Looks like the day of the dead dawns ever closer

MY WIFE considers one of my darker eccentricities to be my collection of zombie movies. These are carefully segregated from the rest of the family DVD collection lest some visitor think my viewing habits are normal. I have tried explaining that my fascination with the walking dead and their cannibalistic instincts is merely a way of being in touch with the contemporary cultural zeitgeist, but my wife is having none of it.

On Tuesday, my sister and I were in Glasgow for the day so – naturally – we went to see the film set for Brad Pitt’s zombie film, World War Z (pronounced with an American ‘zee’). Actually, my sister went on the chance of meeting and running off with Brad. I went to meet zombies in George Square.

All this is by way of asking why the walking dead have suddenly become such a cultural force? This week, the media were giving almost as much attention to Brad and his zombies as to the Edinburgh Festival. Why does it make financial sense to turn Glasgow into a zombie-infested facsimile of Philadelphia?

As well as movies, we’ve just had a zombie mini-series on television: The Walking Dead. Zombies are also a recognised literary genre. You mean you haven’t read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, in which the Bennet sisters defend their country cottage from early 19th century walking dead, and Elizabeth falls in love with the arrogant, zombie-hunter Darcy? The book has sold more than 700,000 copies and went to No3 in the New York Times bestseller list in 2009.

The word zombie comes from Haitian Creole and originally referred to the West African Voodoo cult in which, supposedly, a human soul could be captured and kept in a bottle. More prosaically, a zombie is someone drugged into a state of submission by a Haitian witchdoctor, though the evidence for this is hotly contested.

However, the idea of civilisation collapsing as a result of the mass of the population being turned into flesh-eating undead, while a tiny band of survivors battles to preserve the human race, is an entirely new and entirely Western innovation. This contemporary zombie apocalypse was the brainchild of the American-Cuban-Lithuanian film director, George Romero, whose 1968 movie, Night of the Living Dead, started the cult. He made it for only $114,000. It was shot in black and white for economy and because sticky chocolate sauce could be used for blood.

That date 1968 should give us a cultural clue as to why Romero’s appallingly amateurish zombie movie initiated a cultural revolution. America was mired in the Vietnam War. Western youth were in revolt from San Francisco to Paris. The post-war economic boom was about to crash. For the first time since 1945, Western confidence was dented. The idea of capitalism imploding was suddenly a possibility. The day of the apocalypse had arrived.

I don’t want to be ridiculously simplistic and elevate daft (if hugely enjoyable) zombie movies into a significant cultural signpost. Yet I can’t help thinking there is a link between the West’s growing uncertainty about its values and survival, and the rise of the zombie apocalypse in popular culture.

Of course, our fascination with the apocalyptic goes back a long way. The Babylonian and Biblical tale of God wiping out sinful mankind in a universal flood dates from around 2000 BC. But tales of a Great Flood could represent a distilled folk memory of a natural event. Our modern fixation with the collapse of civilisation says more about how we fear the future. The decline of organised religion in the West, coupled with the rise of mass prosperity in the 20th century, created this new angst. Everyone now has something to lose if the system collapses, yet there is no comforting Providence to set things right.

Romero’s Zombies went out of fashion in the 1980s when the economy recovered. But the zombie apocalypse made an unexpected returned with the new Millennium. At first, this was considered nothing more than cheap exploitation of an exhausted genre. Then came Credit Crunch. Four years on, the global economy is on the brink of a double dip recession, America has seen its credit status downgraded, and the euro is tottering. The zombies are again at the door.

What is the enduring appeal of the zombie film? We all like to be frightened – if only in the safety of our living room or the multiplex. The zombie apocalypse also appeals to the young (and to ageing anarchists like myself) because it posits a world where bureaucracy and cultural taboos have been banished. I can easily imagine wandering around deserted Glasgow with Brad and any stray blondes we manage to save. Yet there is a dark side to the zombie culture fest: subliminally, it crystallises our fears about the fragility of our society. .

The father of modern apocalyptic literature was HG Wells, whose 1898 novel War of the Worlds imagined a Martian invasion of a complacent Victorian Britain. The modern zombie apocalypse has a different message from Wells, who assumed the human race would not only survive the end of civilisation but build a better, more rational society thereafter. Zombie movies, from Romero’s original, through the stylish 28 Weeks Later, to the latest World War Z, do not have a happy ending. The zombies are never defeated because they cannot die.

In one famous zombie film, Dawn of the Dead, the human survivors barricade themselves into a giant shopping mall and enjoy a last bout of capitalist consumption before – inevitably – the zombie hoards break in. The metaphor is all too obvious. Enjoy it while you can, because the good times won’t last. If that’s what ordinary folk are thinking, our politicians – with all their pious incantations about society – have really lost the plot.

PS: The best way to deal with a zombie is a clear shot to the head, or to decapitate them… and remember not to look for the cat in a dark room.