Among supernatural characters and fashionable horror stories of mass culture of the 20th century. The important place is taken by zombies. As a rule, it is somnambulistic recovered moving corpse lead by an instinct to consume human flesh or brains. The mysterious living dead persons generated by a film esthetics of late capitalism appear. As humanoids with terribly disfigured appearance and with picture signs of decomposition. This sepulchral monster constantly threatens suddenly and is destructive to arise. On a threshold of a comfortably arranged house or accurately tidied office.
Slowly-moving living dead persons are the ugly products of modern “immortality mythologies”. The triumph of these mythologies is connected. With the getting stronger belief in biotechnological methods of extension. And return of life by means of cellular engineering, transgenic mutations. And cryogenic cloning. Such mythologies penetrated by new-age syncretism of scientific. And mystical knowledge are based at the same time on keen search of the universal recipe against death. And on paranoid fear of non-final character of a lethal outcome. The most traumatic moment of. A biotechnological utopia of “eternal life” is a fear “to get stuck”. In a deplorable corpse state for a long time which is not accepted by the earth and rejected by society. Zombies show that after the recorded biological death there can be a stage of a coma unconscious “activity”.
Specifics of this interval of “imaginary revival” before finally calming down in a grave are transferred by the term undead. Also vampires, ghouls and the other lives. And death of a spawn balancing on border are usually ranked. As the category undead (or not dead), but zombies never come back to the human addictions and attachments. According to the American poet and philosopher Kasey Mohammad, zombie is the deadest being from all the undead.
Throughout the 20th century, the shocking image of zombie was repeatedly beaten in the film industry. Printing science fiction, comics, computer games, and also in the drawn genres of anime. Spread around in ominous, grotesque appearance, zombie becomes the defiant. But always met with undisguised interest of pop culture element. Zombie in role of a disputable object of the philosophical analysis, numerous cultural researches, and also specialized works in the sphere of cognitive science, neurophysiology, anthropology, social psychology, medical ethics, ethnology, political economy and so on is much less known.
It is remarkable that the peak of popularity of zombie as a fascinating ideas of commercial mass culture was necessary in 1960s-1990s; but in 2000s, zombies “grow” to a subject of studying and judgment of intellectual thought, make the way in university editions and are on a substantial scale discussed in the academic audiences. The majority of scientific (or pseudoscientific) monographs is devoted, by the way, to folklore or critical functions of zombie, and also their importance for eschatological anticipation of “global crisis” of the western civilization, not so much financial, but biogenetic.
Obviously, legitimating of zombie as the political metaphor opening all futurological gloom of further development of post-industrial society happens thanks to publicist movies of George Romero, Often politically engaged, armed with protest anti-capitalist pathos of zombie, Romero also became a basic intellectual model in philosophical zombie science. In 2002, there is Kenan Malik’s book Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us About Human Nature concentrated on natural-science approaches to an explanation of behavioral codes and rituals of zombie. In 2005, there is Jamie Russell’s work Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, representing encyclopedic reference book where in a chronological order evolution of the zombie from Voodoo generations of Caribbean countries to the begging devourers of flesh from ethnic ghettoes of large megalopolises is shown.
