In the first sequence of the first episode of The Walking Dead, deputy sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) is searching abandoned cars along a deserted road for gasoline when he spots a little girl moving among the vehicles.  He calls out to her, and she approaches, a zombie child, bloody, torn face, exposed teeth, and pale eyes - moppet as monster.  She staggers towards him hungrily and Grimes, wincing, shoots her in the head.  It’s a graphic and bloody scene, and one of the most shocking cold opens in the history of T.V.  It contains so many of the elements of the zombie genre - the isolation of a last human, the post-apocalyptic landscape scattered with abandoned artifacts of human existence, the search for resources, the monster as someone we would normally protect, and the breaking of social taboos.   The unease of seeing taboos subverted - cannibalism on the side of the zombies, almost all other social conventions on the side of the humans - is a chief appeal and an important source of unease in the zombie narrative.

“It’s not about the zombies,” the cast members of The Walking Dead assure us on some of AMC’s promo ads for the show.   They tell us it’s about the characters, about relationships, about survival, and about how people change as they struggle to survive.  The other ads, of course, show many zombies.   Close-ups of zombies, hordes of zombies, drooling, bloody, staggering zombies. The promotional “making of” videos on The Walking Dead’s webpage spend a lot of time discussing the nature of zombies, zombie make-up,  zombie choreography, and how fantastically cool it is to be making a show about zombies.

Is there a contradiction here?  Possibly some snobbery — horror is silly, unless you’re doing characterization by Chekhov? Or just an attempt to appeal to as many different demographics as possible?  A bit of both, I suspect.  Stephen King is often credited critically for his characterization and plotting, rarely for his imagination or encyclopedic knowledge of horror tropes.   And AMC is the station whose slogan is, “Stories Matter Here.”

No matter how they try to sell it, zombies make for good stories.  If The Walking Dead was a mediocre show, it still would have been a success as far as ratings, at least for the first few episodes.  That it’s a fine show means some of the largest ratings for a cable program ever.

The first season of The Walking Dead, based on the hit comic by Robert Kirkman, is compelling, and often tense, television.  It has a consistently strong cast, some excellently filmed action, and solid (though sometimes inconsistent) scripts.  Director Frank Darabont’s choice to shoot the show on Super 16 film gives the whole series the desaturated colors and slightly grainy looks of late sixties and seventies films.  This look is perfect for those of us who know the horror films of that period - the period that spawned the first modern zombies.

Darabont — director of The Mist, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and scribe of many other films - tells us on the AMC site that he had always been a fan of George A. Romero’s “Dead” films, had wanted to make a zombie movie, but could think of nothing to do that was new in the genre for cinema.  Adapting Kirkman’s comic books for television has given him the chance to explore what he sees as the most fascinating aspect of a zombie apocalypse - the attempts at survival by the remaining humans.

The first short season, six episodes long, Darabont (most often by directly adapting Kirkman’s situations) takes us through the elements that have come before in zombie films, as if to get them out of the way: a character awakes from a coma to find that the zombie apocalypse has happened while he’s unconscious (28 Days Later), isolated humans scramble for goods and guns (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead), racism comes into play as characters try to work together (NOTLD), and some characters find themselves uniquely suited to cope with the end of the world (Shawn of the Dead, NOTLD).

In the Romero tradition the zombies are slowish, dim, cannibalistic, and the only way to kill them is to take out the brain.   Darabont has always had a talent for characterization, so while navigating these tropes we watch a band of survivors try to cope with each other while fighting off monsters, make alliances, make mistakes, and develop deeper relationships.  Some of this, especially an adulterous subplot, dips into soap opera.  And it’s likely that what we’re really seeing is competent and manipulative horror being made - if you’re going to menace, mutilate, and kill characters, it’s much more effective if we get to know and care about them first.

The first season consists of a lot of fairly slow-moving character work, punctuated by explosions of action.  When considering the story arc of these first six episodes, it seems likely that Frank Darabont, much more practiced in cinema, might have conceived of the whole first season as a long pilot episode.  (The show had a second season approved before the first season was finished shooting - which suggests that Darabont and his writers could make long-term plans).  Consider the structure of the series:

1. The first episode introduces Rick Grimes and his experiences post-coma coping with the end of the world
2. The second episode Rick meets the band of survivors that include his wife and son in Atlanta
3. The third we establish the relationships among the survivors in detail and discover Rick’s inflexible moral drive
4. The fourth we have a failed rescue in Atlanta and an attack on the survivor camp
5. The fifth the survivors have to finally make long-term plans and find themselves trapped outside of CDC
6. The last episode the survivors find out that the government has no solutions to the zombie outbreak

For a running time of just under four hours, we have a very short TV season, or a long zombie movie, and I’m voting for the latter.  It ends when all the traditional options for a solution have been exhausted and next season I suspect we’ll be dealing much more with the questions of survival that Darabont and Kirkman are interested in.

Final thoughts: why the success of this often excellent series, and the success of zombies (in film and pop culture) in general?  Some of this may be the obvious stuff - - the basic horror of it all, the tension of the transgression of taboos, the appeal of violence, the sheer video-game fun of zombie kills.  And the ubiquity of the zombie is often because it is a relatively cheap monster - put some makeup on your friends and have them shamble - the reason that filmmakers such as George A. Romero and Sam Raimi utilized them (though the inexpensive zombie has now been replaced by the much more frightening and relatively inexpensive sparkly, sexually-ambiguous vampire).

I suspect that the reason that zombies are so frighteningly appealing, to an audience, is in our dreams.  Philosopher-historian Will Durant suggested, in his Story of Civilization, that the reason we believe in an afterlife is that the dead visit us in our dreams. As anyone who has lost someone knows, our sleep is not safe from the walking dead, and they are often mute or inarticulate, and even if welcome, always eerie.  The zombie seems to fit right into a niche that our subconscious mind creates on its own.  Even though other monsters of popular culture creep their way into our dreams because we first saw them on the screen, the zombie cozies up to something that is already there.