Zombie movies as the perfect apologetic cinema for Easter: a thread.

The zombie as we know it today is the last great horror monster to be created and seeded into the human cultural consciousness.

The zombie as we know it today has its origins in “The Night of the Living Dead” and the future works of its writer/director, George Romero, a co-writer Jack Russo.

From “Night” and Romero’s future works we get the shambling, cannibalistic undead. Russo’s most popular sequel, “Return of the Living Dead,” gives us their specific desire to consume brains.

The zombie movie is a perfect apologetic cinema for Daster because it shows us a truth that the Fathers recognized explicitly: without God, immortality would be a curse rather than a blessing.

The zombie is driven entirely by an unholy, insatiable hunger. They have either lost their reason, the image of God, entirely (Romero) or use it only as a means to feed their hunger (Russo).

In “Return,” one of the zombies states explicitly that it can feel itself rotting. The desire to eat brains (to symbolically consume the image of God in others, as the brain in the seat of reason in modern understanding) is a desire born from the need to dull this pain.

Thus the zombie is to Easter as the vampire is to the Eucharist: an inversion that can help clarify the truth of the mystery. The zombie shows us that living without death *in this world as it is* would be an unbearable trial that would consume what is most divine within us.

Only in the promise of a Resurrection that conquers death because it conquers sin, the cause of death, and that promises a new creation freed forever from the power of sin, can the human desire for immortality find satiation and joy rather than unending hunger and torment.

The zombie, as an inversion of the Resurrection, shows us the truth of St. Augustine’s words: that even if we did not die, our hearts would still be restless until they rested in God. For only God can satisfy the true hunger of the human heart and mind. Fin.