In the sixth season of the zombie series, the surviving humans build a fence to keep the flesh-eaters out. But all their efforts are undermined by the threat from within, raising uncomfortable parallels with real-world events

Whatever humans do, the zombies just keep coming. Slowly, true, but implacably. In the opening episode of the sixth season of The Walking Dead, the humans are strengthening a security fence around the Alexandria free zone, somewhere in Virginia, to keep out a new horde of the undead and ensure that their semblance of civilisation is not overrun by the barbarian other.

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It is hard not to be struck by real-world parallels: Donald Trump or Nigel Farage’s foreign policy platforms, the fence between Hungary to keep Syrian refugees out, the breached fences at the Eurotunnel terminal near Calais, or fears this year among British villagers near Heathrow of being overwhelmed by asylum seekers.

That oxymoron, western civilisation, is more terrified of the other than ever. No wonder the zombie genre is in rude health: its appeal, in part, is because it is an allegory for western fear of a world collapsing into terror, anarchy and savagery.

Ever since our hero, Georgia cop Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), awoke in hospital five seasons ago in 2010 to realise he was living in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, The Walking Dead has teemed with uncomfortable political and environmental resonances. The refugee crisis, resentment over immigration, beheadings by Isis, Islamophobia, distrust of government, the ruination of our planet – all have their parallels, for anyone with the wit to watch the show as more than horror thriller.

But The Walking Dead has never been more topical than in this new season. As Grimes, the cop-turned-leader of an embattled group of human survivors, struggles to repel the latest horde of zombies, the drama parallels how the western world yearns to pull up the drawbridge to keep the undesirables out. US presidential hopeful Trump, for instance, said in a speech earlier this year: “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” No matter that a US Government Accountability Office report in 2009 estimated that the cost of building one mile of fencing along the 1,933-mile long US-Mexican border averaged between $2.8m and $3.9m (you do the math, or as we say over here, maths).

But 2015’s fetish for fences, and the fear of the other that their construction demonstrates, are not new. They are structural features of life in modern western societies. In this, zombie dramas are allegories of human ruthlessness under capitalism; Europe is a fortress to keep out the other, as is the US, and also the Alexandria free zone in The Walking Dead.

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In his 2005 book, Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals (In the World Interior of Capital), the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argued that capitalism functions, in part, by creating exclusive spaces – be they gated estates, malls with security guards, or fortress Europe – to keep out the undesirable and unmoneyed, those who look different and don’t speak the local language. He didn’t mention zombies, but he could have done.

The blueprint for capitalism’s ruthless exclusion of the other was, Sloterdijk argued, Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, built to house London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 “that invoked the idea of an enclosure so spacious that one might never have to leave it”. Inside the latter, the world’s most diverting flora, fauna and industrial products were displayed in climate-controlled, obligingly sanitary conditions under one roof, thus precluding the necessity for travel, while whatever remained outside (war, genocide, slavery, unpleasant tropical diseases) dwindled into irrelevance. In that respect, Crystal Palace was the blueprint for how capitalism has functioned since. “Who can deny,” Sloterdijk writes, “that in its primary aspects, the western world – especially the European Union – embodies such a great interior today?”

The only problem is, as The Walking Dead tells us, that it is very difficult to keep the undesirables from getting in, from ruining what we hold dear and gnawing on our very vitals. Truly, The Walking Dead tells us, we are just one bite away from becoming zombies ourselves, from dying and being reanimated as the undesirable other, from losing our humanity and becoming a pest that needs and deserves to be stabbed to death for the good of civilisation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Clinging on to their civilisation … Seth Gilliam as Father Gabriel. Photograph: Gene Page/AMC/AMC/Lionsgate

In seasons two and three of The Walking Dead, the human survivors, led by Grimes, hole up in a former prison. The irony of the situation is hardly lost on the new inmates: to be free from the undead threat, the humans need to lock themselves up in a jail. In the bowels of the prison they find a bunch of prisoners who have been locked up for months and so are unaware that the zombie apocalypse has taken place in the wider world. “There’s no government, no hospitals, no police. It’s all gone,” Grimes explains to the disbelieving inmates. “No phones, no computers. As far as we can see, at least half the population has been wiped out.” Grimes’ hope is that he and his band of human survivors can establish a secure home in this prison, ring-fenced from a world that has reverted to the war of all against all, a state of nature in which there are, as Thomas Hobbes put it, “no arts, no letters, no society, and which is, worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Plus zombies.

