What's up with the Zombie Craze

From: Carol J.

Sent: June 20, 2012

To: undisclosed recipients

Subject: Fw: What's up with the Zombie Craze

Really, what going on here with all the zombie interest lately? I did a little search and found hundreds of article and news stories on the subject. I'm sure that media and the drug abuse (bath salts) are the main reason. Anyway I sent you a good article on this, please share. Carol
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BY FRED GRIMM
FGRIMM@MIAMIHERALD.COM
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued an official reassurance: no zombie apocalypse.

“CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),” agency spokesman David Daigle told The Huffington Post.

Who knows, maybe the CDC statement allayed a few anxieties. I found it downright depressing. That the CDC felt compelled to issue an official denial that the zombie apocalypse was upon us seemed like another discomfiting moment in America’s cultural descent.

All this, of course, was set off by the savage May 26 attack on a homeless man on the MacArthur Causeway and the horrible hospital photos and the overwrought on-line, hit-driven media coverage. And, as “zombie apocalypse” trended to become the second most popular search term on Google, it was as if Americans, some of them anyway, couldn’t be bothered with the intellectual distinction between a very real, brutal tragedy in Miami and the ghoulish zombie fantasies of movies, TV and literature.

“I’ve written quite a bit about the current ‘zombie renaissance,’ but things are starting to go far beyond the ideas I explored in my book,” Kyle Bishop, author of American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture, told me by e-mail Monday. “I thought we as a culture were simply seeing a renewed and increased interest in monster narratives as a gut-check reaction to 9/11 and the War on Terror.

“Now, however, the zombie has become something much more visceral, something that has taken hold on our collective unconscious. People – many people, probably – think zombies, or something like them, may actually, indeed exist,” Bishop stated.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/06/04/v-fullstory/2832770/fear-anxiety-drive-zombie-craze.html#storylink=cpy