Mine is conflicted relationship with zombies – a love/hate thing. I love fictional zombie fare. I hate the real ones.
Zombies have many origins. In the Resident Evil franchise, it is the T-virus. In Z-Nation, it is the ZN1 virus. In the Walking Dead, the cause of zombification is a brain virus that gets no formal name. In World War Z, it is the Solanum virus. In The Last of Us, it is the Cordyceps brain fungus.
All of our modern zombie stories are set in a post-apocalyptic future. You will remember that the word apocalypse comes from the Greek word that means to reveal; hence the Book of Revelations. And what zombie stories reveal is what the author believes about human nature – the best of it, and the worst of it. That dynamic makes for interesting drama.
The zombies that I hate are the real ones – laws that have been superseded but not repealed. I think that zombie laws exist because of tradition and human laziness – intellectual laziness, for the most part. Lawmakers write bills that become laws that reverse some existing law – maybe some law from the mid-1800’s, or maybe a SCOTUS decision makes some existing laws moot. Well, until something unexpected happens – like SCOTUS striking down the new law or maybe reversing its own prior ruling. Suddenly, a Civil War era law, dead for over a century, comes back to life like a zombie straight out of the cinema. Or maybe straight out of the Sinema; I don’t know about these things – at least in the same way as lawyers and politicians do.
What makes it possible to revive dead laws is the fact that they were superseded, by a court or a new law, but never actually repealed. Maybe our lawmakers thought it too much trouble to clean up after themselves. I hate it when that happens.