(By Katy Waldman, New Yorker, 9 August 2025)
It’s not alive, but it’s not dead, either. It consumes a
vast amount of resources. It’s mindless: what presents as its will is really a
drift toward the mean, toward the unconsciousness of crowds. It will devour
you, but don’t take it personally. Or maybe do. You profit-drunk, hubris-crazed
humans probably brought this on yourselves.
By “it,” I naturally mean the zombie horde. 2025 has been a
bacchanalia of zombies. “28 Years Later,” Danny Boyle’s second sequel to “28 Days
Later,” ravaged box-office expectations for its opening weekend in June and
went on to gross more than a hundred and forty million dollars globally. In the
spring, a new season of the spinoff series “The Walking Dead: Dead City”
premièred, and “The Last of Us” occupied HBO Max’s prime Sunday slot,
reminding viewers that even megastar Pedro Pascal isn’t above a zombie-hosing
gig. Also willing to parley with the undead: Seth Rogen, who brought in the
aughts-era picador Johnny Knoxville for a zombie-themed episode of his comedy “The Studio.” Rogen’s character, a beleaguered Hollywood
executive, is producing a film called “Duhpocalypse,” which Knoxville is
headlining and which features a zombie plague spread via explosive diarrhea.
This is just the mainstream stuff. For real heads, the first six months of the
year also have yielded a Korean romantic drama series, “Newtopia”; a dark
comedy, “Zombie Repellant”; and a bleak New Zealand indie, “Forgive Us All.”
As a symbol, zombies are malleable; you can make them stand
for any variety of fear. Pose them one way and they reveal a post-covid apprehension
about disease and infection. Put on your maga hat and they evoke
invading swarms of immigrants. As with other supernatural adversaries, they are
especially good at channelling anxieties about the hazy line between self and
other. A typical zombie text starts from the premise that civilization has
crumbled and that survivors are desperate; often, the remnants of the social
order have militarized. There’s a stock scene—it occurs over and over in the
“28 Days Later” franchise—in which a character turns on their infected loved
one, and the question of who our heroes have become flares as urgently as the
question of what they’re fighting. Because lose-lose situations are so endemic
to the genre, a hint of relief can sometimes accompany the prospect of
surrender to the putrefying mob. Zombiehood offers self-loss, the end of moral
choice. In an era of globalization and of populism, zombies provide a vivid
metaphor for being swept away—by a political movement, or by historical forces
beyond your comprehension.
Some have argued that zombies represent something more
mundane. In 2010, when “The Walking Dead” first came out, Chuck
Klosterman suggested that zombie plots are dependably agreeable
because they illustrate how “day-to-day existence feels.” Dispatching a zombie
is not difficult, he pointed out, but it is draining, especially since you have
to do it again and again. (“Blast one in the brain from point-blank range . . .
That’s Step 1. Step 2 is doing the same thing to the next zombie that takes its
place.”) Per Klosterman, killing zombies, like replying to e-mails, is an
enervating time suck, and the allure of zombie stories is that they evoke the
tedium of contemporary life, which is, increasingly, the tedium of scrolling
endlessly on your phone.
Zombies and scrolling—yes. The two go together: the
unhurried, inevitable motion that keeps placing new posts in front of your
eyeballs, and the bodies inching forward as if by the turning of a crank. The
impassive march of content and the shuffling tread of death. There’s something
reassuring, if also terrible, about the inexhaustibility of zombies, and of
content, and of zombie content. You can outrun it but you can never run out of
it. When zombies are doing their jobs, they are darkly mirroring humans, and
their continuity becomes a comfort. In “Zone One,” a dystopian novel by Colson Whitehead, the
protagonist, Mark Spitz, is introduced as a sweeper of abandoned buildings in
zombie-infested New York City. The mostly dull work reminds Mark of his own
resilience. “Everything was so boring that this could not be the first time
he’d experienced it,” Whitehead writes. “A cheerful thought, in its way, given
the catastrophe. We’ll be back.”
Zombies are the dumbest monsters. Despite their ineloquence,
though, I’ve started to view them as messengers, warning of a societal
inability to tolerate loss. The audience for 2025’s reel of zombie apocalypses
lives in a world shaped, in part, by Americans’ refusal to accept an aging Joe
Biden’s ineligibility for President. It’s a world in which
holograms of dead or absent stars, from Whitney Houston to Roy Orbison to the
seventies-era members of ABBA, sell out concert venues. The cannibalization of I.P. in
endless sequels and reboots is a phenomenon that has itself been rehashed ad
nauseam in essays like this one. In June, the Times magazine
reported on the burgeoning field of grief tech—the companies racing to develop
digital representations of the dead which bereaved friends and family members
can interact with. These simulacra can take the form of “griefbots” trained on
the speech and writing of the deceased. Some have video components, evoking “The Shrouds,” the recent David Cronenberg film, in which
new technology affords people live feeds of their loved ones decomposing
underground. As the journalist Cody Delistraty wrote, “Today’s A.I.-driven
afterlife offers . . . an ongoing, interactive discussion with the dead that
prevents or delays a genuine reckoning with loss.”
Online, there is already an insatiable urge to memorialize.
