Made For Walking

I'm not much of a TV person generally, but today I warmly welcome the return of The Walking Dead to an idiot box near me. Weeks of flesh-munching fun lie ahead, courtesy of that most revolutionary of monsters, the zombie.

The mythical beasts humans imagine are almost always symbolic of the times in which they live. Vampires - which have enjoyed their own resurgence in popular culture recently - traditionally represented a parasitic aristocracy or ruling class feeding off their subjects, be it despotic European tyrants drinking the blood of the common folk, or American plantation-owners draining their slaves. In contrast, zombies embodied the precise opposite; a faceless lumpenproletariat bent on destroying the order of things, consuming from the bottom up (which, if you're going to be consumed, is probably one of the less pleasurable ways to go about it).

In times of affluence, we've tended to favour vampires in fiction, terrified of the wealth and power of those who rule us, yet equally enchanted by their opulence and desiring it for ourselves (nearly all vampire stories feature some kind of "forbidden love" between human and bloodsucker). When times are hard, though, and social upheaval's on the cards, out come the living dead to plague our nightmares. We're terrified of being dragged down to their level, where we have nothing left to live for but the need to consume. Forbidden love's not exactly on the cards here, either.

So I'm looking forward to our Friday night zombie apocalypse again, where the walkers take on a world of austerity. And I'm still hoping humanity survives. Just about.