I disagree with this slightly. Video games were actually a pretty social experience for a long time and have always spurred creativity (making the games and problem solving when playing games). For the first, what 20 years or so maybe, video games were either played in an arcade with friends or you had to have friends…

Daisy headbands? That sounds suspiciously like craftin' to me! We had body hair and we liked it.

And what's the deal with this "numbers" stuff? When I was a lad, we just had "lots" and "none!"

Agriculture, ca. 10,000 BC.

What'dya mean I'm not helping!?

They do like to move it. Maybe that is why nobody has found the island

I wanted to add: zombies are also *democratic*. Their power is in numbers, and each has as much potential as the next. As a minority they are possibly beatable, but once they've massed and gain momentum, they're a tougher threat. In that way they are quite symbolically American (I'll not get into the commentary of…

Only a couple posts even remotely mentioned the obscene loss of individuality and free will, so I'll throw that in. Actually, taking that further, not just a loss of individuality and free will, BUT ALSO becoming something that takes that away from someone else, not through malicious intent, but as a mere *side…

The fear that we're killing ourselves with thoughtlessness.

For me, zombies are symbolic not only of—as many have said—our inevitable, unpredictable, sometimes slow, sometimes fast mortality, but also a form of escapism.

I've also heard theories that zombies stand in for alienation and social overload/personal isolation pressures.

on some level zombies represent mindless, destructive consumerism. It plays on the modern fear that our desires and appetites will destroy the world(climate change, poverty, etc...)

The oncoming geriatric stage of the Boomers? Truly the walking dead.

I think they represent the breakdown of law and order. A zombie filled world is a playground ripe for violence and aggression that people see as cathartic.

Because, zombies aren't the Other, zombies are Us.

Society turning on itself. If we're all infected then any of us could be an enemy at any time. Shades of the war on terror.

Zombies also represent the potential for disease epidemics to undermine civilization. It's an epidemiological phenomenon.

Also a satire on our more mindless pre-occupations, like shopping at…

I don't know if that's really a social psychological so much as a sociological one. For my ill-informed guess it means different things for different people. Anywhere from mindless consumerism to invading waves of immigrant Others. Hell it could possible touch on that for many privilege people the world in a shrinking…

This is usually my favorite go-to response for this question, but there are a few others depending on the genre and ultimate message of the media.

Things like "Reanimator" have more of a discussion on the folly of trying to control the inevitable, while things like "Sean of the Dead" have a more lighthearted approach…

I'm not sure why zombies specifically. It's also not clear why the specific choices in your original examples were made, though they seem less arbitrary.

One bit of analysis I've seen floating around is that zombies are a more elitist fear: of the breakdown of order that leads to a mindless mob smashing up cultured…

Immigration; that some unknown horde is going to come in and destroy our way of life and our identity.