If anyone stumbles across this, it's not finished yet. I'm debugging the new blog.
From the dust came Zombies. And they were allegorical. And quite good.
As debutantes in popular culture, zombies were slow, representative of creeping consumerism, of base instincts, of the human drive for consumption over rationality. Never substantially dangerous in small numbers, hordes were the problem. They could readily surround you, take away your choices, and sweep you away. Over zealous group-think turned gangrenous in society writ large.
New zombies are fast. Why? The old ones weren’t scary enough anymore. Or perhaps they were not accurate enough an allegory in modern society. It was not enough to be merely taken over by our suppressed baseness, to succumb to primal instincts, to embrace dog eat dog. With shorter attention spans and a skyrocketing need for the extreme, that particular vehicle of doom just didn't have enough pizazz to keep our attention. Zombies? Is that all? How about a zombie on a catapult? Armed with infectious shurikens? Now that’s entertainment.
*With special respect to Caroline, a third category should be introduced as prologue. Before the 60s, zombies were puppets of bad men with evil powers. So we see an evolution de zombie, puppet of evil doer to unchecked id to ‘roid raging’ caricature of malevolence.
