The Day After Zombie Day is Zombie Day

Halloween’s done. For the most part. There’s cheap candy in the grocery stores, leftover costumes in bargain bins, lazy people’s decorations moldering in their windows. It used to be that November 1st was the first day that you’d start to see Christmas advertising, a sure fire-way to erase Halloween form your head. (Of course nowadays Xmas starts worming it’s way into ads as early as August. Talk about eating your brain, sheesh.)

But die-hards stick with their zombie love year round. This is the way it should be. Zombies, in the movies and books and videogames, are unrelenting. So to should zombie fandom. We don’t call this blog Zombie for Life for nothing.

Going on today, right now, is the Zombethics symposium at Emory University. They’re discussing apocalypse survival, pop zombie culture, “the ethics if defining brain death,” and other topics, all in the context of zombies.

I found about this only just now myself, from a blog post at Psychology Today, where Dr. Steven Scholzman talks about ethics, and explores what is essential the question of euthanasia (although he never uses that word) via an examination of zombies. It’s the same question that pops up in all the zombie flicks: are zombies still people, can they become people again?

Of course, the zombie movies only ask this questionto set up the more important question of: are the bad guys still people, can we kill them? The zombie apocalypse is just a gore-coated way to examine existentialism, really: you’ve been isolated by these zombies, and so your only choice is murder or suicide.

The irony is that, if you choose murder, that is suicide, because you’ve justified some other guy killing you. And this is why every day is zombie day, because existential angst never ever goes away.

Candy helps, though.