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Afraid of zombies? Heard about the coming zombie apocalypse? Have you watched the TV show The Walking Dead or ever seen a movie about Zombies (perhaps Zombieland or Dawn of the Dead)?

What is so fascinating about the undead? Why do many of us get a strange pleasure out of seeing a zombie get killed? In this episode I explore that strange part of ourselves which seems to enjoy watching the undead get really dead.

6 Reasons Why We Want To Kill Zombies

• Freud: we all have an innate aggressive drive. Killing zombies allows for that instinct to express itself. Simple as that.
• Evolution: We all seem to be fascinated with dead things – dead bugs, car accidents by the side of the road, dead animals, etc., and when you hear about someone dying you always want to know why and – admit it – you wonder a bit if that’s something that might happen to you. From an evolutionary perspective one might suggest that as we evolved, those of us who weren’t curious about why other creatures died probably didn’t survive. Those who were fascinated by dead things learned how to avoid being dead. Thus, curiosity about dead things is probably built right into us.
• Social Roles: Every day we restrain ourselves from expressing our true emotions. Perhaps our desire to kill zombies is an expression of our desire to break out of our roles for just a short while, to express feelings – aggressive ones – that we normally must keep inside. Clint Eastwood once said that the reason why people like his films is because he says things to people and he does things that we all wish we could, but we don’t because we can’t – because there are laws and social rules we must follow that he doesn’t.

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• Just World Belief and Tolerance for Ambiguity (or the lack thereof): the existence of the undead make everything easy: they are clearly the “bad guys”. There’s nothing complicated here – nothing grey. The undead deserve to die and killing them really isn’t wrong because they’re dead anyway.


• Fear of Scientific progression: (ex: nuclear bombs, Godzilla, etc.):

• Film-goers have always loved a good scare, and a shambling collection of neuron-challenged corpses make a pretty terrifying story. And if my zombie-obsessed 14-year-old son is a representative sample, blowing the undead away with heavy weaponry has a solid adolescent demographic appeal. But there’s no question, at least in my mind, that zombies (and Godzilla) are an allegorical representation of our fear that science and the technologies it spawn will lead to our destruction. – James Turner, Forbes Magazine article

• Terror Management: zombies are reminders of our own mortality which we don’t want to be reminded of, so we kill them in a symbolic way of overcoming death.
• From Jeff Greenberg, researcher on Terror Management Theory:
  

  People are fascinated by phenomena such as ESP, psychokinesis, communicating with the dead, ghosts, vampires, and zombies in part because [they] allow for the possibility of some essence or aspect of us surviving beyond death. One could speculate that these forms of the supernatural are growing in popularity, along with their positive counterparts, superheroes, because of lessened faith in traditional religious conceptions of the supernatural…

  Zombies also deny the finality of death – here are these beings who are functioning after they have died. It’s not a pretty afterlife, but if this is possible, better forms may also be out there.

  …because zombies are “already dead” we can be guilt free and gleefully watch them killed in every way possible no matter how grisly, vicariously aggressing against this substitute source of our fears with complete abandon.”

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