What's with the Zombies? (500 words)

Why our obsession with zombies, I'm asking myself (and you)?

All those zombie movies at the turn of the millenium and ever since. I'll give you as an for instance say The Walking Dead and This Book Is Full of Spiders?

Immediately an (as yet totally unsupported) theory pops up in my head (as they tend to do): What if there’s a correlation between the tropes of a generation and real life? Wouldn’t that be quite something? Worthy of more than blogging, article, no articles, plural, hey perhaps even a thesis? Who else knows about this? This could be absolutely major…

But will the theory stand up? Will it work, i.e. like any good working hypothesis yield more understanding of the world? Let’s see...the Baby-boomers I suppose had their super-heroes, heroes like superman and batman… Then came generation X and they were majorly into vampires and were-wolves…and we, the millenials, are generation Z. Like in Z for Zombies, ha, ha…

But what if that’s really true? I stop laughing and nibble at a hang-nail, while thinking about my newly born theory.

The Boomers were the last generation to have it good. To know the good life. Before the bubbles exploded, the proverbial shit hit the fan and everything went rushing down, everybody screaming as they were riding the roller-coaster-ride from hell into ever deeper depression of the economy…_The last generation to experience a functioning economy, their outlook remains positive. Total ego-maniacs, they happily see themselves as masters of their fate.

Hmm. Not unlike superman. So far so good.

The other defining experience of the generation was the cold war.

Bingo. Total duality, just like a super-hero and his nemesis, super-enemy. So far it works.

What about the less clear generation X?

Well, I think they generally are angry, feel disenfranchised, not in control, while dreaming of being special…

I slap my thigh in excitement. That’s your vampires and were-wolves right there (as well as most of your anime): Dark, brooding, misunderstood anti-heroes, lurking hidden in society, preying on it. But they are loners and in most cases society happily survives, as most people are and remain blissfully unaware of the sociopaths in their midst...

And then generation Z…

My eyes pop as I suddenly realize: we are zombies…though together in this room everybody’s at the same time elsewhere, as they’re all jacked in via ipods or i-phones…

A shudder trickles down my back and lets my hair stand on end as I realize that there are only soulless bodies around me, heaps of flesh…while the soul, the spirit, has gone gallivanting somewhere else...Not for nothing are we fascinated by soulless bodies. And not surprisingly we also constantly obsess about consciousness without a (human) body like in, say, Ex machina…isn’t that simply the experience of online gamsters translated to the silver screen? Are we escaping reality while the game characters cross over to invade our world, e.g. via cosplay? "What do you think?" I want to ask. Or should I ask, "do you think?"