Zombies in Film, TV and Popular Culture and their Symbolism

On a recent installment of Fox’s hit show Glee, the show choir kids staged an impressive, full-costume and make-up performance of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” mashed up with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll.” What made the spectacle noteworthy, aside from the quality of the zombie outfits and, of course, the singing and dancing, was the context of the show itself. The episode aired in February, so no Halloween connection makes sense, nor did the episode suggest any particular nostalgia for the 1980s. Given the fact that the zombie routine was not only the showpiece of the episode, but also played a pivotal role in the plot arc (as a ruse to win the big game), how are we to understand the use of such a seemingly out-of-place motif? A closer examination of the episode yields a potential answer.
This February sweeps episode centered on several reversals and upheavals in the status of the main characters. The football players, who spent the first one and half seasons tormenting the glee club, are forced to join them in a performance, and quickly become the victims of the hockey team’s all-too-familiar bullying (complete with Slushee attacks). As a result, the football players decide not to perform, and forfeit their eligibility to play in the big game. Their absence is filled on the field by the show choir girls, who prove to be a valuable asset in their own way. As the football team/show choir/zombie horde scores the deciding touchdown, the most talented of the cheerleaders (the Cheerios) quit instead of abandoning their glee friends, thus setting in motion the downfall of the cheerleading coach, Sue Sylvester, who not only loses the national competition she was favored to win, but is humiliated by a Katie Couric intervi...

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...that they want to be in here.
Francine: What the hell are they?
Peter: They're us, that's all, when there's no more room in hell.
Stephen: What?
Peter: Something my granddaddy used to tell us. You know Macumba? Voodoo. Granddad was a priest in Trinidad. He used to tell us, "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth."
Romero here is not only criticizing our rampant consumerism (see Figures 1 and 2), but he is also connecting that lifestyle to some kind of cosmic punishment. If hell is full, then a lot of people have been damned for their misdeeds. The zombie plague becomes a kind of punishment for our rampant moral failures, both large and small. This point is driven home through the mimicry of zombies; what they do is not that different from what we do, but we recognize the monstrosity of the action more easily when it is done by a monster.