The incredibly strange creatures who stopped living and became mixed-up zombies or how to be the living dead in technicolor

Abstract

"It is hard to be a zombie. Slaving all day for no reward, driven by insatiable hunger, feared, unwanted, unloved. “If your sister were a zombie, what would you do for her?” reads one of the questions of a zombie trivia quiz. The answer bears the weight of a moral judgement: “Ignore her.” How come then that those miserable soulless creatures have managed to become cultural icons of the end of the 20th century? The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the infatuation of contemporary culture with zombies/the living dead resulting from the glorification of inertia. Zombies, as presented in the article, are understood in terms of paradoxical entities defined primarily through their lack of identity and, as such, acquiring new properties and becoming a new identity, instantly recognisable to anyone but themselves." (fragm.)