After I saw World War Z years ago, I wrote:
What's with all the zombie flicks?
I read E. Michael Jones' Monsters from the Id when it first came out over twenty years ago, and I've always thought its central message didn't get nearly enough Catholic press. The message: horror movies reflect society's fears. Frankenstein reflected early nineteenth-century society's discomfort with electricity; vampirism reflected later nineteenth-century (and early twentieth-century) society's fear of syphilis; and the horror flicks of the late 1960s through 1980s reflected a fear of sexual deviancy.
"Horror is morality written backwards."
"[E]lectricty . . . suggested revolution in the moral and political spheres in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."
"Vampirism and disease are ultimately metaphors for lust, which is a perversion of sexuality into something not life-giving but life-draining."
"The history of syphilis is in so many ways congruent with the history of horror that what needs explanation is why it took so long for the two traditions to coalesce, as they did in Dracula."
"Lust . . . is parasitic, and as such, there exists between it and the blood parasite syphilis a natural affinity. This is expressed through a symbolic figure like the vampire, who infects his host and drains him of vitality--of blood."
So what fear do all these zombie movies reflect? My guess: a fear of the increasing underclass of our population that can't survive without government assistance in the modern world.
Or perhaps a fear of the swelling immigrant class.
John Médaille
Discerning Hearts