Photographs—memories entombed and then sent flying around the web—saturate our
digital lives. As with A.I., the technology seems to be accelerating us toward
our own obsolescence. In “The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media,” the
critic Nathan Jurgenson writes that an intensifying drive to “embalm”
experience on apps such as Instagram “kills what it attempts to save out of a
fear of losing it.” When Susan Sontag wrote that “all photographs are memento
mori,” she meant it literally, in some cases: an early function of photography
was to preserve the likenesses of the dead, making the camera an analog piece
of grief tech. But her larger point was that the frozen image often exists in
opposition to the dynamic moment and to the living being.
If Silicon Valley’s wilder promises are to be entertained,
our spirits may one day be able to join our effigies on the internet. In Jesse
Armstrong’s film “Mountainhead,” a venture capitalist played by Steve Carrell
refuses to accept his cancer diagnosis and the medical care that goes with it.
He is counting on bypassing death by uploading his consciousness to the cloud.
The movie is bearish on his chances, though, and implies that he’s only
hastening his end by ignoring his doctors. Meanwhile, in a case of life
synchronizing with art, the tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has pursued “anti-aging”
measures—including penis shockwave therapy and plasma donations from his
son—that have transformed him into a waxy, ligatured figure, like an ancient
Egyptian burial doll.
We are bad at letting go. We recoil from sadness and we want
to forget how to mourn. So many of our desires can be gratified, and so
seamlessly, that maybe we’ve grown hypersensitive to the sensation of lack,
willing to embrace any counterfeit that might insulate us. In such an
environment, zombies elucidate the dangers of clinging to the past. One
translation of Aaaaughhhh is “There’s a difference between not
dying and being alive.” A summary of Gyyyyyuaaackmight be “Things
can grow so corrupted or damaged that it’s better not to have them anymore.” In
this nostalgic moment, zombie stories expose a toxic side of loss aversion,
cautioning us not to settle for brainless facsimiles, for shoddy reproductions,
for shambling reanimated corpses of what we once loved.
If zombies were simply inferior substitutes for humans, they
wouldn’t be so worrisome. But zombies are destructive, and contain within them
a critique of reactionary violence. In “28 Years Later,” England has fully
succumbed to a “rage virus” that turns reasonable people into homicidal
psychopaths and keeps the country submerged in the dark ages. Meanwhile, the
rest of the world has managed to keep the disease at bay; beyond England lies a
future of dating apps and streaming services.
The film almost insists on being interpreted as a Brexit
allegory. Our protagonist, a young boy named Spike, is eking out a grim
pre-industrial existence with his parents and a small group of survivors on a
not-so-splendidly-isolated patch of turf off the coast of Northumberland. Misty
myths of old Britain shape the movie’s iconography (a digital recreation of a
legendary tree; a tower of skulls that evokes the country’s Shakespearean
heritage). On the soundtrack, an archival recording of a Rudyard Kipling poem
is distorted to draw out the words’ hysterical quality. If, as the scholar
Corey Robin has suggested, all reactionary movements have, at their heart, a
fear of loss, then Boyle’s England is a conservative paradise, in which an
aggrieved desire for the past manifests as a literal virus. In this reading,
the infected are both Brexiters, animated by a hunger to protect and restore a
world that seems to them to have slipped away, and a symbol of what comes back,
deformed, as a result of the reactionary project. With respect to gender roles,
for instance, the aggressive zombies incarnate a warped and rotted form of
traditional masculinity, a perversion of the warrior ideal.
A virtue of Boyle’s movie—and of the zombie genre more
broadly—is that it showcases what, exactly, people can become so panicked about
losing. In The New York Review of Books, Ben Tarnoff used the term
“reactionary infantilism” to describe President Donald Trump’s “desire to be
carefree” and his “abdication of adulthood’s defining obligation: to take
responsibility for oneself and others.” The infected have not, like true Burkeian
conservatives, reinstated custom or ceremony; they’ve claimed a kind of
license, an unshakeable self-confidence, a self-justifying power. They’ve
regressed, as all zombies must, to babyhood. (I remind you that the undead’s
weapon of choice in “Duhpocalypse” is explosive diarrhea.) Zombies are
bottomlessly hungry, they’re preverbal, and they’re unreasoning. Revealingly,
both “28 Years Later” and “The Last of Us” curtain opens on Mark Spitz as a kid. Zombies
are what happen when a juvenile life stage is unnaturally protracted. They
represent the ugliness of our attempts, as grownups, to recapture the innocent
egotism of infants.
This zombie-baby parallel may explain the tenderness for the
infected that occasionally pierces through the horror of “28 Years Later.”
Boyle casts the zombie plot as a failed bildungsroman, a story about the parts
of us that will neither mature nor die and leave us in peace. The film is
permeated by pathos and a primal longing for safety. When Spike breaks free of
his insular upbringing, he starts to see the infected as objects of pity rather
than of revulsion. His empathy doesn’t last—the end of the film swings back to
nunchuck heroics—but the critters retain an elegiac aura. If they’re warnings,
they’re also embodiments of a relatable grief about being one thing and then
being forced to become something else. To paraphrase the poet Louise Glück, we
look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is zombies.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/critics-notebook/our-age-of-zombie-culture
