Alex had a problem with my interpretation of zombie films as dystopian. She didn't think it worked. You be the judge.

We'll start by defining "utopia" and "dystopia," just for the uninitiated. A "utopia" is a perfect world where there are no problems of any kind. The word "dystopia" means exactly the opposite. It is a world where everything is as bad as it could possibly be. The most common examples of dystopias in literature are 1984, Brave New World, or Fahrenheit 451.

Dystopias are, more often than not, a form of social criticism. The author of dystopic fiction recognizes a social problem in his own time and hypothesizes what would happen if this problem grew and grew, taking it to its logical conclusion. Dystopic fiction is often over-the-top, featuring outrageous scenarios that we could never imagine happening (1984's scenario of worldwide brainwashing and near-total control of dissidents seems pretty unlikely). But this why dystopias are often classified as satire: in making sure that no one misses the criticism, the social problems and their end results are exaggerated.

The point of the dystopia, then, is to point out a problem. Something has gone wrong with society and a dystopia is the end result of that problem. Now take a look at zombies. What are zombies? First, they're definitely not alive, but they're not quite dead, either. They have no proper classification; they're an aberration, something unnatural. Second, zombies have no feelings and no thoughts. Only rarely do they ever have the power to speak. Zombies are no better than animals. They're driven onward by their desire for brains. In an interesting twist, even though they consume brains -- the seat of human consciousness and reason, the thing that makes humans better than animals -- they only get a basic, caloric value from the brains. They don't get any smarter and they don't gain the capacity to reason. This is why zombie societies would never become artistic centers: zombies have no ability to produce art.

Imagine if you were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, or John Locke. You worship human reason. Becoming a zombie -- human, but without that key ability to reason -- would be the worst thing in the world for you.

Now we get to the social criticism part. As I explained previously, old-school zombie films (of the George A. Romero variety, like the original Night of the Living Dead) are morality plays. There is no explanation for why people turn into zombies. It just happens that people do. Herein lies the social criticism: human beings have become base, immoral creatures. If left unchecked, humanity's lack of morality will degenerate from an intellectual baseness to a physical baseness in the form of being a zombie. Ostensibly, it is some higher being that has placed this curse on mankind, a punishment for their immoral thoughts and deeds. The only people who 1) are not zombiefied and 2) survive are a small band of ethical human beings. These old-school zombie films are allegories of the Biblical story of Lot (Genesis 19; God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah but allows Lot to leave, warning him not to look back. His wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt). Lot is allowed to leave by virtue of his ... well, virtue. His wife is, too. Nonetheless, she disobeys God's commandment not to look back and is punished. This happens in zombie films, also, when the people we thought were safe from zombies get attacked and turned into zombies themselves. Apparently they weren't as virtuous as we thought they were.

Contemporary zombie films (this means post-1980s) are not moral plays, but criticisms of science. Return of the Living Dead introduces us to a rational explanation for zombiefication: the military has developed a chemical that re-animates the dead. The first issue that gets raised here is "why do we need to re-animate the dead?" The short answer is "because we can." This idea of science for science's sake (that is, an experiment whose results could yield no conceivable benefit to mankind as a whole) goes all the way back to Shelley's Frankenstein (arguably the first novel dealing with zombies), Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The modern cinema has not only made all of those books into movies, but has added to the genre, most notably with Jurassic Park (recall Ian Malcolm's line, "Your scientists were so busy seeing whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should." Also, a good portion of Michael Crichton's work deals with science that turns against its creators). Our fear of "science" comes into play whenever science does something we view as unnatural -- like re-animating the dead, putting parts of animals together to get new animals, or genetically engineering once-extinct animals. In Return of the Living Dead, the fear is that science -- in the wrong hands and with "unnatural" intent -- could cause us to become not better humans, but worse humans. Again, the worst kind of human you could be is a zombie, a human without humanity.

28 Days Later is probably the seminal modern zombie film. All of the people whom we think "deserve" to die end up dead (all of those people at that compound, for example, are morally decrepit and it's only a matter of time before they get what's coming to them in the form of zombiefication) and all of the people whom we think "deserve" to live end up living. We don't like watching a movie or reading a book where morally upstanding characters meet the fate of the morally corrupt. The morally upstanding characters, we think, should survive because of their values. In 28 Days Later, they do. This film combines both the scientific dystopia (for the zombies are created by way of a virus of some sort -- there's science again, making some sort of mistake) and the moral one (the "good" characters survive, remaining human rather than turning into zombies).

Thus zombie films can be interpreted as social criticism, which allows us to classify them as dystopian. While Alex asserted that zombies can't exist in a society because they aren't rational, I would argue that zombies do live in a society, and their society is the remnants of the old human society they once lived in. It is a corrupt society, but a society nonetheless. There's anarchy for sure, but the zombies exist together all the same. The zombie genre is another attempt at social criticism, one that simultaneously taps into our fear of mortality and our fear of brutality, for the zombie is both a brute and (un)dead. He has neither a soul nor a capacity for reason, making him an outsider to both God and man. And that's really scary.