From The Living Church-Our world is fascinated with zombies. From revisionist writings in adult literature like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to children’s books such as Zombiekins, from television dramas of The Walking Dead to major motion pictures like the recent World War Z, as well as quasi-zombies — Boggans — in children’s films like Epic, not to mention the plethora of zombie video games like Call of Duty: Black Ops II, our society is captivated by the undead. What drives this zombie-filled imagination? What is its philosophical and theological import? Perhaps it is just good science fiction. Maybe it is the fear of chemical warfare, concerns of which flood our commercial media and public broadcasts. But why has this new genre of literature and film so mightily fixed our gaze upon the printed page and illuminated screens? Are we all worried about rampant cannibalism, being devoured by insatiable creatures, stoppable only by a “deadly” blow to the head? Or have we simply run out of other good reasons to give Brat Pitt a heroic leading role?
The film and television industries reveal a number of things about modern society. There is a tendency to think that film and media show us where we are heading, and while this is true, it is crucial to understand that these message-mediums are communicating a reality already present. These artistic mediums communicate more than their directors, screenwriters, and actors could ever fully grasp. All art is the result of a particular gaze. In Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes this gaze as the habit by which we relate to social space. Dramatists and playwrights communicate a world that is inseparable from their entrenchment in a habitus — a subconscious bodily comportment that conditions a particular way of perceiving the world. Filmmakers are no less conditioned and culturally effected.
More here-
http://www.livingchurch.org/brief-theology-zombies
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