Morality In Stephen King's The Walking Dead

If we are all insane, then sanity becomes a matter of degree. Words said by a man many people know of, Stephen King. A lot of King’s short stories and books fall under the same category or genre of horror. Nationwide, King sells over a million copies of his books a year. Why? People love getting the shit scared out of them. Does that mean humans are psychotic? Possibly. But what we don't really pay attention to is why we enjoy it so much. The best parts of a horror film are when creepy things pop up, or when someone is about to die.Which occurs in a very popular show, The Walking Dead. Every Sunday 17.3 million people tune into AMC and are utterly captivated by the flesh eating zombies (Thomas). People enjoy watching horror because they could
live vicariously through the characters whom avoid morality issues, and death. When a person invests time into a show, they begin to feel like they are a part of it.
The creators of a television series try to suck in a person and keep them hooked on watching, which is why Netflix is so popular. By investing our time into shows, we learn things from what we see. Morality can be constructed through watching things such as, The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, and Sons of Anarchy. Not everything we watch could be a potential life lesson, but most of the time they are. On The Walking dead, there is a zombie apocalypse and between the few survivors there is still moral code [most of the time] (“The Walking Dead AMC”). The remaining survivors fight against the zombies. This show in particular depicts various acts of violence, and because it falls under the horror/drama category, we see the characters deal with immorality (“The Walking Dead AMC”). On season four episode three, one of the main characters Carol deals with the biggest morality issue yet. Rick, another main character and the main man in charge have all the survivors camped out and living in an old jail. The biggest issue they are having is that their survivors being infected with the disease that is turning people into zombies. Carol has to decide if she has to kill the two survivors who were infected, causing the others to also get the infectious disease. She goes through with it and kills the two infected survivors and burns the remaining corpse. When Rick asks Carol if she was the one that killed
them she simply said, “yes” and walked away (Patrick). As humans we are intrigued by watching the characters like Carol deal with arduous moral dilemmas. Living vicariously means living through someone else's experiences. That's why so many people like watching reality television. The irony with that is that reality television is scripted but people still want to be like The Kardashians. Everything is so perfect for Kardashian family members unlike the fictional characters on The Walking Dead. That does not mean that people don't look up to, or want to be like characters like Daryl and Rick. The fans of The Walking Dead are so in love with Daryl they all want to be a badass like him. Uproxx describes Daryl as, “jagged amalgamation of masculinity, courage, compassion, brutality, and grit glued together by a dithering sense of honor and unwavering backwoods wisdom” (Figueroa). Daryl Dixon is known for using his crossbow and wearing a poncho. On an episode while he's riding his horse it gets spooked, sending Daryl down a valley and causing him to impale himself with his own arrows, leaving him weak and vulnerable to the spine chilling zombies. Like he always does, Daryl makes a comeback and takes out all the zombies, making a necklace out of their ears (Figueroa). Now tell me that’s not badass. While watching all of this, your adrenaline is pumping faster each second, the thrill becomes so real. Ten percent of the American population love the adrenaline rush (Tartakovsky). At this point many of us would be yelling at the tv telling Daryl to get up when he was down. Things like this don't happen in real life, so when it happens on tv we get pleasure out of it. We escape our own reality and live through the characters on the show. That's why we get so attached to them and God forbid one of them dies, we cry as if we knew them personally (I fall victim to this). We find what we lack in other people; in this case it's the characters on the walking dead.Which is what makes it the top watched show on tv this year (“Most Popular TV Series”). If you asked ten individuals what their biggest fear is, eight out of the ten would say they are afraid to die.
No one wants to die because we don't know if there is an afterlife. As humans we try to avoid talking about death. Our children play video games where the characters can get shot multiple times and still ‘start over’ giving them another life to live. They also watch shows where vampires can come back to life and live forever. Giving us the impression that humans are immortal. A common thought a person might have is what they would do if there was an apocalypse, more importantly a zombie apocalypse. I’m sure you wouldn't know how to answer that exactly. A popular genre of shows and movies out today deal with the end of the world, and it's so common because as individuals we project our emotions onto other people, or through things.That's why we love watching things that deal with death, because we want to know how the characters deal with it when in reality we are afraid to. Forty five minutes are spent watching people fight zombies and try to survive, making it quite entertaining. We see how the survivors have to deal with life after death, which makes us feel some sort of comfort. I took the time to ask a close friend why she thinks people are afraid to die she responded, “if the characters on The Walking Dead survive the zombie apocalypse and death, it's possible we can too. In a sense the characters give the viewers hope because ultimately we are afraid of
the unknown” (Alcazar). The mystery of the afterlife will not be solved until we get to that point in life and until then we fear the reaper, and avoid the reality of death. As humans we are intrigued by watching weird, gruesome, and unnatural things. Just looking at the list of the top shows in 2015, half the shows fall into the horror or thriller category. Watching shows or movies like The Walking Dead ultimately let us choose which character we want to be. We would be in control of how we want to take action or responsibility. If there are no people living on earth, should one still have morals? That would be your choice. How many times can you be in a life or death situation without ever dying? An unlimited number of times according to Walking Dead, and we love that.