I have always had a soft spot for zombies. They bring ballet back to horror. And they are real sociable. They seem to crave company and, unlike most families these days, they really love eating together.

Also the groaning. Scripts are generally so bad that a large component of the cast not having to speak at all is generally a blessing. In fact the groaning and the dragging, then the dragging and the groaning. A squelchy bite and then the screaming. That’s music to my ears.

I have been looking for a low commit TV series that I can tape and watch at my leisure to wind down from days with my decidedly non-zombie children. Instead of the moaning and the dragging, the dragging and the moaning, I have with them the shouting and the jumping, the jumping and the shouting. A squelchy bite, and then the screaming. Okay that last part is zombie. Anyway, The Walking Dead seems to be it. A low commit I mean.

One good thing about it straight out the gate is it is not about Vampires. Vampires are very adolescent monsters. All lust, eyeliner and emo-guitars. Zombies seem to me a middle-aged evil. Their clothes are not so great. They sag. Their colours all wash out to beige, olive and taupe. They are no longer attractive. And of course like us-all, they seem really tired.

On the whole zombies are rather busy figures. Cheek-rotted soccer moms out on the streets, getting on with things. Yet at the same time bushwhacked, hollow-eyed and bad-tempered.

And nothing is a big deal in their lives. Sure they want to eat us, but when they can’t they seem happy just to shuffle around. Where vampires seem to be perpetually bursting with the lust and the anger and wotnot, all to a melodramatic backdrop and soundtrack, Zombies will take what comes their way with relish, like a mid-afternoon shag when the kids are on a play-date and your schedules coincide. Then they mozey on with the drudgery of just living zombie-style. Or in their case dying. So yeah, sick of Vampires, loving the whole zombie shabby chic shtick.

Which in The Walking Dead is all very low key. Washed out colours, bad hair, dull clothes and, for some reason, a lot of sweat. I get the message, Georgia is hot, but I don’t yet get the point. Is hot bad, does sweat draw them in? The walkers I mean and a word on that.

They don’t call them Zombies. Anything but that. Skanks I hear, walkers is the polite form, I am sure there have been a fair share of just ‘those things’, but zombies no. All in keeping with a very PC program in which all racial potentials are covered, and where we have already been lectured about racism in an exchange between good cop and stereotypical redneck: “The way I see it, now there ain’t nothin’ but white meat and dark meat.”

I am a tad uncertain how this really solves the black white divide. In that white and black are still there, only this time I guess the walkers are dark meat? Why I am not sure. What’s dark about them, ‘cept they are real dirty? Still, the effort is appreciated. No more black, no more Asian, no more zombie, just people who walk and the rest that what? Run mostly from those they find undesirable. Oh, no change there then. White flight all the way.

Wait a minute, is the whole thing what they call in Belfast, political? Is there, for example, a hidden message in the term walker? We think over here walking is a good thing. In general, in Atlanta at least where the program is mostly set, walking is what the poor, the pissed and the rehabbers do. You only walk if you can’t drive and in the States that means something sinister.

Or you walk as a dead man to the chair. Perhaps the whole thing is a projection forward to a real American future when in just a few decades there will be no gas and we will all have to shuffle about in our falling apart gap wardrobe, walking where once we magnificently cruised in our SUVs. I hope not. I want low commit from this thing. No attempt at messages please. Zombies don’t mean anything. They are the shuffling approach of the totally zoned out. Yeah, cool.

Anyway whatever you do, don’t call them zombies. They hate that.

While respect is handed out in relation to their name, in the four episodes I have seen the zombs overall don’t get a good deal. It starts well with a lot of up-close rotting face shots as the program begins its first person, ingénue slow-reveal a la Twenty Eight Days Later. Shit, everyone is dead but me. Not dead, undead!

But as things progress and the troubles of the survivors become a tad soap opera-ish—extra-marital affairs, revenge tragedy, wife-beating and mental freakouts—the zombies often seem to be forgotten about. Like when good cop and co. go back into Atlanta to get the guns they dropped, and this being America really really need them, it’s with a group of Hispanic gang-bangers, actually geriatric nurses, that they end up dukin’ it out with. The zombies sort of hang out looking a bit awkward, like they have been invited to a party where they don’t know anyone and they are carrying the wrong bottle of wine. If this carries on it will end up being a bit like Lost, but without the budget so they set it in a quarry straight out of Doctor Who circa 1978. Film makers, they love a good quarry.

This is of course a problem with the format. Zombies don’t really do much. One is much like another. There are no leaders. As we said, they natter not at all. There isn’t even a shelf-life here to go up against. I mean why do they keep going, looking to eat if they seem to keep going even if they can’t eat? Their lives are so meaningless, dull and without incident, beyond the odd great meal. In other words they are just like us. Which I like but which is also a bit, well ho-hum. ‘Cos my life aint Hollywood.

Meanwhile the walking alive are busy aday, hogging the limelight as per. So it was a welcome intervention at the end of this week’s episode when suddenly the walkers bit back, crashing a family cookout back at camp, and finishing off an annoyingly waif-like and blonde girl. No more heartfelt chats about Daddy’s fly-fishing psychology with her older, more neurotic sister for her. Which is a relief.

They also chowed down on the wife-beater because yeah, having had his head beat in by bad cop, the one who was boffin the wife of good cop as he struggled less with zombies and more with the deep southern accent our British-born lead was asked to mangle like a zombie to the limb of a pretty child, what else was there to do with that plot?

Where next is the question. One thing is for certain two ancient laws of horror persist. Evil people they got it comin’. And if someone says they are just off for a pee, they aint acomin’ back homey, their shit is over.

Overall, although it tries to run before it can walk, there is still a lot of bite left in the old corpse yet I wager. Long may they walk.

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Last edited by fnord (2011-05-10 14:44:09)