Zombies are Trying To Eat My Brain

Who would have ever thought that the zombie would rise again in popular fiction? I mean really, it’s just a hokey idea. For the undead, vampires at least can be sexy and refined… zombies? They just stumble about and rot, not much depth there. I’ve been pulled into a series of cheap online zombie fiction called ‘Monster Island’ and just started the second book, ‘Monster Nation’ last night and I don’t know why. The genre is a one-trick pony; legions of undead, stumbling towards us, wanting to eat us, there’s too many of them, blah, blah, blah. And this ‘Monster’ series is even worse because it quickly degrades from ‘hokey’ to ‘super hokey’ by introducing mummies too. That’s right, mummies… sheesh. Poorly written too but I still just can’t detach myself from it. Even though I haven’t seen it, I think the film ’28 Days Later’ would be on the ‘sophisticated’ end of the zombie fiction spectrum. In fact, I watched the trailer to the sequel; ’28 Weeks Later’ and it did look rather good. Although it reminded me of an episode of The Smurfs wherein there was some sort of mysterious Smurf disease being spread by bites. Once bitten by the infected, the Smurf would turn a purple colour, jump up and down quite a bit and seem to develop a case of Tourett’s. I can not recall exactly how this Smurf contagion was contained and it is so far back in my memory that I’m not even completely sure that this episode even existed or was a result of a Kool-Aid binge in my adolescence. But assuming that I actually viewed this, it would seem a pretty messed up plotline for the wholesome Smurfs. Maybe the writers were stretching the boundaries of the material in order to appeal to the more mature 10-12 yo. demographic, Smurfette wearing a push-up bra probably helped that too.

But the absolute best zombie work? Shaun Of The Dead… rock.