Ah, zombies…the poor, shambling, flesh-eating cannon fodder of the undead army.
Vampires have cunning wit and mind control. Werewolves have savage, bestial strength, ravenous appetites and the ability to smell their prey. Zombies have, well, they *really* want to eat your brains!
So, zombies aren’t necessarily scary as individual threats go. What makes zombies scary? Simple. No movie, novel or short story has ever posed the treat of one zombie. It’s the idea of zombies overcoming mankind that is the threat. Still, that’s not the fear. Put a well-armed man in a fortified position against a zombie and there’s no fear. Put the same man in an isolated space. Let him know that eventually the food, the water and the bullets are going to run out. Give him the doubt that help is coming, or may ever come.
Now he’s afraid.
Zombies have populated a ton of movies, including George Romero’s classic, Night of the Living Dead, Vincent Price’s great performance in The Last Man on Earth (adapted from Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend), and Lucio Fulci’s masterful Zombie which featured not only an insanely tense scene with a rusty nail, and a great match of a zombie vs. a shark…yes, a shark! The new century has brought such films as Danny Boyle’s hit 28 Days Later, and recently in the zombedy genre films, including Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland.
For Division’s “Control Issues” CD, I wanted to channel that fear from the perspective of those trapped inside while the zombies closed in. The track, “Feast,” tells the story of those awaiting the inevitable end. They even ponder if their death is the end of all mankind. The chorus goes like this:
“Minutes stretching into hours while the living are devoured,
In the dark we hide. How much longer before we die?
Never see a new sunrise as we stare death in the eyes,
Now that they’ve found their way in…let the Feast begin!”
The theme of “Control Issues” should be pretty evident on this one. I give huge kudos to Romero for his films, and openly admit this is largely influenced by his 1978 movie, Dawn of the Dead.
So tell me, do zombies scare you? Is there a particular thing that makes you afraid of the zombie outbreak scenario, and if it came from a film or a story, who put that fear into you?
Off to destroy the stairs,
nK