“Almost everyone is a zombie now,” yawns a blasé teenager in one of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels. She is updating the heroine Bella – shortly to become a vampire’s virgin bride – on the progress of a horror film they are watching, but she might also be surveying the world outside the cinema. Are we surrounded by animated corpses, which lumpenly trudge along like the undead commuters on London Bridge in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land? Study the queues for public transport in the rush hour or workers numbly performing menial tasks: one way to get through the ordeal of existence is to behave as if you’re no longer sentient.
In Edgar Wright’s film Shaun of the Dead, it takes the baffled Simon Pegg a while to realise that the decrepit north Londoners staggering to the corner shop are cadavers in an advanced state of decay. In George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which Wright’s film parodies, packs of zombies maraud in slow motion through a shopping mall outside Pittsburgh, avid for flesh to gnaw: here are our culture’s ideal consumers, posthumously driven by appetites that have outlived them.
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