Aaron,
On 28 Days Later we should say they are not 'technically' zombies but
the 'infecteds'; although you could easily say 'they look like zombies,
they behave like zombies...'. Also in that scene why wouldn't the
father want to save his child from the threat he will embody? After all
people give up their lives for loved ones - the value here lies not in
his own life but his altruism for others (or a genetic fundamentalist
might say that his 'selfish genes' are ensuring their survival). On
this problem the depressing Right Next Door is rather interesting about
the moral problem of the infected person and how we should behave
towards them. The central characters wife is infected by an unknown
pathogen as a result of a dirty bomb and he keeps her out of their now
sealed house.
Your general point though is interesting. In Dawn of the Dead (1979) it
is those who cannot bear to realise that their loved ones will become
zombies who are most at risk for not disposing of them. In the context
of that film I see this as the inertia of the "old" society played
against the inertia of the "new" consumerist zombie order.
More generally it may be because zombies are the living dead - not
either dead or alive but a kind of pure or bare life. Therefore in the
zombie context what matters after our death does matter because we
won't be dead, we'll be zombies. I agree though the question of
family / love is often key. It struck me how in the Dawn of the Dead
remake critics mistook the little girl next door (the first on-screen
zombie for the daughter of the couple. Also, how this figures
catastrophe as the breakdown of the (suburban) social order of
the "neighbour".
Ben
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