Usually, zombie films seem more focused on the immediate aftermath; survival in the short term rather than the long term. The focus here is on a familiar area becoming alien, not a new wilderness. But I'm open to being convinced....perhaps fantasy apocalypses are a way for creative types to explore the frontier mentality without having to deal with the messy political terrain with which The Wire involved itself. Shootouts and survival struggles for the middle class?I think there's something to this, though certainly works like The Passage, World War Z, to a lesser extent Year Zero and it looks like The Walking Dead and Monsters both deal with fairly long-term aftermaths of depopulating cataclysms. In The Passage, we're left with a tiny outpost of humanity that, for all it knows, is entirely alone in the world, cut off from communication and aid with any other enclave. The virals are their wolves, their outlaws and raiders. In this kind of apocalypse, it's true that familiar landscape is changed, rather than new landscape discovered, but the change is so radical that there's no way in which the survivors can function the same way in their old space. If the land isn't actually new, it's certainly made so.
Ned thinks something different:
I think it’s actually a good deal simpler than that....In most of these stories, on the other hand, people are just struggling to survive in a hostile, unfamiliar world. That leads me to think that the modern obsession with zombies, the collapse of civilization, and so on, has far more to do with our own anxieties about decline—particularly in the United States. We’re transfixed by post-apocalyptic scenarios because it so often feels like we’re sliding towards an apocalypse.He and I talked about this after he wrote it. I don't actually think that Americans today are actually convinced we're on the edge of an apocalypse. Rather, I think we're confounded by a number of challenges to our self-conception relative to the rest of the world, whether it's economic competition with China, or competition between Islam and Christian values (if you believe such values in conflict, which I want to make clear that I don't). If you look at apocalyptic movies like Independence Day or Deep Impact, they reassert American exceptionalism. The American president coordinates a successful global response. American ingenuity (with Russian help) finds a technological solution to extinction. In these international movies, points of reference are preserved overseas, and America has unique value—they generally provide a comforting message.
But in these depopulating apocalypses, the points of reference are wiped off the map essentially from the start, either because the rest of humanity has been destroyed, or because our characters survive in an area so devastated they have no ability to contact them, no awareness that anyone else is left alive, that any institutions of society still function, anywhere. It's a profound and unsettling isolation, and I think it's somehow different. I'm not yet sure how.