Please Kill the Zombie Subgenre

CREDIT: NYTIMES.COM

Yesterday at work I was shuffling through my RSS feeds when I saw a post on HOWDesign.com entitled Zombie Haiku: The Movie. I thought it was strange and different that a Graphic Design blog was featuring a somewhat genre related thing, so I checked it out. After making it through 2 minutes of the mildly amusing, but mostly obscenely irritating video posted there I had a relapse of a thought that has been rattling around in my brain for a while. I am absolutely, 100% sick of zombies.

Admittedly, I was never a HUGE fan of the subgenre to begin with, although I'm huge a fan of the "Dead" films (the original "Dawn" and "Day" at least) and have always appreciated the super low budget jaunts like "Redneck Zombies," but in the past few years especially, things are getting out of control. The mainstream zombie love was cute and fun at first, but the concept has become so watered down that I now groan at the mere mention of the word. The zombie image, now beyond the point of self parody, is being co-opted for "outbreak" films like the upcoming [REC] remake Quarrantine, and if you ask me, that's a very bad thing. Instead of coming up with original ways to display deterioration and gore, directors are content with just throwing some gray makeup, sores, fake blood, and janky teeth on their antagonists to milk what little fear these formerly terrifying monsters still evoke.

Despite my hopeless title, I'm not suggesting people stop making and/or appreciating zombie movies all together. I'm just generally asking the world at large to find something else to co-opt and ruin, and spare me the pirates vs ninjas vs robots vs chuck norris vs zombies bullshit. If we back off now, we can still look back fondly on our zombie days, and hope and pray that 5-10 years from now, someone makes a visionary zombie film that will blow all of our asses out and make zombies scary again.

Until then, enjoy your zombie yoga you fucking nerds.