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you're thinking of the original series
they did a reboot - 4 movies, 3 of which have been released so far.
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the original tv show had 26 episodes and a movie called end of evangelion that retold the last 2 episodes, or perhaps came after it, it's hard to say what it was. unless you've seen that you haven't really seen evangelion. that movie is a masterpiece.
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as for the post christianity thing-
so christianity dies in the mind of anyone who isn't brain damaged but it lives on in the unconscious. so you get this post christianity which totally dominates us now.
it's basically concerned with retrofitting the basic structure of christianity onto a secular and disenchanted world.
if you start to look for it you'll find evidence for it everywhere
the idea that if we can just find one "redeeming feature" in people then it's all worth it. the idea of an inner salvation through the self. the idea that negativity and making nihilism explicit are the symptoms of a damned soul, whereas positivity for its own sake and the denial of nihilism are redemptive. the idea that our entertainment industry constitutes a pure context free space of "enjoyment" which is like the sacrament, the holy ghost. the idea that a kind of belief in denying bad things is a substitute for morality. we don't want to face the truth so we use post modern relativism to make belief itself apparently meaningful. atheists are just as guilty of this, because they believe in belief. also, having good intentions is the replacement for faith in god.
but this ideology is really shaky and it doesn't really have a way of getting reality to confirm it.
the zombie and post apocalyptic genres exploded after the war in iraq was lost, which was a war to remake humanity into liberal democratic subjects (through murder). the suppressed rage at humanity for rejecting this imposition of a secular universalism that was supposed to bring it salvation, and the refusal to accept responsibility for what we did, which would entail questioning our very identity seems to manifest in zombie and post apocalyptic fiction.
there was no baghdad manhatten chase like the neo cons promised, no statue of milton friedman outside a baghdad mcdonalds which is what they ACTUALLY SAID WOULD HAPPEN. it wasn't a "zero casualities" war like they promised. it's not just that our invasion caused the death of over a million people, it's that it actually regressed the country to a state worse than what it was under a leader who was basically a secular dictator. we didn't economically benefit from the war, didn't even grab any loot. we basically just threw soldiers at it, and more of them choose to shoot themselves in the head than died in combat. we dismantled the government and destroyed the infrastructure and our dream of a free market utopia didn't magically spring from our imaginations into reality.
zombies originated as a myth that french slave owners in haiti told their black slaves in order to stop them committing suicide due to their harsh conditions. the myth was that if you killed yourself your masters, who were of course made in gods image, would control your soul and you'd become a puppet slave and tend the fields for eternity. it was literally a myth designed to make the black slaves work themselves to death instead of killing themselves.
then in the 60's romero rejigged the whole zombie thing. he was brought up a catholic and explicitly linked that to his zombie films.
i think zombies function now as a way for the western culture to desperately try and rediscover its disgusting fantasy of its "authentic humanity". basically its vanity and rage at its own technoscience disenchanting it from its sick religion. zombie movies always sort humanity into the damned and the saved, and the post apocalyptic thing is an obvious metaphor for the collapse of the US empire. the fantasy is that it hasn't collapsed, just imploded, and by hacking and slashing away all the damned traitors who didn't believe in it, secular man can remake the christian covenant in his own image.
the zombie is obviously a christian fantasy. it's a corpse without a soul. it's the excess of animality - raw drive and craving. it's the fantasy that the soul of a person lives within us and our experience since we now know it isn't going to heaven.
most zombie films use this trope - it's a secular way of sublimating the horror of annihilation. we see this beautiful person and then the tragedy befalls them and they become a zombie. we have to kill them in order to force judgement on them, cos if we don't then we're all just appetite driven monsters seeking the fulfilment of our drives, shuffling around until we die.
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