Okay, Halloweeners, listen up! The good news is we're going to have a zombie-tastic Halloween. The bad news is we will not reference zombies again for ten solid years. You'll thank me later.
In 2004 it was really cool when they re-made Dawn of the Dead. It had been awhile since we'd had a bona fide walking corpses flick hit the big screen, and one with a high budget and respectable acting gave us just the proof we needed that vampires weren't the only supernatural creature we could respect. It was even cooler later that year when Shawn of the Dead managed to spoof this awesome movie and be its own awesome movie all at the same time. One perfect zombie horror, one perfect zombie comedy: done and done, over and out.
But we wouldn't keep them dead. Why? Maybe it's because zombies come back to life by definition, and that to truly honor them we needed our zombie pop-culture affection to continue on like the unyielding ghouls themselves. But I have a more cynical take on it. I think we've overindulged in zombies because we're just not all that clever.
Does no one else tire of something after he's seen it done four times in a year? I for sure do. I was very tired of zombies by the time Zombieland came out in 2009. And Zombieland was a good movie! I had just been bored of five years (at that point — eight now) of zombie pub crawls, zombie survival guides, zombie retellings of classic novels, zombie drawings of your favorite cartoon characters on key fobs, and the like.
Nothing against popularity. So what, the zombies are "in" again, as bell bottoms and pompadours will invariably be if fashion cycles continue as predicted. In this case, though, I see the zombie trend as less about popularity and more about laziness.
"I've got an idea! Our fundraiser will be zombie themed. No! Our school dance. No, wait! Our weekly crochet circle and recipe swap!"
Please, folks, let's give it a rest. We can be more creative than thatnot because we need to prove to anyone how creative we can be, but because variety is the spice of life. Truly. Imagine how great it would be if the theme for your next ice cream social were as impressive to those parishioners as the zombie idea was to you when you first saw it at the drag show? And then what if the theme of Friday's beer bust were something totally different from those two and yet equally as memorable? Then we'd be living in a cool world, keeping our creative juices flowing and bringing fresh ideas with us everywhere we gogrowing, expanding, evolving, et cetera.
Maybe you don't hit drag shows and church ice cream socials in the same week as often as I do, but you catch my drift. We need to move on from zombies now. There are lots of other things we can scare ourselves with that are just as much fun to dress up as. Take the Romney dressage horses, for instance!
To play devil's advocate, there is a certain appropriateness to the zombie motif spreading out of control, catching on like a virus to which no one is immune, making us all shut off our brains and join in its hungry, un-clever persistence. Maybe it's not really a zombie trend until all of society has succumbed save a handful of us who refuse to convert, fighting desperately to make it go away, make it go away, make it go a ……….BRRAAAAAIIIIINNNS.
Follow Homer on Twitter
@HomerMarrs