From day one in our class, the buzz about zombies has been present and persisted, despite the vast majority of our material not being zombie-related. Being a fan of zombies myself, I’ve always wondered what it was about them–and the prospect of a zombie apocalypse–that draws so many of us in. Reading Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, I felt he highlighted something about zombies that I had never picked up one: wish fulfillment.

In a scene towards the beginning of the book, when Mark encounters four zombies that had been cooped up in the break room of a legal office, he muses about being an angel of death with a chilling amount of glee. From that passage, it was clear that a part of Mark enjoyed participating in the apocalypse’s carnage. That’s when it hit me:

On some level, we’d all love to go on a killing spree.

We’re all imbued with that primal energy–that Freudian Id–which gives us a capacity for violence. These thoughts are curbed by our learning and internalizing of societal rules (like don’t murder people). Both of these attributes make sense in an evolutionary sense: those that were strongest and best at fighting got to pass on more of their genes over the course of many generations, and likewise those that could cooperate effectively also succeeded in dominating the gene pool. A zombie apocalypse lets us toss off our societal shackles and appease our violent impulses without having to deal with the moral hangups that accompany murder. Zombie apocalypse scenarios are–purely and simply–guiltless indulgences of our primal predisposition to violence.