Zombie fever is sweeping the nation once again, but this time, the friendly, comforting barrier of fiction has been removed, and innocent fascination has been coupled with a repugnant, unsettling fear associated with some sort of coming apocalypse.
In Miami, Florida on May 26th, 2012, Rudy Eugene, 31, was shot by police officers after refusing to stop chewing off the face of his victim, Ronald Poppo, a 65 year old homeless man. The incident was quickly picked up by national news outlets and has become a topic of conversation around the United States and throughout the world.
Helping to boost the news item in popularity, besides the gruesome and strange nature of the attack, has been the use of the apocalyptic vocabulary, which often attributes the actions of Eugene as being zombie-like. Since the incident, association with vocabulary like ‘zombie’ has prompted anxious and disconcerting rumors of apocalyptic proportions, citing the attack as the first in what is expected to be a surge of similar events leading up to the end of the world.
Such claims are compelling to some, but to the majority, seem laughable, and as the facts of the case continue to filter into the news, logical explanations have surfaced that have negated the actual possibility of Eugene being the first zombie.
Yet, the incident that occurred and the response that followed has drawn out and brought to mind an interesting relationship between the apocalyptic craze that has been perpetuated and reaffirmed in the past decade, particularly the role of the zombie in popular culture, and the important fictional aspect that makes these infatuations so compelling.
In recent years, films such as Zombieland and I Am Legend, and shows, particularly AMC’s The Walking Dead have profited from an increased interest in an apocalyptic obsession. The success of the flourishing genre, if one could call it that, has inspired an increased interest in similar themes, prompting end-of-the-world films and even more big budget zombie productions like Paramount’s highly anticipated World War Z, starring Brad Pitt and based on the 2006 novel by Max Brooks.
The term ‘zombie’ has become part of our cultural vocabulary. We are fascinated by the possibility of epidemics and end of the world situations, and we are drawn in particular to romantic, dramatic possibilities intertwined within zombie-ridden fiction worlds. However, wherever there is interest in zombies, like anything horrific or disturbing in theory, there is the comforting reassurance that the possibility of such things is probably fictional.
Still, the draw of some of these apocalyptic themes is that they could be possible in the real world. This phenomenon is compelling because while we think that these things could be possible, at the same time we are reassured that they aren’t real, or at least won’t be possible in our lifetimes. In other words, it is not reality, and it will not happen, and that is a comfort that allows people to keep watching, to become invested, and to derive pleasure from what would in reality be completely traumatic and horrifying.
After the incident on the Miami freeway, Rudy Eugene’s unsettling behavior, while it most likely has a logical, real world explanation, however disconcerting it may be, illustrated the types of reactions that might happen if a zombie apocalypse were actually unfolding in our real world.
The result is that people panicked, and the romantic, dramatic element typically associated with creative fictional depictions of zombie infestations was shattered for a few short hours, in which anyone aware of the attack at least for an instant entertained a zombie reality, and most likely resorted to designing a battle plan that could be acted upon if the threat was in fact confirmed.
With this particular situation we see an element of the horror or apocalyptic genre that is necessary for the viewer or reader to be entertained and fascinated by what is obviously gruesome and violent. It is this distance between people and the medium that creates this infatuation. The relationship is psychological in that the medium implies a fictional reassurance that makes it possible for the viewer to feel comfortable with the events and the environment such as with a zombie apocalypse.
Rudy Eugene’s attack on Ronald Poppo has provided a small glimpse into the reality of a zombie infestation that fictional stories implied would never happen, while at the same time utilizing the marketability of its apparent possibility, and in part has picked at the comforting barrier that is situated between the fictional world and our reality.
In fact, the popular existence of zombie lore could end up being attributed as directly linked to the events, as being somehow subconsciously flowing within the mind of Eugene because of the everyday apocalyptic and zombie-like cultural vocabulary, that when mixed with what has been speculated as a drug overdose, formed to make the strange, cannibalistic attack possible.
