Perhaps it is our films WHICH are the zombies- once creative but NOW simply corpses reanimated by and for profit.

Back to zombies. Americans like to see people- or zombiefied people- getting shot. The fact that the zombies are deemed in/sub-human removes any icky moral feelings. If anything, our entertainment culture has conditioned us to wish that we could all shoot someone- it looks like so much fun on-screen- but most of us still realize we cannot act on this impulse, so zombies will have to do.

“And, even if individual zombies are sometimes easy to kill, that’s still not the point. The point is that the zombies are not individuals, they are more like an aspen grove. They are one horrible roiling organism, all of them at once, in dreadful togetherness.”

because it reminded me of the thought I had at the very end of the premiere of The Walking Dead, wherein Our Hero is trapped in the tank while the zombies swarm around eating his horse — that the zombies resembled nothing so much as an ant colony. You kill a few, but the sheer numbers of them are overwhelming in their massive mindlessness.

But mainly I’m commenting to point out that Chuck Klosterman started his writing career with this kind of hipster presumptuousness (he ran a supplement in our local paper and nobody knew how he got the job) and obviously he’s never learned better. And yet he’s in the New York Times. If there’s little appreciation of true talent in the media, there’s even less punishment for lack of talent.

You should contribute! Or at least come up with a punny paper title, e.g., “Bela Lugosi’s Shed: the Epistemology of Backyard Vampire Storage.”

Also, why can’t you read NYT articles? You don’t need to be a subscriber to have a NYT account, it’s free!

I do think Klosterman gets one important distinction between vampires and zombies right, though: vampires can be eroticized and individualized and zombies cannot. So while the vampire is so great (and so enduring) because, as you say, it makes us think about the relationship between sin and the afterlife AND the consequences of “inappropriate/unnatural” sexual contact, the zombie is enduring because of what it has to say at different historical moments about the sameness between life and death, the power/threat of masses, and non-sexual (AKA capitalist) reproduction–a kind of instantaneous, undying, unconscious, repetitive, non-consensual genesis.