Buy Or Don’t Buy

Back in November, this chart from the sci-fi blog io9 caused a stir in economics- and zombie-loving circles. It purported to show an uptick in the number of zombie movies produced in times of economic or social unrest. As the creators said:

Still, even correcting for the fact that there are more movies being made today, you can see that there are distinctive spikes in zombie popularity - and they always seem to fall slightly after a huge political or social event has caused mass fear, chaos, or suffering. That’s why World War II, Vietnam, and the current Iraq War are all followed by a zombie rush at theaters.

We could talk a little while about the apparent cherry-picking going on with the world events here (The late-80s recession was worse than anything that happened in the early-60s or mid-70s?) but at least the io9 folks realized that they weren’t not exactly dealing with hard science and admitted that it could just be a coincidence.

But now the hypothesis has turned into a fully-formed fact, according to the New York Times’ book review of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies :

Monster stories are a projection of our collective anxieties — and that may explain why in the current economic downturn, zombies are starting to catch up with the long-fashionable vampire. Vampires are sleek demons for good times. They suavely leach off society — like investment bankers who plunder outsize shares of deals for themselves or rapacious fund managers.

Zombies are more bluntly menacing. When they rise up, what results is a “zombie apocalypse,” or complete social breakdown. That image resonated in 1968, the chaotic year when “Night of the Living Dead,” the black-and-white zombie classic, was released. And it resonates today, when the banking system teeters on the brink of collapse and once-solid companies like Lehman Brothers are melting into air.

No. No No No No No. NO.

Listen. I’m a Cinema Studies student, at least for four more weeks. I know about reading all sorts of things into films based on the social mores at the time they were produced. Hell, I once wrote a paper pinning the the architecture of dystopian societies in sci-fi films to changing city-planning trends. (I got an A!)

But there are a bunch of things wrong with this assumption. Let’s start with the thesis. Are zombies getting more popular? There is one high-profile zombie book at the moment. The story mentions two other films (one of which hasn’t been made yet) and one video game. Compare that to 2002-2005, when we had 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, The Dawn of the Dead remake, Land of the Dead, Resident Evil, and many, many others, including scores of zombie-themed video games. It doesn’t appear that zombie stories have gotten more prevalent since the recession. If anything, they’ve gotten less.

Second, remember this past winter, when vampires were all the rage? People loved Twilight, Let the Right One In and “True Blood.” Manohla Dargis even made a slideshow where she lauded the vampire’s “ability to change with our times and according to our needs - to shapeshift.” Even accounting for a time lag due to production, were we not in a recession then? Now vampires are only “sleek demons for good times” - because they resemble bankers…?

And finally, even if zombies were more popular than vampires, how would it have to be because of the recession? There’s an unsettling scent of determinism here that suggests we only like the monsters we like because of our economic situation. Nowhere in the review is there any mention of why else people might enjoy zombies: their awkward lumbering, their cries of “BRRRAAAIIINNSSS,” the fact that you can only defeat them by destroying their head, preferably with a shotgun.

I’m all for looking at societal changes though the lens of popular culture. My problem is noticing something is popular, automatically proclaiming a trend, and then making assumptions based upon this trend with no other evidence.