Why do we love zombies?

This weekend was the opening of the “Zombie’s in Love” Art Gallery at the Nucleus.

And as could be expected, the zombie fanatics were out in force that night – me & my friends included. I even wore my “In case of a Zombie Attack” shirt (from A Softer World) for the occasion.




The event itself was very cool. Several of the gallery’s artists were there, promoting & signing their art; a lot of students from Art Center got the chance to draw portraits of live “zombie models” (volunteers who came to the opening dressed as zombies?) and there was even a hip-hop group (dressed as zombies) who performed some kind of “zombie-wedding” hip-hop routine.

Zombie modeling

And while a lot of the artwork displayed was pretty great, I noticed that a lot of them didn’t seem to make sense. One in particular was entitled “Zombie Kong” which was a painting of a zombie King Kong in his famous “climbing the Empire State Building” scene. The depiction of Kong was great—especially his decaying insides—but I didn’t understand what King Kong had to do with zombies. Also, there were several paintings / works of art there that were kind of cute (?) that I thought just went against the whole disgusting visual appeal of zombies.

That *IS* why we all love zombie movies, right? Because of how intriguing it is to look at something so disgusting? It’s similar to why people slow down on the freeway so they can look at car accidents or a house that’s burning down: because we cannot NOT look away from it.

Isn’t that also why we all cheer whenever someone dies on screen, horror movie fans? The violence and gore tickles this dark side of ourselves that says “Yeah! I like violence & evil to a certain degree and this is a perfectly acceptable outlet for that!”

……………well, that’s why *I* like zombies.

I mean, look at this face! Don’t you just want to stare at it for a few seconds so you can admire all the gross details that went into this?

I love the teeth

I’m ashamed to say that I only have a few pictures of the event. It seemed like everyone else was taking a picture of all the paintings / zombies that I didn’t really feel the need to take any of my own.

SIDENOTE: A Google Search of “Zombies are Awesome” revealed the following results:
Yahoo Answers to the Question.
Zombie 101 - "Zombies in the Media"
Zombie Defense Course

SIDENOTE 2: Check out the Nucleus’ next show: Curiouser & Curiouser - Art inspired by the "Alice in Wonderland" stories.