a strategy. I mean, you know, when you see these ladies doing laundry and Walking Dead, I mean, they have found a niche a place and then you community, and it might have been the one that they chose before, but it becomes a strategy for survival. So I think that says a lot about cling to the status quo and clinging to community and nostalgia for earlier modes, gender and--

Shanny Luft: 19:19

right. And that, that goes back to the earlier question I was asking about the popularity of of zombies is because in almost every zombie story, there is a clear demarcation of gender roles, right? Men become hunters, and defenders, they're, you know, if you can't shoot a gun or a crossbow, you're not useful in this society as a man. And women have the role of taking care of children of cleaning. You know, they're, they're the gatherers that happens over and over again in zombie stories. And that, I guess, is part of the appeal for some people to imagine this kind of fantasy about returning to a simpler time when there were two genders and they both had you know separate spheres?

Kelly Baker: 20:02

Yeah. And it all made sense, right? I mean, so I think part of the nostalgia piece of this is it's like, can we get back to a moment where women were women and men were men and gender is binary, right? And men were in charge. And women are support, right? So there is something about the kind of instantiation of like, traditional patriarchy that I think really appeals to people about this, that they're like, oh, like, this does make sense. Like, we missed this. And so yeah, so I think it, it's interesting about what characters have to be off, right? In these scenarios, because they don't fit so neatly into gender divides, or they don't, or their, or their sexuality doesn't fit either, right? Because a lot of these are just adamantly heterosexual

Cary Elza: 20:47

gotta repopulate. Right?

Kelly Baker: 20:49

You do, right? And so anything else just doesn't work.

Cary Elza: 20:54

But and this is the the other reason that the zombie metaphor can just live on forever and ever, never, because humans are going to eff it up in a zillion different ways. Like, we're never going to get done. It's, yeah, it's, it's infinite. And our foibles are failures.

Kelly Baker: 21:11

And I think that that's the thing that is always most interesting to me about these apocalyptic narratives in general is that they get rid of complexity and ambiguity like that, it just makes things make sense. But there's something really appealing about life being simplified, and us having really clear cut places for everything to go to the categories are neat, and that they're not like all slammed together and messy, that life is inherently less complicated, when what you have to figure out is what you're going to eat. There's a way in which the apocalypse is like the easy button.

Cary Elza: 21:49

I was just gonna say, in the early days of the pandemic, I wanted to read nothing but Laura Ingalls Wilder, I just, I like went through the whole thing. And I know that those are super problematic books, believe me, I know. But it's just something about just worrying about putting your crops in making it through the long winter. That sort of stuff was deeply appealing to me at the time, again, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, it's just like knocking us back down to the bottom, like, one step at a time. It's okay, one step at a time. Do you have food on the table? And you know, as we get higher up in that hierarchy, life gets so hard, right? Can I self actualized? Absolutely not. But you know, I'm supposed to be trying, I guess it but it's like, the lower we get, the more things make sense, like a biological level, you know,

Shanny Luft: 22:45

that's something this conversation is helping me see is that the zombie apocalypse, the world that comes after is not a fantasy about a future. It's a fantasy about a past, because the zombie apocalypse is really returning to an agrarian society. It is a kind of fantasy world of farming, where the men are farmers, and the women are, you know, raising children is the appeal of that is the simplicity.

Kelly Baker: 23:06

I always have this idea that zombie apocalypse is or westerns, there's something about them that just kind of fit with the genre of the Western, the men are men and they have done and they can challenge each other, right? There's all this space and all these sorts of things, right? That you just live your life out in the wild. So you know, you're not concerned with like, the 500 email you've received from something, you know, like, because like you because there's no electricity and you know, this is not something that you're dealing with. And so you can see how that fantasy work.

Cary Elza: 23:42

Kelly, your point about this kind of being the new frontier and a new opportunity to colonize space. It's so important, I think, and it's, that's one of the reasons it's so resonant It's because when you have all of this space that's taken up by other people and then you all of a sudden get the chance to treat those other people as non people right and we have a new frontier, you have the new opportunity to homestead to change your life for the better and I think if that shot if like Rick Grimes riding his horse down the middle of Italy, you know down Peachtree Street, Atlanta, and I think about just how close all of the post apocalyptic movies not just the zombie movie but most of these apocalyptic movies Mad Max Fury Road, Western right are to that basic fantasy that we have of establishing civilization in the midst of wilderness. I think that is such a good point.

