Our Amusements columnist Rick McGinnis has a non-moralizing piece on the ubiquity of zombies in popular culture in the December edition. We ran the column under a headline that came with double cheese, for which the editorial staff, not the columnist is responsible.
An excerpt from the column:
The Walking Dead glistens with gore, which you would have to expect from drama where most of the players are decaying. Zombie films shoulder a great deal of the burden of gleefully coarsening entertainment, since the zombie canon prescribes a shot to the head as the only way to stop the ravening hordes. The result is a matter-of-fact use of rifles, pistols, axes, crossbows, stout poles and baseball bats, employed remorselessly since, after all, you cannot really kill something that’s already dead.
More profoundly, zombie films speak to a simmering paranoia about hostility lingering beneath the placid surface of society, which might have become exaggerated lately with the so-called “culture wars” and our increasingly bipolar politics.
I have to ‘fess up: I love zombie movies and thoroughly enjoyed AMC’s The Walking Dead whose six-episode season one was too teasingly short. That said, I don’t consider the series or zombie movies appropriate fare for children and pre-teens.
In August 2009, McGinnis wrote about vampires taking over pop culture.
