Zombierama

So the other day, I find myself alone in the house and I decide to watch the remake of Dawn of the Dead. I’ve watched it like a dozen times and keep rewatching it because I’m all about seeing the dead come back to life. It’s like, inspirational or something. It’s comforting to know that death is not the end. Beyond death is rebirth as an ambling corpse with a neverending bloodlust and hunger for human brains. Just like it says in the Bible.

For some reason, I really dig movies where the world ends, which is strange because if the world actually did end, I’d be totally bummed out. Still, in movie form, it’s total win. And a movie gets bonus points if the end of the world is populated by zombies.

Like the 28 Days Later movies. British zombies, with regrettable extensive shots of Cillian Murphy’s unit.

And just when you think the Brits got rid of all of the zombies? BOOM, some dumbshit Typhoid Mary lets that monkey loose again in the sequel and Britain is once again overrun with zombies. I told this British guy
I know, FUCK THAT, I’m NEVER coming to Britain because you’ve had two large rage zombie outbreaks and CLEARLY don’t have the resources needed to contain them, and he responded that that was cool, that he’s never coming to America because he’s seen Dawn of the Dead. Which is kind of where this whole thing started, anyway.

Why do I like zombie movies? Because they give you perspective.

Dawn of the Dead totally trumps Slumdog Millionnaire as a “be thankful for what you have” movie. Sure, you’ll appreciate your life more if you see how shitty conditions are in India, but it’s far more sobering when you realize how lucky you are that you live in a country that is not overrun with the living dead. Imagine a “my life is hard” showdown with someone in the middle of a walking dead plague. You’d say, “I
can’t pay my bills,” and he’d be all, “Oh, I feel so sorry for you; zombies are eating my face.” I’ll bet even the kids in Slumdog could watch that movie and feel better about their lives. And can you imagine if the two were combined and Indian slums were overrun with zombies? Oh God, imagine the diarrhea.

So I laid down on the couch, set my laptop on my stomach, and started
kind of live blogging on Twitter while watching the movie. Because there were things I needed to know, and had thoughts I needed to share. We all come closer together when the dead roam the earth.

JohnnyBTruant: On the set of this movie, what were the zombies like in person? I’ll bet they were assholes.

JohnnyBTruant: …but on the upside, I’ll also bet they didn’t eat up all of the stuff on the Craft Services table.

See, I’ll bet zombies make shitty actors. Sure, nobody portrays a zombie like a zombie (”you do what you know,” and all that), but I’ll bet they keep trying to eat the live actors. And you know they don’t make good conversation.

And there were a LOT of zombie extras in this movie, too. I think extras usually get this tiny little fee for appearing in a movie. But you know how zombie extras are — they probably spent all of their pittance on
brains, and then came back so that the bigger stars could take advantage and have sex with them. Except that you should never let a zombie perform oral sex on you. Seriously.

JohnnyBTruant: On set, how could you tell the zombies apart from the regular actors who were just real douchebags?

But by this point in the movie, I was caught up in the illusion and was starting to forget about actors and sets. The characters are all bunkered in the mall (ironic that unlike in real life, the zombies are outside of the mall) and there has been much limb-tearing and bone-shattering and a few head shots and at least one broken pool cue through the head. Everyone has blood all over themselves and everyone is carelessly getting it on the walls, on the floor, on Ving Rhames. Nobody is bothering to Swiffer anything.

JohnnyBTruant: There’s so much blood all over walls and everything in this movie. If you hired a zombie as a janitor, you’d have to fire him like right away.

But what about the more pressing concern? All of this co-mingling of gore: Your gore in my cuts; my gore in your cuts; zombie brains on everyone’s sleeves following a saw incident.

JohnnyBTruant: Hey, do you think zombies can get AIDS? Because that’s some high-risk shit right there.

And really, I thought — why couldn’t they get AIDS? They can get pregnant. Or rather, they can become zombies once they’re already pregnant, and then inevitably the baby becomes a zombie, too. A zombie woman would squeeze out her baby and if you could keep her from eating it, you could totally get her a copy of Social Distortion’s Mommy’s Little Monster album as a shower present, except that you’d have to throw it at her from a high place because otherwise she’d devour you.

And so I just kept coming up with questions that nobody can answer. Do zombies have dinner parties? Because they’d surely be ironic if so. And what do the animals think during a zombie attack? A lot of zombie movies suggest that zombie people like to eat people, but not so much animals. Animals would rule the world and even during the chaos, they’d basically just think, “Oh, everyone’s acting like Ashton Kutcher now.” Until everyone died (again) and the animals then learned how to use DVD players so they could watch Resident Evil, which is the only movie I can think of where zombie dogs get any play, and even then, those dogs aren’t so much zombies as they are inside-out.

Fundamentally, a zombie plague changes the culture of any country it touches. In fact, it homogenizes us. That’s strange to think about, because you’d figure that Iraqi zombies would be different from American zombies. You’d think Iraqi zombies would be more fundamentalist and maybe wear turbans, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. All zombies are the same. We’d be so much better off as a world if we could just learn from the zombies. Except for the implications it has on the whole “staying alive” thing, and on popular culture.

JohnnyBTruant: Zombie humor is bad. You’re like, “What has four wheels and flies?” and they’re all “AAARGAGEGHG.” And their timing sucks.

Of course, it doesn’t stop there.

JohnnyBTruant: You know, I’ll bet zombie karaoke is TERRIBLE.

They all seem so totally zoned out and high, but I have to wonder if it’s the living humans driving them wild. Would they settle when all of the humans were dead and zombified?

In fact, if you could get all of the zombies in one place and keep them from going anywhere (maybe maroon them on Iceland and just keep telling them their passports are expired if they try to leave), it’d be an interesting social experiment to see if they ever developed a government. Or a theater district. Both relate; I’ll be zombies are excellent at both long rants and at filibustering. I’ll bet diversity would suffer, though, and all art would be like watching Dane Cook movies.

Eventually, the movie ended and I had to stop thinking about zombies. Except that you can never really stop thinking about them, because that’s when they get you — when you feel safe. And modern zombies? They’re so fast that you can’t look away for even a second. Used to be, in the Night of the Living Dead days, you’d see zombies coming for like ten minutes before they got anywhere near you. And then you could probably just put up some red velvet valet ropes and a set of dress code rules to keep them at bay. Not so much with these modern zombies. Zombies 2.0.

Your perspective is skewed when you return to reality after something like this. I have to use a hedge trimmer. Will I have to disembowel anyone with it? And what about that chainsaw? Because in the movie, the hot chick gets accidentally chainsawed, and even though it’s gross, it does cut her bra strap and I got all conflicted. What is acceptable behavior in this zombie-heavy world? If I’m going to be trimming limbs, am I allowed to remove clothing with my power tools if I manage to polish off a few zombies in the doing? These are the things that keep great thinkers awake at night.

It’s hard to say in this crazy, modern world we live in.

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