But then more zombies invade the prison, driving Grimes and his gang from their fortress and on into their seemingly hopeless quest to find a safe haven from the undesirables. Their drama, for western viewers worried about their own security in the face of terror threats and immigration, is compellingly resonant.

One of the things that makes The Walking Dead poignant is that the ring-fenced interior of the capital has fallen apart: there is, as Bob Dylan put it, no direction home. In it, the west’s worst nightmare is realised – that we have been driven from our comfortable homes, forced to fend for ourselves using survivalist skills that we would have learned if we had paid closer attention to Bear Grylls. Your Facebook friends and Twitter followers won’t help you now. It’s time to neglect personal daintiness and cover yourself with zombie blood if you are to survive the zombie end times.

The west’s worst nightmare is realised – we’re driven from our comfortable homes, forced to fend for ourselves

This is one reason why the US series has been so popular, and why there is a Walking Dead computer game, a post-episode microanalysis called Talking Dead, dozens of live blogging sites and, my personal favourite, a site called Interrogating the Ideology with a Chainsaw, which explores the philosophical lessons of the series.

The zombie genre is one of the most fruitful of horror narratives because in it, each of us is one bite away from becoming the other. Time and again in The Walking Dead, a human will be bitten by a zombie and then one of their family will have to kill them as they reanimate. In season one, shockingly, Andrea sat in vigil overnight beside her zombie-bitten sister and, when the latter awoke, stabbed her in the head. In this, again, the drama has horribly poignant resonances for the nature of capitalism in an age in which social exclusion is common, in which compassion is a luxury and humans risk becoming dehumanised creatures that are either useful or expendable. It’s resonant because we fear that our human relations could be similarly destroyed; worse, that we might become dehumanised things even to those we love.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Abandoned cars near Fukushima, Japan, September 2015. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

The world, too, has become a thing that we destroy in The Walking Dead. In the very first episode, Grimes saddled up and rode a horse along the freeway into Atlanta. On the opposite carriageway were miles of cars abandoned during the zombie apocalypse, and the city itself was a ruin ruled by the undead. Recently, when Polish photographer Arkadiusz Podniesinski was given a permit to enter the 20km exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station that suffered a tsunami-triggered triple meltdown in 2011, he recorded a similar landscape: abandoned cars, playgrounds turning to rust and ruin, a human world despoiled and apocalyptic. “Post-apocalyptic photos of Fukushima look like scenes from Walking Dead,” was the inevitable headline.

Perhaps most resonantly, The Walking Dead works as an unremitting critique of the effeteness of life within the capitalist interior. It asks its too-comfortable viewers the difficult existential questions: would you survive in a post-apocalyptic scenario without broadband, dental floss and artisanal cheeses? When all the canned foods have been looted from the grocery stores, would you have the right stuff to carry on and rebuild society? Or would you envy the dead and do what is necessary to join them?

In exploring such questions, The Walking Dead is akin to many post-apocalyptic horror dramas such as Danny Boyle’s 2001 film, 28 Days Later, the 2008 BBC series Survivors, or John Wyndham’s 1955 novel, The Chrysalids, about a post-nuclear apocalypse society. Each takes us out of our comfort zones and into uncomfortable ones.

It’s striking, for instance, that in The Chrysalids, the survivors live in a society reminiscent of the American frontier during the 18th century, with the technological status echoing the Amish. In The Walking Dead, that frontier spirit is a useful virtue to have. In this allegorical world, too, democracy is expendable. Grimes and the Governor (the one-eyed dictator played by David Morrissey who leads a rival group of human survivors) both rule through brutal dictatorial power, manufacturing consent by force of will and arms. One of The Walking Dead’s most difficult resonances is that it expresses a very American distrust of government and the sense that, in extremis, democracy gets in the way of a well-ordered society.

One of The Walking Dead’s most difficult resonances is that it expresses a very American distrust of government

It is also unremittingly violent and that too has real-world resonances. Stabbing zombies through the eyes, just like offing vampires with a stake through the heart, expresses our desire to terminate the other with extreme prejudice and no consequences. Ukip’s election manifesto just didn’t have the courage to express its supporters’ repressed desires. The zombie genre gives us a safe fictional space to explore our fears and our furies.

