“We will all die. When we’re young, a voice inside says ‘but not me, surely not me’. But that voice fades in time, leaving us only with the longing for eternal life. And so these myths comfort us: vampires are lonely, ghosts are intangible, werewolves are bestial, this is the price of immortality. To become a zombie exacts an even sharper price: brainless, repulsive, no one would choose that fractional life over the peace of death. Perhaps the zombie represents our society’s increasing yearning for immortality, and the increasing necessity therefore to imagine it as horrifying.”
“The zombie apocalypse is the death of civilization, the moment when all that becomes important is: do you have food? Do you have guns? We want to practise this in fantasy, to imagine it all the way through, especially in times of economic crisis. We live in cities now; far from sources of food, not knowing our neighbours. Zombies are the horrifying crowd of the urban poor, the grasping hands reaching out for something which, if you gave it to them, would destroy you. They’re the interchangeable anonymous people we encounter on our daily commute, those whose humanity we cannot acknowledge.”
“Something terrible had happened and the world had changed. Aharon Appelfeld, one of the most celebrated Israeli novelists of his generation, who also makes an appearance, as himself, in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, says of the Holocaust in Roth’s book of interviews Shop Talk: ‘We came into contact with archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious, the meaning of which we did not know, nor do we know it to this day.’ That is what is horrifying: not the death, not necessarily just that, but the absolute inexplicability of the whole thing. The horror is in the things we do that we do not understand.”
“Zombie movies always go roughly the same way. First there are isolated reports of strange occurrences. The protagonists laugh them off, cannot believe. Then there is proof, but by then it is too late to run. Hide, maybe. Fight them off if you can, but they can tell you are different, they will sniff you out in your hiding place, there are too many of them to keep fighting. At last there is a small family-like group sheltering, shivering together as the monsters outside – people who used to be their friends, neighbours, lovers. There is only one ending. Holocaust movies go exactly the same way: line by line by line.”
“The trial of Eichmann, when the silence was finally broken, was in 1961. George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968. Is it too much to say that those walking corpses were a dawning realization of the whole monstrosity? Probably. I can only say that this is what they are for me.”
“Zombies are all the things that will not lie down and die, the truth we cannot repress, the thing that will rise up until it overwhelms us all. Whatever you want to forget is stumbling, dead-eyed and open-mouthed towards you.”