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I am quite amused by the rising amount of Zombie related fads, memes, and themed media in our culture. Props to George Romero for inciting this with his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead and the subsequent Dawn and Day of the Living Dead (1978 & 1985). It's taken almost three decades, but Zombies have now begun to spill over from the realm of cult movies to the mainstream. We haven't seen a Zombie television series yet, but I'm sure it will in time.
A few years ago, a fad started where people would meetup for semi-spontaneous parades referred to as Zombie Marches, Zombie Crawls, and Zombie Outbreaks. People were encouraged to dress up as zombies (fake blood, wounds, and torn clothing) and/or to film/record the event for posting on YouTube. As I recall some of didn't go down so well with local police; some called them terrorist acts because of the people shambling around in blood covered clothing and occasionally carrying pretend weapons, one kid was even arrested because of a short story he wrote because he referred to several teachers in the story.
Zombie themes have also been popping up online with Zombie Survivalist sites, Survival Videos and Zombie Web Comics. Thankfully, not all Zombie comics follow the same premise of a small group of people trying to survive a zombie outbreak. Last Blood, takes a new twist on the theme with Vampires coming to the aid of Humans to fight the zombie hoard. In The Zombie Hunters, people who are infected with the zombie virus will only turn into the walking dead when they die, and are thus immune to the zombie bite, the author has also created different zombie types (much like the video game, Left 4 Dead) to spice things up. And organized crime seems to behind the zombie outbreak in Dead Winter.
I'd be willing to bet that this resurgence in Zombie popularity is due to people feeling more mortal after the events September 11th, 2001. Zombie movies, at least the good ones, have always been looked on as metaphors for how we face life and death - the zombie representing our mortality creeping up on us. And with the looming threat of terrorist attacks (real or imagined), people are beginning to turn to one of the more light-hearted, yet terrifying, memes to cope with the idea that death might be right around the corner...
The image of the walking dead.
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