What New Zombie Craze?
It seems like forever now that we have been hearing about this new zombie craze. It seems every other day some dude is biting off another guy’s face or a zombie is on TV trying to sell you something. Why zombies and why now?
Zombies are not some new creation that just hit it big. The zombie culture has been around for a very long time, lurking in the shadows. As with any pop culture phenomenon, zombies’ popularity has been cyclical. All cultures have some form of zombie story or mythology deeply engrained in their culture. Pop culture really caught on to these stories in the 1930’s with the release of voodoo zombie movies. These differ greatly from the Hollywood zombies that would come thirty years later.
Slowly the popularity of these films waned, and a visionary came along in 1968 to film a whole new breed of monster. George A. Romero filmed and released Night of the Living Dead in 1968 on a tight budget; little did he know the impact this film would have on the pop culture landscape forever. After its release, NOTLD went on to earn millions and bring this army of man-eating corpses to the forefront of pop culture again.
Romero went on to film a string of zombie movies, and continues to be the father of the modern zombie; but another thirty years pass and pop culture’s blood lust is just too great to contain. The long running video game franchise Resident Evil made its debut in 1996, and featured nightmarish monsters of all sorts – including our classic zombies. The popularity of the Resident Evil franchise spawned a movie franchise that is still going strong.
This popularity spawned a rebirth in zombies over the next few years and the release of 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s reimagining of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead ushered in a whole new era of zombies. Instead of the slow shamblers of Romero’s older films, zombies became speedy threats around every corner.
This latest round of zombie popularity seems to have some staying power, but like every other time, we will slink back into our dark corners and await the next unsuspecting generation to come along for us to feed on.
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AiZ: Alice in Zombieland (Complete Saga) is now available in the Amazon Kindle Store, on Smashwords for all formats, and through many online retailers. Pre-orders are open the signed limited edition paperback, as well as the regular paperback editions, at ZombieACRES.com. Also available through Amazon is the anthology 100 Horrors, which features an exclusive Zombie A.C.R.E.S. story, along with 99 other tales of terror. 100 Horrors is available in Kindle and paperback formats.
Joshua Cook is a writer for hire living in the Seattle area. You can find him on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. To find out more about Zombie A.C.R.E.S., visit them on Facebook, Twitter, and in the ACRES merch shop.
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