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The following will contain some spoilers for movies that have been out for some time. Read at your own risk.
One of the things I find most interesting about zombie scenarios is the bit that gets short shrift in most movies or stories (Not all. I can think of a list of exceptions, some of which I'm going to discuss). The thing that really interests me is the process of society unraveling.

Think about it. The Dawn of the Dead remake starts with a baseline, a busy hospital, the tightly woven pattern of the suburban neighborhood. The heroine awakes to a hint of something wrong, followed by horror. She escapes into a world gone wrong. I think this is one of the strongest sequences in that movie, particularly the beautiful shots of the chaos going on behind her as she flees.

Shaun of the Dead has one of the best depictions of unraveling that I've seen. All the beautiful little set up sequences, interspersed with hints of things wrong: people calling in sick, the homeless man chasing pigeons, the person collapsing on the sidewalk, the sick on the bus. The build is slow and beautiful. How often have we each passed, drive3n, or ridden by someone maybe mentally ill, sick, or intoxicated behaving oddly. how often do we say anything? I once got chewed out at the library where I worked for calling in someone obviously distressed outside to emergency services. If one lives in a population center of any size, one is trained subtly or unsubtly to hurry pass, to look away. The bits outside the bar could have been any one of hundreds of youTube clips taken by people mocking the extremely intoxicated they have stumbled upon on the street. In Zombie films, it is the helpful strangers and the first responders who generally die first. I think part of the genius of Shaun is the distortion of patterns and the initial obliviousness of the protagonists in the face of what looks to be societal collapse. So familiar, so funny, so horrible, so human.

I recently stumbled on a cable showing of Dairy of the Dead. My initial assessment of all the things wrong with the film still stands. Watching it on the small screen was an improvement as I could do something else during the long boring, whiny bits. I kept thinking that the really interesting parts were mostly off screen while instead we were forced to follow these incredibly annoying and banal people we don't care about. They come on the hospital after all the really interesting things have happened and we are left to try to piece together a sequence of events that was vastly more interesting than any of the action in the film. Similarly, I wonder how that poor Amish gentleman found out the zombie apocalypse was on. Later, there's the bad of significantly more competent and less annoying African Americans they come across. What was their story? How did they deal with the initial outbreak? What happened later? watching it, I'm busy thinking of better movies that could have been made from the promising pieces stuck like gems in a pile of feces. I still love the ending, I think because we are able to picture how we got there, the pieces we are handed of the events in the mansion are enough to make the unspoken bits extra powerful, and the denouement unwinds with an inevitability that seems fitting. Too bad there aren't any likeable characters to give it real impact, but the falling apart of everything, society, hope, the situation at the mansion, the sanity of the characters all gives it the same fascination of a building being demolished.

I've been watching my own country unravel for some time. I can't tell if have passed the point of no return or not. I think there's something there. Zombies are about mobs, about the slide into dementia, about the collapse of society as a whole into chaos and death. I read about bubonic plague over and over as the gay men of my generation were dying in droves from our own modern plague. Joe Haldeman wrote Forever War about a science fictional war because he wasn't ready to write about Vietnam with out a layer of metaphor or two. Sometimes a bit of fictional distance helps a person or a society start processing the big things. Humor helps too. (I'm looking at you, Shaun and Zombieland). Zombies are about the big things, when you scratch past the first layer of skin.



Scary thing? This wasn't the long complicated thing I've been wanting to write. *facepalm*