Man, the Zombie genre is played out.
I'm not entirely sure when the meeting was held that decided everything had to have zombies in it, but ever since the admittedly brilliant "28 Days Later..." we've had zombie games, zombie TV shows, zombie movies, zombie Nazi movies, zombie comedy movies, fast zombies, slow zombies, everywhere a zombie zombie.
Just yesterday I changed the channel to find a movie in which the dessicated corpses of four women rise from the dead and go on holiday to Dubai.
...Oh, sorry, that was Sex and the City 2.
Still, anyone who thinks that society needs more zombie-related entertainment at this point has clearly got a screw loose, because contrary to what most people will claim, the whole appeal of the undead is that we all fancy a go at genocide.
Plenty of people have intellectualised the fad for reanimated corpses in horror movies, but they're over-thinking things. They claim that zombies are scary when, in fact, they're demonstrably not.
Sure, they're dead bodies that walk around, which is pretty unpleasant, and they're trying to kill you, which is scary in the same way that anything trying to kill you is scary.
But they're slow, and stupid, and can be dispatched pretty easily with a hammer.
Anything that you can best with DIY implements is never really going to give me nightmares. You couldn't take out Michael Myers with anything short of a tactical nuclear strike. In Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis stabs him in the eye with a wire coat hanger, Donald Pleasance shoots him half a dozen times and he falls thirty feet out of an upstairs window, full of bullets and, again, coat hangers.
Five minutes later he's up and maiming with barely a mark on him.
Zombies? Forget it. You could handle one of them with the coat hanger alone.
Look at the creature from "Alien." Try taking that thing on with the contents of your local Do It All and see how well it goes. "Not very fucking well at all" should be the answer you come back with, except you wouldn't come back at all because you'd be dead, torn limb from limb in a pile of Black and Decker products and a Dulux colour chart.
So zombies don't scare me, much, and I'm sure they don't scare most other people, either.
Why are they so popular, then? Because we all want to have a go at a few dozen guilt-free murders.
I initially thought this was a generational thing. Being raised on Schwarzenegger and Stallone meant that guys my age wanted nothing more than to inject a few litres of horse steroids and mow down waves of evil foreigners.
you're officially in the Taliban.
Honestly, though, all my generation got was a slightly more ridiculous version of the same shit Hollywood had been churning out since the invention of celluloid. John Wayne almost single-handedly killed off the Native American population, when he wasn't single-handedly killing everyone in Japan...
...and many other stars before and since have built their careers on killing a fuck-ton of people for our amusement.
These days, however, we can't just use "because they're foreign" as an excuse for machine gunning people on camera. (Although it's still apparently a workable excuse in real life, if the news is anything to go by.)
In modern entertainment, we still want the thrills of mass slaughter, but without the faint aftertaste of white guilt that was starting to creep up on first world audiences.
Then someone hit upon the idea of massacring people who were explicitly not of any set colour (except a sort of mouldy green) or ideology, and were actually already dead in the bargain.
Brilliant!
Finally, in the 21st century, you could fantasize about comitting a murder-spree without looking like a racist or a psychopath. All you had to do was picture it involving zombies.
This is the real reason audiences like zombie movies. The primal, ugly, flawed monkey brain that dwells within us all still craves violence, but the more civilized part of our makeup wants to make sure it's passed through an acceptable filter.
If we're honest with ourselves, we're not watching a zombie film and thinking "Look out, surprisingly buff apocalypse-survivor, there's a flesh-eating corpse behind you!" as much as we're thinking "Man, I'd really love to stove someone's head in with an axe like that. Y'know. Justifiably."
If anything, it's a positive sign that our mass need for cathartic slaughter has at least lost some of it's more explicitly racist and xenophobic overtones.
Zombies, over-exposed as they are, might just be a tentative sign of cultural progress.
Just, really: Stop telling me they're scary.
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