I’m going to borrow from the horror master Stephen King, on the subject.

“We had gotten talking about the bulge in popularity of books concerning themselves with the supernatural. Gault pointed out that in the forties Weird Tales had only been able to pay a pittance, and then in the fifties it went broke. When the machines fail, he had said (while his wife candled eggs and roosters crowed querulously outside), when the technologies fail, when the conventional religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assault of a million fluorocarbon spray cans of deodorant.”

To paraphrase, we love horror because it’s simple. You see a zombie, you shoot it. You see a monster, you run. Suddenly the moment and you matters. Compared this to the horror of realizing all your career will not matter in a few decades, and you’ll probably die slowly and painfully due to the Twinkies you’ve been sneaking, the zombie is downright comforting.

