Zombies

-Is anyone else out there a "zombie" movie junkie like me? I think I have seen just about every movie made within the last 30 years, no matter how camp or bad. I love the George Romero franchise of films: "Night of the Living Dead", "Dawn of the Dead", "Day of the Dead", and the 3 that came after and were largely not worth mentioning. The remakes of his "Dawn of the Dead" and of his biological disaster film (much akin to zombies), "The Crazies", which was recently remade are also among my favorites. I love, and live for the next installment of, the "Resident Evil" franchise. I thought AMC's "Walking Dead" was brilliant in its vision of the end of the world focused on survivors in Atlanta (My youngest brother lives in Atlanta, and for those of you who have spent any great deal of time there, I am not sure that the series is not a period piece). I loved the spoof "Zombieland", arguably Woody Harrelson's best role since "Kingpin" or "Cheers". I almost forgot the British indie classic: "28 Days Later" and its ghostly vision of Westminster Bridge and Parliament Square filmed without a single person or vehicle in sight in one of the most heavily travelled 3 square blocks in the world (I lived in London during its filming which was done at 430am on Sunday morning). How could I omit Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and its homage to the walking dead. I even find that I will sit down on a Saturday night to watch some SciFi Channel low budget creeper about teens and recently deceased, come back to life, flesh eating ground crawlers.


-I don't know why I like "zombies" so much. Romero used them, in his craftier days, to poke fun at things like racism and consumerism (What could be better than the black/white racial mix and the taboo it presented in the two survivors in "Night of the Living Dead" or the rampant "shopping" while holed up in a West Pennsylvania mall as zombies swarmed the parking lot in "Day of the Dead"). Maybe it is the fact that zombies live a pretty good life. They are singular in their quest, generally (some movie makers have toned down their zombies in their hunger for "flesh" while others have sped them up to cheetah-like speeds making mockery of the foot-dragging decomposing flesh-eater we all first fell in love with), for a pound of flesh. Their hunger is both sexual (they spend a perpetual existence seeking the next piece of human meat) and spiritual (they seek in many franchises to eat "brains"). Zombies do not need money. They don't live in houses. They crawl around neighborhoods in various state of undress (and decomposition) as if in a perpetual rave. They observe no rules.

-Zombies are not evil. They are automatons. With few exceptions, while always starving, they run, or stumble, like the Duracell bunny, on and on. They moan or scream, in theory because they are acting only on primal instinct as that is all that is left of what they were. They are, quite frankly, a neat example of mass society. They have no real voice. They follow only the rest of their masses in aimless search for some sort of physical satisfaction. In the end, in most franchises, they overwhelm the remaining remnants of society as their numbers and our stupidity (that of the "living" survivors) allow them to overcome order and intelligence with mass.

-Zombies represent a "dumbing" down of the world. Whether created by an accident of the military or corporate doing, or science, as is the case in the remake of "I am Legend" (a cure for cancer goes horribly wrong), zombies are generally the result of arrogance or malignance. They are bred of greed or deceit and lead to a band of survivors forever struggling to maintain vestiges of the world that was. Zombies are not monsters. They are an allegorical representation of the 90% plus of our world today which blindly follows the talking heads on tv and assumes that success is a 3 bedroom house with a flat screened tv.

-I like zombies. I know some. I think my favorite zombie is the one in the original "Day of the Dead" which bites the great white. Seems like payback for that Christine "Chrissie Watkins". Go look up that reference.