I’ve probably seen “Dawn Of The Dead” countless times. On screens big and small, I’ve watched the end of the world happen from Monroeville Mall. And I’ve seen and liked all of Romero’s zombie movies thus far, finding them ripe with political and social commentary and unforgettable gore.
That being said, zombies are stupid.
Zombies work in Romero’s films because they’re window-dressing. Entirely metaphorical, they really don’t represent much of a threat. In a Romero movie, by the time someone’s been overtaken by a zombie, their soul has already been long gone. The eating of flesh is just a foregone conclusion.
So I don’t really get this rush to popularize a fringe monster that only works at a metaphorical level. I don’t get “The Walking Dead.” I didn’t see the point after I read “World War Z.” And, on that note, I don’t understand the recent news that Paramount wants to make a trilogy of “World War Z” movies.
I don’t recall who, but someone who was perturbed by the flood of zombie media noted, perfectly, that zombies give protagonists a license to murder indiscriminately. In other words, Romero was a humanist, and modern zombie storytellers are nihilists.
A special shout-out, by the way, to the underseen Joe Dante gem “Homecoming,” an episode of “Masters Of Horror” where zombie soldiers rise from the dead to vote the President out of office.
(via abatida)
