Zombies aren’t scary. They’re popular movie monsters because, while looking vaguely human, they’re sufficiently “othered” that you can kill them without remorse (thus acting as a convenient stand-in for other groups that the audience wishes they could do that to) and because they represent an apocalypse that kills most of the people but leaves the stuff behind, meaning that you don’t have to deal with society anymore but you’ll still easily have a roof over your head and food on your table (albeit mostly canned food.)
Back in my reddit days I wrote a long comment about the fact that zombies are scary because they are the ultimate persistence hunters.
I mean, them being walking corpses might also have something to do with it…
I remember reading that
That is scarier to me than the fast zombies.
Zombies aren’t scary. They’re popular movie monsters because, while looking vaguely human, they’re sufficiently “othered” that you can kill them without remorse (thus acting as a convenient stand-in for other groups that the audience wishes they could do that to) and because they represent an apocalypse that kills most of the people but leaves the stuff behind, meaning that you don’t have to deal with society anymore but you’ll still easily have a roof over your head and food on your table (albeit mostly canned food.)
Huh, never thought about it that way. Great metaphor, tbh.