A recent cruise through the all-knowing Internet yielded more zombie-related info and creative projects than one would care to view in one afternoon. Gore-ridden explorations of the the living dead abound, from zombie flicks, TV series and video games to cell phone apps (Zombie Booth is particularly freaky), board games and books ("Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" anyone?), some in living graphic-novel color.
Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video somehow is now even more ahead of its time.
And that's not counting all the zombie swag out there, like your standard action figures, T-shirts, calendars and, my favorite, zombie decoys (to distract an invading horde, obviously).
For some bizarre reason, we appear to be super fascinated with all things re-animated, but at the same time, naturally, we're more than a little freaked out by the prospect.
Just Google "zombie plan" - i.e., one's planned escape route and the necessary weaponry required should a zombie apocalypse go down - and many, many pages' worth of options pop up.
No thanks to George Romero, I'm hereby leery of any burial grounds within a few miles of my house (two), especially the one named "Resurrection Cemetery." In this neo-Atomic Age, on particularly dark nights, Max Brooks' "The Zombie Survival Guide" becomes more than just a funny little coffee-table book.
Even a lighter manifestation of zombie lore like Cracked.com's article "Five Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Happen" doesn't seem entirely ready to write off the undead as mere figments of our apparently disturbed imaginations. It tries to laugh off the lunacy of a zombie invasion, but then it tells us about horrible things like toxoplasmosa - a parasite that turns "victims into mindless, zombie-like slaves." Not funny. Especially when it goes on to report that half the world is infected with the stuff (with attribution).
So, we recognize this horror - we've examined it in gruesome detail - and yet we go back in for more. If you ask me, it's because we're all making zombie plans. Struck by the nightmare of society - indeed, our species - quite ended by what's pretty much a plague, we can't help but wonder how we'd perform in a zombie onslaught. Are we the unlikely hero or are we lunch? Could we strike down a loved one who'd been turned?
And now the truly terrible world of the undead will unfold right here in our little region. Hollywood just had to beguile more people with its slew of semi-hysteria-inducing zombie stories, and now we're going to have a film crew here dotting downtown Mystic and Norwich with zombie hordes as they film "Remains" for something called Chiller TV.
Great. Just as we calm down from last fall's TV hit "Walking Dead," we get to revisit the notion of the fall of the human race, right here at home. (Anyone else still haunted by that scuttling little girl in "Walking Dead" minus her bottom half?)
Well, if we must we must. But before I go and do a weapons check in my basement, I'm going to bone up with a rigorous Zombie Movie-Thon and take notes. Just in case.
Source http://www.theday.com/article/20110405/ENT09/304059996/1044
No comments:
Post a Comment