Braaiiiiii....fuck it.

Let’s talk about zombies, shall we?

Yes we shall.

The fascination with these shambling shenanigan chauffeurs has been around for a while. It’s a great device, really. So many possibilities for the budding writer/director/video game designer. Morbid fascination with death. The moral dilemma of seeing a former friend become a monster. Is your old pal really in there? Is he locked in that skull somewhere?

Nah, who’re you kidding. He (it’s almost always a he) isn’t in there anymore. Blast the punk. Take that contrived moral tension and splatter it all over the wall in a pattern that would make Rorschach proud.

Zombies do not quality creative content make. They’re a mindless mass of minions that only exist to provide the protagonists with the opportunity to indulge in massive amounts of violence that doesn’t come with any of the ethical baggage that comes with killing a human being, even if it’s a faceless, redshirted mook.

Zombies are not the product of some dark voodoo or a cracked up rabies virus. They’re the product of two of humanity’s more primitive instincts. The first is a passion for violence for its own sake. This doesn’t always manifest, sometimes the creative work featuring the brain thirsty undead is more about survival. But the attentions visited upon the hapless evil minions are far worse than what standard issue evil henchmen get. Zombies get shot, set on fire, decapitated with a chainsaw, bludgeoned to redeath with a baseball bat, run over with cars, killed with doors, blown up. Take your pick, or come up with a new way! It’s an arena in which human creativity is for once given free license in coming up with bloody painful ways to end a life. Of sorts.

The other one is a desire for the apocalypse. It might be more prevalent among me and mine, but this one’s been around for a while. I would love (in a hypothetical sort of way) to watch everything I know burn to a cinder. Let the tall buildings fall, let the contrived societal rules just disappear. I think that we might have made a few mistakes while building our respective cultures. Waste it all and start again? Awesome. Can’t have order from above if your president is enjoying and aide’s…intestines. Can’t impose order when the citizens are either bunkered up or playing their very own interactive video game, complete with M-rated gore. It’d be fun!