The University of Baltimore is offering a Zombie class this semester. The course description (from Yahoo! news):

Students taking English 333 will watch 16 classic zombie films and read zombie comics. As an alternative to a final research paper they may write scripts or draw storyboards for their ideal zombie flicks.

I’m not sure how this is news, but I support it. I took a class on horror literature in college, which was considerably more broad; it studied Poe, Lovecraft, Dracula, Frankenstein, King, etc. There’s very little difference between studying horror literature and studying dystopian literature, so I’m not sure why studying Dawn of the Dead and The Walking Dead is newsworthy but reading 1984 and A Brave New World isn’t. Both genres abstract our current fears into monsters or societies which don’t exist. Or in the case of zombie literature, monster societies which don’t exist. While the dystopian novels might be more prolific, people have been enjoying stories about zombies, vampires, wolfmen, and monsters for hundreds of years.

In fact, of the remaining horror types, I think we’re moving away from a fear of things like the wolfman and mummy, and becoming more afraid of zombies, robots, and aliens. Vampires, once creatures of secret castles hidden deep in dark Germanic woods, now go to high school and work a 9 – 5, so they continue to haunt the public imagination. They do have the advantage of being normal looking people, which has hurt the image of the mummy and Franken-monster in popular culture, as there are fewer places for a monster like that to hide. The last thing I heard about a mummy was written by Josh Ritter, and was actually somewhat sweet. But as science and technology marches on, the scourge of zombification or the rise of the robots seems more realistic, and therefore, more terrifying. The further we explore the reaches of our universe, the more horror films we will see staring slimy monsters from space, exploiting our fear of the unknown darkness of the night sky.

I’m all in favor of a zombie literature class. If nothing else, zombie literature demonstrates excellent character development through the stress of being a survivor, and many are Utopian works in reverse, showing how to unify and rebuild after a great loss. Plus, I’d take any class that let’s you watch Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland.