What is the Obsession?

Throughout pop culture today there is an increasing fascination about zombies.  There have been video games, television shows, horror films, books, and more.  So what is a zombie?  One common definition is: 

"the body of a dead person given the semblance of life, but mute and will-less, by a supernatural force, usually for some evil purpose."

 Zombies are the "un-dead," those that have died and come back in a trance-like state.  They are not very fast but can definitely infect or kill a human and therefore are extremely dangerous especially in a "zombie apocalypse".  A so-called apocalypse would result in the entire human population becoming infected probably due to some type of human error in the form of a disease or attempted cure for a disease.  The science behind the cure would go terribly wrong and the side effects would result in most of the population becoming a zombie and hello zombie apocalypse.  
Previous to George Romero's (1968) Night of the Living Dead however, zombies were considered to be the result of voodoo or witchcraft.  In this film however, the zombies rose from the grave due to radiation from a fallen satellite. This film and the following Dawn of the Dead in 1978, started the revolution that set the stages for many of the movies and books seen today about the origin and situations of zombies. 
My brief experience with the zombie sensation include the television show The Walking Dead, the video games Black Ops 2 and Left 4 Dead, and the 2013 movie Warm Bodies.  In each of these there are different ideas of zombies, how they became infected, and how to kill them.  Moreover, the zombies have different appearances and different ways of motion.  
These experiences have sparked my curiosity for the new found obsession with the zombie.  However, this obsession with the idea that the dead may return is not new.  There have been generations of folklore about the un-dead created by voodoo and witchcraft but now the origins of zombies in the stories have been created by human error.  These ideas serve as a warning to humanity and the further search for new sciences.  Experiments and the desire for knowledge are important but some things may beyond the human capacity to control and the results may be detrimental.  They may even cause a zombie apocalypse.  The good news is our pop culture is educating us on ways to survive, hopefully they would be accurate. 



http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/zombie+?s=t
http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/29/oreilly-godzilla-science-technology-breakthroughs-zombies.html
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063350/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1