A zombie apocalypse

I am a sucker for zombie movies. I don't know why. I can't explain what compels me to love those brain-eating hordes of the undead, but I do. 28 Days Later, Night/Dawn/Day/Land/Diary of the Living Dead, Sean of the Dead, Resident Evil, Evil Dead... I gotta love the undead. It all started in the summer of 2005, when I worked on the Gordon College grounds crew with a guy named Dustin Davies. That guy loves his undead even more than I do. Several times a week, he would get me to sit down in his darkened dorm room and watch whatever piece of cheesy cinematographical gore-fest that was on the menu for the day. And just like that I was hooked. We watched movies in every horror sub-genre known to man... slasher films, old school horror, supernatural, and monster movies. The latter was the one that I really got into. Give me any creature from a werewolf to The Thing, and I am a happy man. But for some reason the Zombies were the ones I really took a liking to.

Perhaps I like zombies because there is no malice in a zombie. In fact, most good zombie films are meant to be satires of humankind.It is in the human characters that, as in many horror movies, the true barbarism comes out. 28 Days Later showed this well (if not too blatantly) with its "wait... WE are the monsters!" message. Driven by the maddened desire for survival, the human characters create more havoc than any undead creature ever could. It was with Dawn of the Dead that I first realized that horror can be more than a frightfest but that it can be making a real statement. You see, zombies are driven by simple desire to meet their primal needs. Thus their incessant hunger. It was George Romero's genius to have them drawn to a shopping mall where they surround a small group of survivors.

But there is another thing that adds to the zombie movie appeal for me and that is the Apocalypse factor. I have a "thing" for post-apocalyptic visions of the reality. I get into movies and television shows where normal people are stripped of their comforts and forced into running, jumping, trap-setting, hunting, dodging... This can happen on a desert island, during wartime, when science goes bad, in a battle wasteland, in the wilderness, when pursued, and, of course, a zombie holocaust. Call me "odd", but I find that there is something romantic about these post-apocalyptic scenarios. Usually it involves one man, or a small group at best, up against a lonely world. Whenever I see those scenes in 28 Days Later or I am Legend where people are foraging for food in an empty city I feel a bit envious. I would love to explore an empty Madrid...

So when I had my first honest to goodness zombie apocalypse dream last night, it is odd that I woke up frustrated and disappointed. First of all, in the movies the world is full of the shambling undead and very few humans are left. In my dream, however, the world was still full of people PLUS the zombies. It was a crowded, panic filled place. Not at all the romantic wasteland of the big screen. On top of it, everyone kept getting in the way of a good survival plan. People kept doing stupid things: leaving windows open, turning on lights at night, going back into houses to save their cats... it was killing me (figuratively) and them (literally). I couldn't enjoy myself when I had to keep wondering if someone else's mistake was going to get me killed.
In retrospect, perhaps it is funny that I had a dream about zombies devouring the world populace but that it was the world populace that was making my dream a nightmare. Perhaps that says too much about my character... I wonder if other zombie loving perfectionist introverts would have felt the same way.