A lengthy, disturbing, and at times quite interesting interview with Walking Dead creator (or alleged co-creator, according to recent lawsuit) Robert Kirkman is up at Salon.

Some highlights, and our responses:

So what is it about zombies in general that people are so interested in them these days?

First of all, they’re awesome. They look cool. They do cool things. There’s definitely a lot of reasons to love zombies. Culturally, the last time zombies were this popular was the height of the Cold War. So I think any time there’s a sense of unrest in society, it tends to drive people toward stories of the apocalypse and the end of the world. It makes it interesting to sit on your couch and think: OK, if society did collapse, would I be like Daryl Dixon? Would I be like Shane Walsh? Would I be like Rick Grimes? Which person would I be like? What decisions would I make? And analyzing that kind of stuff makes it easier to ignore the economic collapse or the crisis with oil prices, or whatever is going on in the world today. It’s much easier to sit in the safety of your living room and analyze it rather than to actually think about all the horrible things that are going on out in the world.

This plays into the ‘Zombies are a harmless, socially acceptable substitute for pondering actual doom’ pop psychology answer that you get a lot when various Anti-Zombie media figures are asked to explain the popularity of (overwhelmingly Anti-) Zombie works.

But I have to say, the concept of elaborately pondering what you would do in a ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ is counterfactual to almost all Anti-Zombie fiction, where either a) the characters have never seen a Zombie movie before and are completely and regularly surprised by predictable events, or b) the characters are head-smackingly stupid and self-destructive. Usually both.

In fact, The Walking Dead explicitly relies on b), since no sane person would behave like the characters in Kirkman’s story, half the time. Just wait until the show gets to the prison arc from the comics if you don’t believe me. You’ve never seen so much dysfunctional cutting of one’s own throat in a narrative before.

That’s not necessarily a knock on all characters in all Zombie films (or comics, here), either. Sometimes they DO know the ‘rules’, like in ‘Shaun of the Dead’, and other times they’re just, well, under a lot of stress, and cannot see that they would clearly be better off mediating a peaceful solution with the Undead than fighting a battle they cannot realistically win (and ultimately, you never really ‘win’ a conflict like that).

Speaking of ‘the rules’ though, Kirkman has this unquestionably and objectively wrong thing to say later in the interview:

With “The Walking Dead,” I try to take the best part of the Romero model – George Romero by far did the best zombie movies in history — and his films are all consistent. Then I wanted to use most of those rules, because those are the best, and then add a few of my own — things that are logical; things that to me make sense. To just to try and say: Look, there should be some set rules on zombies. There are certain set things that make zombies cool, and we should try to maintain them.

Statements like that make me wonder if I’m the only one who ever actually watches a Zombie movie and remembers it afterward.* Romero Anti-Zombie films have in fact been quite inconsistent on the ‘rules’ of Zombification.

In ‘Night of the Living Dead’, the Undead revive due to unknown factors, but the film strongly implies that it’s due to space radiation from a probe returning from Venus. It has nothing to do with the spread of a microorganism, and is mostly not dependent on your stereotypical Zombie bite. A little girl does become a Zombie after being bitten, but the vast majority of Zombies seen in the film were not revived in that manner, she may simply have died from her wound. The newscaster, in fact, explicitly says that any body of anyone who recently died comes back to life, regardless, it seems, of contact with the Undead.

(Ahh, radio. Once the dominant news medium, believe it or not, for day to day life or Zombie Apocalypses)

I blame that space probe, myself.

Contrast that with ‘Dawn of the Dead’, where there’s no space probe mentioned and being bitten by a Zombie is now the dominant method by which Zombiism spreads on-screen, although many Zombies already Undead seem to have never been injured previously.
(Presumably if the Hare Krishna Zombie was bitten it was on his pamphleteering hand.)

In ‘Day of the Dead’ a biological explanation is aggressively posited, but also questioned, since the alleged scientists cannot isolate the actual cause of Zombification despite extensive study and a well equipped facility.
(Science: Overrated, apparently.)

Later Romero movies equivocate between these two ideals. The global, simultaneous ‘apocalypse’ comes up in ‘Diary of the Dead’ and ‘Survival of the Dead’, precluding a purely biological model again, but no alternative is mentioned. Space probes aren’t as menacing as they seemed in the 60s, I suppose. ‘Land of the Dead’ seems to be very strongly in the ‘bite’ camp, on the other hand.

Stephen King, for what it’s worth, manages to unify the two Romero dynamics fairly well in his short story ‘Home Delivery’, so if you want a good retcon to explain these inconsistencies away he’s your man. Most people just fail to notice them anymore, like Mr. Kirkman.

The rest of the interview has lots of details about gruesome violence against Zombies and promises that under Walking Dead’s new showrunner Glen Mazzara the show will be faster paced and, presumably, even more Living Supremacist.

We can hardly wait. /sarcasm

Again, for more insight into the truly twisted mind of Robert Kirkman, you can read the full interview here. I recommend against doing so if you’ve recently eaten. It’s pretty repulsive stuff.

*Actually, I know I’m not the only one who notices these things, because the glowy space radiation comes up in ‘Marvel Zombies 5′.

Tags: Comics, Robert Kirkman, Television

This entry was posted by John Sears on Tuesday, February 14th, 2012 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.