All About the Zombies -- The Walking Dead

In the first sequence of the first episode of The Walking Dead, deputy sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) is searching abandoned cars along a deserted road for gasoline when he spots a little girl moving among the vehicles.  He calls out to her, and she approaches, a zombie child, bloody, torn face, exposed teeth, and pale eyes - moppet as monster.  She staggers towards him hungrily and Grimes, wincing, shoots her in the head.  It’s a graphic and bloody scene, and one of the most shocking cold opens in the history of T.V.  It contains so many of the elements of the zombie genre - the isolation of a last human, the post-apocalyptic landscape scattered with abandoned artifacts of human existence, the search for resources, the monster as someone we would normally protect, and the breaking of social taboos.   The unease of seeing taboos subverted - cannibalism on the side of the zombies, almost all other social conventions on the side of the humans - is a chief appeal and an important source of unease in the zombie narrative.


The rest of this column is HERE.