The anthropologist and Zucotti Park activist David Graeber once told me that the threat of violence underpins society: it’s there, we just don’t see it. In zombie dramas such as The Walking Dead, scarcely a scene goes by without a zombie being stabbed in the eye, having its cranium sliced in two with an axe or being shot in the face with a crossbow.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Katana-wielding Michonne (Danai Gurira). Photograph: Gene Page/AMC/AMC

Consider, for instance, my favourite character, Michonne. Before the apocalypse, she was a lawyer. Now, in the eschatological age, she’s a terrifying warrior, fast-handed with her katana, a long sword used by Japanese samurai. With her sword and perma-glower, she looks like an online avatar on to which one projects one’s fantasies. Maybe mutating from bloodsucking lawyer to bloodletting zombie killer wasn’t much of a career change.

But what’s striking is that she uses a katana rather than a gun to kill her prey. Although there are enough discharged firearms in The Walking Dead to keep the National Rifle Association drooling, the favoured weapons against the undead are axes, knives, swords and crossbows. Why? Because shooting a zombie is so noisy that it risks attracting more zombies, and because to kill a zombie you have to stick something – blade, axe, sharp stick – in its brain. That kind of termination is better done up close and personal. As a result, killing becomes an intimate activity.

Michonne’s drama is painfully resonant for us, posing difficult questions for effete westerners: what would you do to survive? Would you kill your nearest and dearest? Would you keep them alive even if they were zombies? Would you turn your loved ones into pets to help you survive? The Walking Dead thereby gives us an allegory of what capitalism does to human beings – it dehumanises us, reduces us to mere things that can be used.

At the end of the premiere of the last season, Grimes and his gang of survivors have strengthened the perimeter fence around the Alexandria free zone, but realise they need to do more if they are to survive the looming zombie assault. Thousands of zombies have escaped from a quarry where they had been milling aimlessly for ages (it must be great fun to be one of the many zombie extras in The Walking Dead, although, ultimately, all that slow walking, growling and biting must get a bit samey for those with ambitions to win Emmys) and are now mincing – is mincing the right word? – towards the free zone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest They’re coming to destroy your way of life … Photograph: Gene Page/AMC/AMC/Lionsgate

What can the humans do? Grimes realises that the zombies can be lured away from Alexandria if humans offer themselves up as bait. Grimes enlists Daryl Dixon (played by Norman Reedus) to drive very slowly on his motorbike in front of a column of zombies. As they slowly follow him and other humans down the blacktop, Dixon looks like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn on a Harley. The zombies are tempted away from the free zone by the scent of human flesh, and the hope is he and other humans will steer them 20 miles away, thus ending the zombie threat to the Alexandria free zone. Perhaps the humans can finally live free from the other. But at the very end of the episode, this cunning plan goes disastrously wrong. From within the free zone, someone sounds a horn. The zombie hordes, en masse, turn towards the noise and start shambling towards it. They are moving, slowly, implacably, towards the human settlement where, quite possibly, they will break through the fences and feast on the human flesh within. The credits roll, leaving us on a cliffhanger with lots of questions – will the zombies get in? Who sounded the horn? And why?

The enemy, it seems, is within. This has long been a staple of the horror genre. You lock the doors, bolt the windows, sharpen the razor wire and find you’ve locked the evil inside. Again, this has uncomfortable political resonances. Domestic Islamophobia is often premised on the fear that British values are being corrupted from inside and that British resolve against a hostile other is impaired by the enemy within. The resentment for Mexican immigrants that Trump clearly hopes to capitalise on for his presidential bid involves fears of similar corruption.

So far, we haven’t considered the zombies’ perspective. What do they want? Not much. Just to chew, if not ingest, human flesh. In order to have that, they need at least some of us humans to survive. That is the only good news that one might take from The Walking Dead. If the zombies are our enemies, then at least they don’t want to kill us all off. The same, it’s worth pointing out, is not true of golfers. In the otherwise depressing post-apocalyptic scenario explored in The Walking Dead, I find that thought a consolation.