The headline got me. Had to read it — 'Our Age of Zombie Culture' by Katy Waldman, published in The New Yorker on August 9, 2025. The writer started off summarizing all the zombie shows that have hit the screen since 'The Walking Dead' (2010). Well, I chased down every episode of both seasons of 'The Last of Us' (2023).
Television audiences have always been fascinated by zombies and eagerly lap up every zombie flick. Since the cult classic of '28 Days Later' (2002). Even Korean horror shows — 'Train to Busan' (2016)! Two seasons of 'Kingdom' (2019)! The television zombies started off slow and senseless, then they gradually evolved to become faster, and perhaps do a group-think. It's almost scary, really.
I jokingly fit in the phrase 'zombie apocalypse' into papers, and also say that as a reason to why I work out at the gyms and grudgingly do cardio and pull-ups in order to leap up over walls.
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.
And now there's the recently released '28 Years Later' (June 2025). Directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, it also feels like a 'coming of age' film, albeit in a post-apocalyptic world of the 'normal' and the 'infected.
Of course the writer would eventually link television zombies to real life zombies, people who are apathetic to everything, and it crosses over to AI zombies too. Well. I'll not go farther into the realm of American politics and social life. You could imagine all that along this vein.
I idly thought about vapes and its K-Pods with etomidate and other drugs. Those who vape K-Pods staggers around and fall over like zombies too. The commentary ended with these lines about zombies and what we think or feel about them, given how much we're into them.
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.
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