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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #35: Make Your Own Zombiepocalypse

Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #35: Make Your Own ZombiepocalypseThe Zombiepocalypse has been normalized. Nowadays, you won't go into a video shop or a comic shop without seeing a new zombie title. I just go, "Here we go again."

It didn't use to be like this, of course. The horror genre used to be considered disreputable. Teenagers liked it because we could piss off the parents. The mainstream film industry regarded it as disposable, the British Establishment practically linked it with pornography, slapping an X on nearly every horror movie that got passed in Britain. If anything, the zombie subgenre was one of the more respectable ones, if only by default. This was thanks to George Romero kicking it off with NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, which introduced images redolent of Sixties turmoil. The idea of the zombie came originally from Haitian voudoun mythology, though in reality , the zombie in question was really a heavily-drugged living slave rather than a revived undead corpse, but the myth stuck. The original zombies were dogsbodies that had no craving for human flesh at all. It was the ghoul from supernatural literature that ate human flesh. Romero combined the zombie with the ghoul to create the zombie as we know them today. Romero then followed it up with DAWN OF THE DEAD, which drove home the scope for social commentary in the genre. This of course resulted in the endless flood of rip-offs from Italy during the 1980s that were light on the commentary and heavy on the gore.

It wasn't until Zack Snyder's remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD that revived the zombie flick, and Edgar Wright's SHAUN OF THE DEAD that made zombies hip again, a one-two punch that took place in 2004. Then Max Brooks' global zombiepocalypse novel WORLD WAR Z in 2006 added to the mainstream acceptance. Robert Kirkman's comic series THE WALKING DEAD started in 2003 but took another two years to make its mark. Since then there have been various cheapo straight-to-DVD zombie flicks, comics series, and even medium budget zombie flicks are being made. By 2005, even Marvel comics got in on the act with MARVEL ZOMBIES, which was a gory comedy about zombiefied superheroes eating and killing everything in sight, an apt metaphor for the state of the whole superhero genre as I've seen, and I wonder if it was intentional. You can tell a subgenre has finally become mainstream when superhero comics pick up on it. And TV has gotten in on the act. We've had Charlie Brooker's DEAD SET which deconstructed celebrity culture, surveillance and BIG BROTHER using zombies, and every pilot season in the US has commissioned a zombie script for the last few years, though only cable network AMC has gone as far as to greenlight an adaptation of THE WALKING DEAD. And then, of course, there's the games, LEFT 4 DEAD and DEAD RISING, where you get to vicariously try your hand and zombie-whacking and surviving.

I'm not the first to say it, but it looks like the zombie is the popular metaphor for the times. It's a metaphor for societal collapse and the mindless masses coming after you when you're just trying to survive. Despite the argument from purist zombie fans that the fast, running zombies are not "pure" zombies, it make sense that they're the preferred versions for now, because they represent the on-rushing horde rather than the slow, shambling mob, you have a lot less time to shoot or escape. They're more brutal and violent. That's in keeping with anxiety of this century so far, with war, terror alerts and economic decline. We are so screwed.

With zombies becoming so common, it's inevitable that we would start getting a variant subset of the subgenre itself: the sort-of-zombies. These plots usually involve a contagion that reduces the majority of people into violent, bloodthirsty hordes. this subgenre was pioneered, again, by George Romero in his 1973 movie THE CRAZIES, which is admired by his fans but originally bombe and has been generally overshadowed by the DEAD movies. THE CRAZIES was more overtly political in the way it identifies the government as the villains in testing a biological weapon on a town that turns those infected into violent maniacs. Then the government sends troops in to clean up the mess by essentially imposing martial law and shooting down the infected. No surprise that we're getting a remake this year, when distrust of the government is back in the air. The time is right. What's Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD, after all, if not a stripped-down version of the zombie survivalist genre, only the zombies are just nasty people?

Garth Ennis' CROSSED is pretty much THE CRAZIES, only stripped of all political allegory and boiled down to an existential parable for blokes, or the MPAA to censor it. I often feel Ennis' writing is a kind of therapy: he gets to have a schoolboy's giggle at how shocking and awful he can write something and then earnestly try to explore what it might feel like, with lots of hang-wringing while the infected are reduced to foul-mouthed, sadistic, raping adolescents. It reminds me of high school where you and your mates try to one-up each other by coming up with the nastiest, grossest scenarios you can think of. If I was still a teenager, I suppose I might be impressed with CROSSED, but after a steady stream of horror movies of all sorts since my teens, this is just another day at the horrorshow for me. Maybe that just means I'm getting old, when it's just another exploding head, another trail of wet giblets, another fearful chase, another case of attempted shock that just passes me by. If maybe I were still fifteen, it might get a rise out of me.

Basically, if you want to do a zombie story but without zombies, you can just substitute them with something else, virtually anything else. It's quick and easy. With so many entries out there, we've gotten to the point where the zombiepocalypse has gone beyond vicarious safe scare to a kind of cultural comfort food.

To sign off, here's a dispatch from the Teletubbiepocalypse.

ShootingshootingshootingOhGodThey'recomingTheywon'tstopAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA at lookitmoves@gmail.com


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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