For the last five years, pop culture has fixated on things that just won’t stay dead. Stephenie Meyer and her Twilight series helped give birth to a sea of pulp-fiction, television and cinematic knock-offs. But Jacob the werewolf and Edward the vampire are no longer in vogue. In 2013 their un-dead shoes are fast being filled by the zombie, a particularly “working class” monster, offering an entirely different spiritual perspective.

My friend Al first suggested the working class nature of zombies. I asked why he preferred shows like the hit TV series The Walking Dead over the Twilight saga and he said that, apart from not being a 14 year-old girl, there was something more down to earth about a zombie. “You’ll never catch a zombie in designer jeans!” he said – a point that’s admittedly hard to argue against. But Al is not alone; producers are beginning to share his appreciation. B-grad zombie films are a Hollywood staple but this year three major releases will lead those stumbling corpses right into the mainstream.

In June this year Brad Pitt will star as Gerry Lane, a United Nations employee at the heart of World War Z. A zombie pandemic is sweeping the globe, resulting in millions of undead overrunning armies and governments. In September Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges will put zombies to work in R.I.P.D – the Rest In Peace Department, a police unit staffed by undead officers. But even that bizarre story line takes a back seat to Warm Bodies, the zombie love story. This month Nicholas Hoult plays a deceased teenager who falls in love with one of earth’s last surviving girls – shortly after he finishes eating her boyfriend. More on this in a moment…

Hollywood is one of the best barometers for measuring what appeals to people (their business model depends upon it) and the seismic shift in taste from vampires to zombies points to the increasing popularity of a particular way of seeing death. Meyer and her cohorts were all about immortality. Their story lines presented a very youthful desire to be good looking, rich and powerful forever and their popularity reflected the very real hunger for a place in a beautiful, unchanging world that God has placed in the human heart. Death, in short, could be defeated. Zombies signal something different altogether.

The zombie is what’s left over when the human being is gone, the meat that can be stabbed, shot and set on fire without harming our morals. In fact those who don’t realise that death is the end, and insist on seeing some link between their departed loved ones and the figure shambling towards them, are generally on tonight’s menu. Zombies are an atheist’s apocalypse, the ultimate proof there can’t be a God because He couldn’t allow this to happen, even though He hasn’t. And the biggest difference between the decaying zombie and the well-dressed vampire is the conviction that there is no coming back from death. It’s not a doorway, it’s a dead-end. Which is why I find Warm Bodies so interesting.

Unlike the vast majority of zombie films, Warm Bodies suggests there is a cure to the plight of the living dead. The factor that restores the colour to our zombie boyfriend’s skin is his encounter with love. Somewhere deep in the public subconscious we accept the premise that love is capable of bringing people back to life. Of course Hollywood has experimented with this formula in lots of ways, and I see it as another God-buried truth. If we’re going to rise from our graves, if we’re going to be united with those we desire the most then love will play the crucial role. Or, as the apostle Paul puts it, “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in our transgressions…” Next year Hollywood will undoubtedly discover a whole new way for love to deliver someone from the grave, but it remains a story line we can’t easily evade.