It seems to happen whenever Steve Beard hangs out with friends — especially folks who don’t go to church — talking about movies, television and whatever else is on their minds.
“It may take five minutes or it may take as long as 10, but sooner or later you’re going to run into some kind zombie comment,” said Beard, editor of Good News, a magazine for United Methodist evangelicals. “Someone will say something like, ‘When the zombie apocalypse occurs, we need to make sure we’re all at so-and-so’s house so we can stick together.’ It’s all a wink-and-a-nod kind of deal, but the point is that this whole zombie thing has become a part of the language of our time.”
As Simon Pegg said in an interview a few years ago, zombies are also a metaphor for death and the human fear of death. Zombies are slow, relentless, and often clumsy. You can run, you can fight, you can hole yourself up in a fortress, but they will eventually catch up with you.