Wednesday, November 18, 2015

No Zombies Allowed

I'm tired of zombies.

There. I said it. I'm tired of them. The whole apocalyptic, walking dead, zombie plague thing? I'm done. Don't bother me. I'm sick of it.

I've seen some of "The Walking Dead" and found it a colossal bore. I've watched some modern zombie films (most recently "The Dead," a zombie film set in central Africa), and they just don't engage me at all.

I mean, what ARE they, anyway? Are they normal humans with a disease? Are they actually animated corpses? So many films show them as not bleeding, basically being dead, all that...but why do they never decompose? Why aren't they ridden with maggots? How do their muscles continue to work without any blood circulation to bring oxygen? Why do animals never attack them? Why do they never dehydrate or desiccate?

OK, sure, I'm told that in "The Walking Dead" they claim the zombies have a toxin in their bodies that destroys the decomp bacteria....but any toxin powerful enough to do that will destroy human cells and cause their bodies to fall apart. But otherwise, zombie movies and TV shows never really address all the scientific aspects of how a zombie apocalypse would fail quickly. As I've seen it said, if a real zombie apocalypse happened, we'd just have to hunker down for a few weeks and let nature take care of the zombies for us, and then just go out and rake up the remains.

But really, I'm tired of how bleak it all is. Horror films used to have a contract with the audience: we'll give you something terrifying, but at the end everything will just about be set back to rights. Zombie films? Fuck that....we'll give you something terrifying, and by the end everyone will be dead and humanity doomed. How delightful.

I'll make exceptions for things like, well, voodoo cults in Cornish tin mines, or Bela Lugosi in a castle in Haiti, or the like, but unless someone actually manages to do something very daring and different with the zombie genre, I'm done with it.