A Safe Way To Learn

• Human beings, right from childhood are predisposed to pay attention to threats, making it hold our attention.
• Threat takes hold of our visual attention, cognition, memory, learning, and our words and actions.
• Someone already feeling anxious will get ‘sucked’ into the plot of a horror movie easily.
• The purpose of the inevitable ‘monster’ in any horror movie is to induce this anxiety and fear among the audience.

The horror movie experience gives us a chance to control our anxiety, as we can always cover our eyes, mute the audio, or turn the lights on. If we want more anxiety, we can do the opposite.

Feeling scary for a fictional story can be less consequential and even therapeutic.

A lot of symbolism can be interpreted in popular zombie films. 

The undead are the ultimate other of any us-and-them division, especially if you consider us to be savvy and them to be brainless. But Zombies were not used as just a frightening enemy, but were used to show the ills of the society: consumerism, capitalism, terrorism, etc. 

Zombie economics refers to theories or ideas that are long gone, but still refuse to die.

At this basic metaphorical level, "zombie economics," for example, can describe socialists or free-market thinking, depending on which side you believe holds the monopoly on functioning synapses.