Zombies

I was so depressed this weekend, I went to a movie at the movie house.  I go to a movie in the movie house maybe once every year or so.  Mostly I go alone.  I don’t know when but I got used to going to movies alone.  Carol doesn’t like the movies I go to.

 

28days

 

 

For example, this time I decided I would go see 28 Weeks, the sequel to 28 Days Later.  28 Days was a zombie movie, my favorite sub-genre within the big genre called “horror flicks.”  There’s nothing like a zombie really for making a deep social or allegorical statement of some kind.  Zombies usually look a good deal like human beings except they are dead.  So if you get zombies, not only to look like human beings, but act like them, then you get the implication, symbollically, that we the living people are like the zombies and are ourselves among the living dead.

And if you think about that too much you might start to thinking—as I sometimes do—that this statement is more accurate than not..  But it’s hard to identify with a zombie completely not because it is dead but because it is living.  That’s the horror of the zombie, not that it is dead, but it came back from the dead.

People are just not supposed to come back from the dead.  That’s all there is to it. 

Why the zombies come back isn’t always that clear.  Myth has it the zombies come back because hell is full and can’t take anymore customers.  But sometimes they come back because of some environmental pollution.  Radiation maybe.  In 28 Days they come back because scientists were screwing around with some monkeys and developed this virus that turns the monkeys into raging beasts that want to do only one thing: kill whatever is right in front of it. 

Damn those scientists!  And there never ending screwing around!

So to be technical about it the zombies in 28 Days are not zombies because they don’t come back from the dead.  Rather people get infected by the virus and then they run around killing each other in mad monkey like mahem.  Indeed, for some reason, while they seem pretty intelligent, the infected like monkeys don’t use tools to kill each other—just their hands and then their teeth.

Like your regular zombies, these monkey virus zombies have only one thing on their minds: to kill.  And your regular zombie has only one thing on his or her mind: Eat Brains.  So in this way the monkey virus zombies and your regular orthodox zombie are alike; they both have one thing and one thing only on their minds.  They live to eat or at least to chew.  In this way too, they are like human beings.

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