Kelly Baker: 24:44

I'm always fascinated by these post apocalyptic movies with the ruins the ruins of civilization, you know, I Am Legend. We are not going to argue about whether it's a vampire zombie movie, whatever. But like but the you know, there's the scenes where like, Will Smith is standing in the city. And like deer are galloping near him. Because nature has overtaken things. And it's so different. And so it's always really fascinating for me to see how all of a sudden we just lose all these people. They're like they're just gone. And the potential and possibility is there in a way that it might not have been

Shanny Luft: 25:19

28 Days opens with the scenes of this guy walking through London, right, and it's completely vacant. And those those images, like the images of Atlanta, are really remarkable. He spends a couple of minutes just walking around the city. And what I hadn't realized while I was watching it, but Kelly, you're helping me think about his zombie movies with regard to cities seem to solve what they see as the problem of a city. The problem is all those damn people,

Kelly Baker: 25:49

right? Right.

Shanny Luft: 25:50

cities seem better than zombie movies. Because you can go anywhere and do anything and you've got like this, you've got this great world in front of you. I'm putting all this in quotes. Obviously, this is not my actual opinion. But it does seem to be like the an argument that zombie films make, it certainly changes people's relationship with it in a way that's not nice, all together negative. Because those shots of abandoned buildings are not always horrific, right? They're They look like promise, right? Or possibility or something like that.

Cary Elza: 26:22

This is my favorite sub genre of the post apocalyptic movie. So I absolutely love that kind of fantasy of You, yourself alone, rebuilding the world. And then I think about what I would do if I was the last person on Earth. And the answer is just like, sleep. I would sleep, I would read some books. And then I would give up.

Kelly Baker: 26:50

I think there's something to be said to you about the way in which folks don't understand that people find the apocalypse appealing because it's also about meaning making. So it's saying that there's something beyond like, these individual contradictory lives, that we're involved with, that there's something bigger than us, the world is going to end. So how do we order our lives? How do we understand the information that we're processing? I think that's a really fascinating thing. And I think it's even more fascinating in a moment of extreme climate change, where we're actually looking at like, Is this the end of the planet as we know it? And I think that's a harder thing. To wrap your head around than zombies.

Cary Elza: 27:34

Yeah,

Kelly Baker: 27:34

zombies, like we have a plan, we have a solution, we can make it through oceans becoming so hot that things die and our planet can't work the way it's supposed to. That potential of an end is much harder for us to like, think through and hold on to. And I'm not sure we can actually hold on to it on a day to day and be able to get out of bed in the morning.

Cary Elza: 27:58

It's just really nice. When our bad guys have a face. Yeah, yeah. Tangible. And we know who the good guys are. And the bad guys are and you can shoot the bad guys. That's a lot easier than dealing with climate change.

Kelly Baker: 28:14

Yeah, the the solution feel you can hold on to them.

Shanny Luft: 28:18

Right. And the challenge can be overcome by a handful of smart individuals who have almost no tools but a gun.

Cary Elza: 28:26

They don't even have to be that smart.

Shanny Luft: 28:29

People have nothing but a gun. Yeah. Kelly Baker is a religious studies PhD and award winning author. She's written five books, including The zombies are coming, which is what we've been talking about today. And Carrie Elza, you're a professor of Film and Media Studies here at UWSP. It has been so much fun to talk to you about zombies. Thank you so much for the conversation.

Kelly Baker: 28:53

Thank you.

Shanny Luft: 28:55

I hope you enjoyed this episode of no cure for curiosity. Our intro music was written by UWSP music student Derek Cardin, and our logo is by artist and graphic designer Ryan, Dreimiller. I'll see you in two weeks with a new episode.

Gretel Stock: 29:09

This podcast is brought to you by University College at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Our mission is to provide coordinated, intentional, and inclusive services and opportunities through our core values of connecting, supporting, collaborating, and engaging. Discover your purpose and visit UW-Stevens Point at www.uwsp.edu.