'Santa Clarita Diet' and Why Zombies Will Never Die

Netflix's 'Santa Clarita Diet' twists the zombie genre even more, and proves why it'll be around forever.

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Zombies just won’t die. We’ve spent the last handful of years beating the proverbial dead horse with a seemingly endless crop of zombie pop culture, bombarded by everything from the likes of Rob Thomas’ quirky iZombie to the Jane Austen adaptation Pride & Prejudice & Zombies to of course, The Walking Dead. But as TWD’s ratings drop as the series bungles one dramatic turn after the next—this season, it hit lows not seen since Season 3—and cultural attention turns to other tantalizing Sunday night delights, the future of zombies is increasingly uncertain. 

Enter The Santa Clarita Diet, a seemingly cheerful, Drew Barrymore-led Netflix series that flips the script on apple pie sitcom traditions with a matriarch who just so happens to also be an undead, man-munching zombie taking purposeful aim on the “deplorables” of her charming California town. Our first looks at the series have been surprisingly sunny, if a little vicious, but I can’t help but feel like the sheer existence of the show raises some questions about the zombie genre as a whole.  

As we all know, there’s no quicker way to ruin something fun and moderately edgy than with ubiquity. See: Paul Ryan dabbing, Taco Bell tweeting “Taco Bae,” Netflix casting Drew Barrymore as a zombie. Are zombies, as a lip-glossed Hilary Duff might scoff in an early aughts drama, “totally over?” 

The answer to that question, as it turns out, requires a little zombie movie history. You see, for about as long as we’ve been telling the story of the zombie, we’ve been channeling modern anxieties through them. Walkers were first introduced as a racially-charged “other,” characterized by their savage and cannibalistic tendencies and raw instinct in books and early horror flicks. Michael Jackson played with the trope in Thriller. George A. Romero attempted to defy it by casting Doug Jones, a black man, as his lead in Night of the Living Dead, a film that also used a racist posse of sheriffs to violently dispatch its zombies, a decision that mimicked the racially motivated violence that marred 1968. 

Then, as the nation’s attention turned from the racial unrest inside the country to the war outside, the genre began to reflect cultural anxiety about the Vietnam War and the public’s growing distrust of the nation. Instead of abandoning the genre, the new cultural climate encouraged Romero to ratchet up the violence and the sharpness of his carnage with the grotesque and consumer-focused Dawn of the Dead, a bloody, technicolored affair that helped trigger a new trend of hyper-violent zombie films. Even after the war, Sam Raimi, Stuart Gordon, and Peter Jackson explored the trend with nasties like The Evil Dead, Dead Alive, and Re-Animator, leaning into the public’s new taste for onscreen violence and having a ton of fun in the process. 

Romero, ever political, also made The Crazies, a zombie flick that cashed in on the nation’s newly revived distrust of the government and their worries about the potential of biological warfare. But that concept was perhaps best explored in Danny Boyle’s terrifying 28 Days Later, which hit screens just a year after a wave of Anthrax attacks shook the U.S., and featured seemingly unstoppable zombies infected with a mystery “rage virus.”

For a while, it looked as though zombies were flagging as comedic riffs like Shaun of the Dead, Dead Snow, and Zombieland had their way with the genre’s tropes and Hollywood churned out batches of warmed over reboots. But then came independent film and TV, which brought a new plethora of zombie apocalypse visions. The low-key grime of The Battery and the balls-out nuttiness of Wyrmwood may have flown under the radar during their limited release, but the movies astutely poked at our unease surrounding fossil fuels and the environment. Elsewhere, Charlie Brooker’s Dead Set took dead aim at reality television culture and tech obsession. And amidst the indie action, a phenomenon was born, thanks to the gritty gleam of The Walking Dead.

Night of the Living Dead

The Walking Dead, for what it’s worth, managed to combine the fears of nearly all of the zombie waves that came before it, and maybe it’s that finely-tuned concoction that’s managed to keep it on the air for so long despite the show’s diminishing returns. Timed almost uncannily with an ebola outbreak that triggered nationwide hysteria, The Walking Dead’s constant calamity helps to put the anxieties of simply existing in an increasingly connected world into calming relief. It’s chaotic, evil escapism, allowing all of us to imagine what exactly we would do if things really did go to shit.

One calamitous election later and we’re still watching (for now, anyway), but we’re also looking at an interesting new element of the genre: life after the zombie outbreak. Two films made in the past year, the eye-popping Train to Busan and The Girl With All The Gifts, focus their stories through the eyes of future generations, sidelining the traditional “search for a cure” thrust in order to explore the future of the zombie infection, and the realities of carrying on amongst ever-encroaching decay. 

And then there’s The Santa Clarita Diet, the off-kilter Modern Family riff that isn’t dealing with an apocalypse at all, but the real world headaches that come with living a life with a dark and sometimes wonderful disease (despite being literally dead), and all the iffy moral implications that come with it. And while the upbeat tone and sitcom take on the genre will likely put off hardcore genre fans, it’s not so much a suburban harbinger of doom for the genre as it is a sign of its much-needed evolution in tumultuous times. As we continue to use imaginary zombies to cope with very real anxieties, we might just need the undead to make it out of this whole thing alive. 

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