So there's been a lot of discussion of why zombies have surged in popularity in media in the last decade, and everyone has an opinion with very little in the way of quantitative facts.

The first thing I did was hop over to Google (company) Insights for Search ( http://www.google.com/insights/search/ ) to see if the assumption that zombies have recently become more popular holds true. Unsurprisingly, it appears that yes, it does:

You can see a huge increase in search interest in zombies around 2008 and another bump in early 2010 (oddly most popular in West Virginia). I believe a lot of this is due to the crazy success of the Call of Duty (video game) zombie stuff.

I then turned to Google Trends Correlate to see what search terms correlate most with the term "zombies" and... well... this doesn't seem too helpful:

Unless sharing on Facebook (product) really is causing the popularity increase in zombies. Who knows?! Maybe Facebook social sharing is really getting the zombie word out...?

Okay, so what are some theories that are bandied about about the rise in popularity?

I'm on the Zombie Research Society (ZRS) advisory board ( http://www.zombieresearch.org/advisoryboard.html ) and we've talked about this a lot. I was on an hour-long panel at Comic Con this year with World War Z (2013 movie) author Max Brooks, Matt Mogk (the head of the ZRS), and several other zombie experts:

(Note Max Brooks has a "Scott Kenemore" name tag in front of him... and yours truly shows up at 5:45! :D )

What follows is what I've heard the experts say as well as some of my own interpretations.

My favorite explanation for the general zombie popularity surge
The world is becoming an increasingly complex place with new modes of social interaction and communication, increased globalization, social change, unprecedented technological advances, financial prosperity mixed with uncertainty, and so on.

The great thing about the zombie genre is that it's more or less a blank slate upon which a writer can cast any number of big, unfathomable societal and psychological fears or concerns.

• Genetic modification? Zombies.
• Atomic weapons and radiation? Zombies.
• Class warfare? Zombies.
• Racism? Zombies.
• Existential crisis and uncertainty of the self/free-will? Zombies.
• Biological experimentation? Zombies
• Space exploration? Zombies.
• Runaway consumerism? Zombies.
• Pointlessness of violence? Zombies.
• Death? Zombies.

Max Brooks has a great sound-bite in this interview with CNN ( http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/10/02/zombie.love/ ):

"You can't shoot the financial meltdown in the head -- you can do that with a zombie... All the other problems are too big. As much as Al Gore tries, you can't picture global warming. You can't picture the meltdown of our financial institutions. But you can picture a slouching zombie coming down the street."

There may also be a political aspect: there's been a big rise in the US in recent years some form of Randian "Libertarianism (politics)". At the same time, the apocalypse genre in general seems to hold a certain appeal to survivalism/individualism types, so maybe there's a relationship there between shifts in US politics and zombie media... but that's totally anecdotal, but an interesting possibility.

As far as video games, I've also heard the practical argument that zombies are great for game makers because you can do more visually-brutal things to a zombie in a game than you could a person and get away with a less-harsh maturity rating because "they're not really people".

Relatedly, in 2004 Saw (movie series) came out to huge popularity. There's been a lot of commentary about the rise of the torture film genre (namely US society coming to grips with its views on the Bush-era torture and war policies such as at Abu Ghraib). Zombies may also give people a guilt-free "person" to see hurt/dismembered (similarly, I've semi-jokingly heard that Quentin Tarantino (director)chose Nazis for a movie topic for Inglourious Basterds (2009 Movie) because no one will ever complain about seeing Nazis tortured onscreen).

Finally, it's hard to ignore the run-away popularity phenomenon: a couple of really good pieces of zombie media were created and those spurred on copycats as well as genuine genre advances and evolution. In 2002 28 Days Later (movie) was released and was an amazing take on the zombie film genre that helped revitalize the zombie movie.

The same year, Resident Evil (games) was remastered and rereleased for the Nintendo GameCube (video game console) to huge critical acclaim (IGN's tagline says it all: "The prettiest, most atmospheric and all-around scariest game we've ever played": http://cube.ign.com/articles/358/358101p1.html ).

The following year in 2003 Max Brooks wrote the very popular Zombie Survival Guide which helped spur on various zombie books and literature.

Then in 2004 Shaun of the Dead came out and showed that the zombie genre could also be funny, leading to films like Zombieland, Fido, and others.

I would argue that technology has also played a role for the success of zombie video games. For a long time the games were of the single-player survival horror type. But as online console gaming became commonplace, co-operative survival horror games became possible giving us games like Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, the Call of Duty (video game series) zombie mods, Dead Island, and others.

In the end, there are a many factors that make the zombie thing work, but the one that can't be overlooked is just how much fun it is.