American popular culture is overflowing with doomsday prophecies and end-of-the-world scenarios.. is there some weird kind of wish-fulfillment at work in all these visions of near-universal death and destruction?

Wish fulfillment refers to the satisfaction of a desire through an involuntary...

• As a medium, zombies can be used as a comparison and an example to better discuss concerns and problems in the community.
• It could also serve as a message to promote awareness on how zombies are being reflected in the society.

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 soc...

There is, at a very deep level, a growing dissatisfaction with the centralized status quo. But for most people, the solution is far from clear. In the popular imagination, central government is associated with order; the state and the society are understood to rise and fall together....

... refers to a powerful image of what governments try to do to their citizens — to create a uniform, homogeneous population, incapable of acting independently.