Last Sunday evening, AMC broadcast the season 1 finale for its hit series The Walking Dead. Based on a graphic novel, Dead tells the story of a group of people struggling to survive and relate in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. The director, Frank Darabont, shopped the idea to several channels with no success until AMC decided to greenlight the project. It certainly looks like it was worth the risk.
To nearly everyone’s surprise, the show attracted 5.3 million viewers for its premiere episode on Halloween night, and continuously sustained viewers twice that of AMC’s other hit series, Mad Men. The season finale provided an exclamation point to that early success, attracting 6 million viewers.
For some time now horror has been the focus of academic study, especially within religious studies. Turns out the final episode of Walking Dead was a case study for the intersection of zombies and theology, and a pointer toward the evolution of both scientific and popular thinking on the soul.
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