Aimless ranting and zombies

Hi, it's Buch again. I know I haven't been writing much on the blog here, so thanks for reading this. Honestly I just don't seem to have much to say these days. My world views are pretty much limited to, 'This videogame is cool', 'This movie sucks', 'I need to get a membership at the swmming pool and then maybe I'll swim more' and 'I hate everyone and everything on television, particularly all newsreaders and Phillip Schofield.'

"Is there any ITV show you aren't on, Phillip?"

And while each of these arguments seem valid, fresh and fascinating to me, I realise quickly how dull they must be to other people when I yell at the TV and just get stern, English looks of disapproval in response. But these are my major concerns in life, aside from angst about tuition fees and my ex girlfriend, and these of course form the wealth of fascinating life experiences that make up the entirity of the fiction and poetry I write.

So all I have for the blog is stupid, stupid smug humour and nerd rage. I guess you get both today, because this was supposed to be about...

ZOMBIES.

Yes, zombies. I remember about five years ago reading a blog by the author of A Modest Destiny, when he was dilly-dallying with a comic about a post-zombie future: he pointed out that nowadays when you announce you're working on a creative project about zombies, every single one of your friends says 'yeah, me too'. And in those five years, it just seems to have become ridiculous.

I should point out that I love zombies. George Romero's cheap horror-turned-classic Night of the Living Dead is one of my favourite movies (Dawn of the Dead actually seemed quite dull to me) and I recently finished reading Max Brooks' novel World War Z, which has to be the greatest entry to the genre since Romero invented it.

But I also just saw Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides (Stranger tides? The water and weather are just about the only things that never behave unexpectedly or pose a threat in the entire movie! Where are these stranger tides, anyway - isn't this still the Carribean? Cuz they were sailing over a maelstrom in the Orient last time and no-one batted an eyelid.) And I remember seeing the trailer and laughing as Disney desperately read out some of the cool junk they had been loading into the movie to grab interest: "Mermaids! Blackbeard! Zombies!" It worked on me, but I remember my brother and I crying out 'Robots! Ninjas! Phillip Schofield! Pira... oh, wait.'

Sadly when I got to the movie, they were actually zombies in the traditional, Voodoo-or-something sense of the word. It was just, you know, mind control. But I was also kinda relieved, because... do I really need to see flesh-eating undead masses again? I like that now, in the post-post-zombie-craze-craze, people are trying to be a little more unique with their zombies - make them fast, make them sing, make them intelligent, make them Nazis, make it a comedy, give them rat teeth, anything - but... damn. Enough with the zombies. Also superhero origin stories. Enough already.

Oh do fuck off.

So every movie is zombies, every non-ninja videogame is zombies (Dead Rising, the Resident Evil series, Left 4 Dead, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, Plants Vs Zombies, Zombie Cow Milking, I Made A Game With Zombies In It - those last two are actually real) and now it's infecting (ho ho!) novels. Like I said, I adored Max Brooks' zombie history book, but... I like novels. I like to pretend they're big and clever. Please be careful with them, young zombie authors.

Last year I read about half of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I remember seeing the cover and laughing out loud - it seemed like a wonderful idea: re-write every young woman's favourite book, deliberately vandalising it by adding every young man's favourite guilty pleasure and watch as Zack lays waste to the English classic. Sadly the novel really, really, really ran out of steam with that one joke, just endlessly repeated and awkwardly shoe-horned into a romance. I ended up putting it down and reading the original instead. Anyway - my point is:

The... WAR... of the Worlds... plus blood. Did you even read the title, Eric?

Yep. I'd like to start my tirade by pointing out that The War of the Worlds contains quite a lot of freaking blood. You remember that bit where it turns out the Martians feed / power their machines by extracting blood from fallen humans? Maybe the author here hadn't quite gotten to that bit when he signed for his royalty fees. Point is: how can you add a silly, violent, geeky element to a (brilliant) story about space aliens lazering everyone to death? For crying out loud...

I do wonder if I'm wrong to complain about the great tide (or horde, HO HO!) of zombie fiction we have seen over the last decade or so. After all - [REC.], 28 Days Later and numerous other recent works were genuine classics, right up there with Romero's early films. Hell, I have now written three short stories about zombies myself. I really like them.

And aren't all great stories still being endlessly repeated? Romero zombies are only 34 years old, so maybe that's why this bothers me. I'm not writing a rambling essay about how every vampire story is just Dracula, or how every mad scientist and monster are clearly Frankenstein and his demon. And I'd argue that the zombie tale is every bit as good as those two gothic classics.

It's a good story:

See, you have this attractive girl, Barbara, who suddenly realises the world is being over-run by the dead, come back to life and desperate to devour human flesh (Why not each other's? Why do they need to eat at all since they never show signs of tiredness or needing any external energy source? We may never know.)
Barbara and a bunch of people get stuck in a shack, and then somehow the zombies find them. And the zombies are now millions-strong, even though one would assume that they would eat their victims' flesh, rather than leave them to... anyway.
Someone betrays the group, gets infected or makes a mistake, and Barbara (or a protector) is the only survivor. At the last moment she escapes miraculously, only to realise too late that she is still not safe! Rather she has accidentally thrown herself into the horrible, poisonous, waiting arms of an even greater threat to her safety and dwindling sanity.

Activate the Cube!

And if your version of the zombie story is good, you'll put in a subtle allegory or subtext about a modern political issue. If you're Max Brooks, then you'll write several of these and mix them together with political speculative fiction. And I will love you.

I don't know what my point was here. I like a great many of these recent zombie films, games, that TV show I haven't seen yet, and books, but... I don't know. I guess they're still new: the early 21st century is for zombies what the Universal and Hammer Horror series were to vampires and mad scientists. Shaun of the Dead would be Abbot and Costello in that analogy. I kinda look forward to the day when zombies are old hat.

Maybe one day some twisted, translated, re-wrtten version of Night of the Living Dead will even be the equivalent of a Grimms' fairy tale. I hope so.