exception is the low-budget Japanese zombie comedy One Cut of the Dead (2017), which became a sleeper hit in Japan, and it made box office history by earning over a thousand times its budget. One Cut of the Dead also received worldwide acclaim, with Rotten Tomatoes stating that it "reanimates the moribund zombie genre with a refreshing blend of formal daring and clever satire". The "romantic zombie" angle still remains popular, however: the late 2010s and early 2020s saw the release of the TV series American Gods and iZombie, as well as the 2018 Disney Channel Original Movie Zombies and sequels Zombies 2 (2020) and Zombies 3 (2022). Apocalypse Intimately tied to the concept of the modern zombie is that of the "zombie apocalypse": the breakdown of society as a result of an initial zombie outbreak that spreads quickly. This archetype has emerged as a prolific subgenre of apocalyptic fiction and has been portrayed in many zombie-related media after Night of the Living Dead. In a zombie apocalypse, a widespread (usually global) rise of zombies hostile to human life engages in a general assault on civilization. Victims of zombies may become zombies themselves. This causes the outbreak to become an exponentially growing crisis: the spreading phenomenon swamps normal military and law-enforcement organizations, leading to the panicked collapse of civilized society until only isolated pockets of survivors remain, scavenging for food and supplies in a world reduced to a pre-industrial hostile wilderness. Possible causes for zombie behavior in a modern population can be attributed to viruses, bacteria or other phenomena that reduce the mental capacity of humans, causing them to behave in a very primitive and destructive fashion. Subtext The usual subtext of the zombie apocalypse is that civilization is inherently vulnerable to the unexpected, and that most individuals, if desperate enough, cannot be relied on to comply with the author's ethos. The narrative of a zombie apocalypse carries strong connections to the turbulent social landscape of the United States in the 1960s, when Night of the Living Dead provided an indirect commentary on the dangers of conformity, a theme also explored in the novel The Body Snatchers (1954) and associated film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Many also feel that zombies allow people to deal with their own anxieties about the end of the world. One scholar concluded that "more than any other monster, zombies are fully and literally