Undead Cool

Zombies. Slow. Brainless. Shuffling messes, devoid of any flicker of emotion. Say what you like about them, they have slowly (its their way) clawed back to being THE coolest horror creations ever. For a while it was werewolves who ruled the monster playground. Until the vampire came along and stole the spotlight with dashing looks and tales of romance, sending women (goths in particular) weak at the knees. The vamps had great PR behind them and seemed to get the best looking men in film/television to portray them.


Do the zombie shuffle!

But now those undead voodoo dancers have returned with a vengeance, leaving all other creeps behind in their fould dust and letting the fanged ones get on with faffing around in poncy looking cloaks and frilly cuffs. Effeminate bunch, vampires.
Of course zombies came to prominence thanks to the 'Grandfather of zombies' George A. Romero and his brilliant films, and now we welcome them again to where they belong, and indeed where they feel the most comfortable, surrounding us with their rotting presence. Recent movies like Zombieland, Dead Sno and Land of the Dead, together with videogames like Dead Rising and Burn! Zombie Burn! Have seen to that. We have seen a kind of 'zombie chic' emerge which prove that however mangled their corpses, or however pungent they smell, those grave dodgers will always be welcome to gnaw their way into our hearts.

Doughnut withdrawal can be fatal

The first time I ever appreciated just how frightening zombies can be was when I played the first three installments of the Resident Evil games. That single minded urge to simply want to feast off your flesh and the slow, shuffling towards you in a dimly lit corridor was very disturbing like a crawling, certain death with sole reason to cruelly rip your organs apart.
Films like Zombie Creeping Flesh and Night of the Living Dead did their best to creep me out, and to an extent they did, but it wasn't until the Playstation arrived where you could actually be 'in' the film/game that the terror truly took off. It was that step closer and anyone who has ever played the Resi Evil games must have felt the same.
Another icky thing about zombies is the fact that they dress like us (obviously because before getting zombified they WERE us) and I don't know about you dear reader but for me there is something utterly disturbing and freaky about that. The clothes give them a normality, human but not quite. They are the last link to how they used to live, a final snapshot of lost lives. Think about it. When you see zombies in film or videogames they are dressed in all manner of things; leisure wear, work clothes (like the police zombie above) and sports kit. Carrying on with life before they were turned into the undead. The viewer knows what job they had, or their hobbies and now its merely a shell.
There is something deliciously horrifying about that.