Social Media: Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse
If you look at that link you'll see that this ACTUALLY FROM THE CDC (The Center for Disease Control in the US). That's right... they're actually telling you to prepare for the Zombie Apocalypse... well sorta...
The article is actually about emergency preparedness, and they're just using the "Zombie" angle to grab folks attention. But this leads to an interesting question...
When Romero made "Night of the Living Dead", he brought a new "monster" into the fold - The flesh eating Zombie. While the idea of Zombies -reanimated dead- have been around for much of recorded history, Romero was the first to turn them into something that wanted to kill and eat us. Previously the fear of Zombies was becoming one - now it was being killed by them... and then becoming one. In the late 1960's this was terrifying to a lot of folks.
But something has happened. As the Universal Monsters - Dracula, the Wolfman and the Mummy before, Zombies have gone from counter-culture, to pop-culture - witness the Honda Civic ad I posted here. They have gone from terrifying ("Night of the Living Dead"), to subversive ("Dawn of the Dead"), to comical ("Army of Darkness", "Fido") to hawking products and services. Does this spell the end of the Zombie as a "horror" creation? Will another Stephanie Meyers turn them into romantic fodder? Or will some filmmaker come forward and push the envelop, and once again make us fear them? I'm curious to hear your thoughts and opinions.
Comments
Which leads to an interesting point: some horror authors will write about an overexposed monster just to see how talented they are. I can see this happening with werewolves, but I feel nosferatus and the undead have been run into the ground so much that I wouldn't read it, though the novel might have merit.
Suddenly, I am worried that there will be a slew of zombie love stories though!