In 2015, the series "The Walking Dead" ranked second among the most pirated in the world, according to the site TorrentFreak. This is not exactly a surprise, since the program has a huge amount of fans who love the stories involving the most popular zombies on television nowadays.

But where does this fixation come from these monsters? New York writer Julia de Guzman tries to understand this obsession with the theme, which is responsible for the children series, movies, comics, games and even pranks over there sinister. In this article, you may know a little more about curiosities and origins of these beings who insist on "living" even after death.

Although they have been in pop culture for a long time, it was only recently that they were catapulted to success. Julia recalls, however, that the origins are much older. In the 19th century, the Africans had the Nzumbi, who were not very afraid; After all, were controlled by sorcerers who mastered black magic.

Nowadays, these monsters have developed a kind of will of their own, willing to destroy everything and kill everyone they meet on the way. "The zombie serves as a normative interruption figure: their only motivation is hunger, and there are no common codes of behavior to prevent them from fulfilling that need," the writer says.

The Walking Dead series helped popularize zombies

Reflection of fear

Kelly Murphy, a professor of religion and philosophy at the University of Michigan in the United States, says that zombies reflect our fears and so have evolved over the past few decades. According to her, the original zombies reflected society's fear of becoming enslaved, unlike the current ones, which reflect the most supernatural fear.

Julia de Guzman points out that in the book "American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture", author Kyle Bishop shows how insecurity and uncertainty grew in the USA after the attacks of 11 September, bird flu, Hurricane Katrina and anthrax outbreaks. All this in an interval of just over five years, which coincides with the narratives involving the zombies.

The idea of ​​facing fear in the arts dates back to Ancient Greece, as the population remains more stable when faced with what afflicts it. Watching the chaos on the big screens and the big screens, we understood what a world without laws would be like and we would come to accept more comfortably the real world we live in. So much that movies like "My Boyfriend is a Zombie" and series like "iZombie" already show a new reality: the one of zombies interacting with the society in a positive way.

"My Boyfriend is a Zombie" shows the relationship of a young woman with an undead

And so, do you agree with the author that the increased exploration of the theme is a reflection of our own interest in seeing a world dominated by chaos in order to face real problems? It is the reflection!