The monster that might be me

I love Zombie movies.

I love them because out of all the horror movies that exist, those are going to have the best chance at producing some kind of effect on me.

Most horror movies don't even faze me.

Many actually bore me.

Zombie movies though. I am not frightened by them. That's not quite the effect they have. No, This is more a feeling of ...revulsion.

It's not even the idea of people, or things that resemble, or used to be people, eating people. Cannibalism I can handle easily.

No, the revulsion comes from the ferocity and the abandon the newer movies, especially the "..of the Dead" series( most by George Romero ) attribute to the newly risen dead.

There is an animalistic sense to them. There is also a pseudo intelligence given to them, if not actual thought, the memory of thinking that propels them.

There is a total lack of dignity. Yes, that's the word, dignity, in these creatures.

These things are soulless physical creatures with no 'human-ness" to them anymore.

They are...devoid.

My sense of all this is what leads to the feeling of revulsion. These creatures are entirely contrary to what people should be.

It's as if they are the 'anti-people".

Everything and anything we can call "good" in humans is gone from these things.

There is no caring, no concern, no vestige of compassion what-so-ever in these things.

They are a mockery of what we are.

These 'zombies" are the twisted fun-house mirror reflection of what we are, of what makes us human.

Perhaps it's because I have a pretty good imagination, I can suspend my perception of 'reality' enough to 'get into' the movie, if only for a short time. I see what they are, and I believe them.

I see what we are when the soul is gone and there is nothing left but a physical shell. A creature with nothing in them to distinguish them from a rabid animal.

I can see this mirror reflection all too well in the mirror called the 'news".

In the story of the young man who tosses a baby out of a moving car.

In the story of the woman who shakes a child to death then hides the body in a rented garage.

In the story of men who stand in a circle, watching, while a woman that could be their sister or daughter is raped and abused but consider it all to be her fault because she was walking without a male companion or wearing the wrong kind of clothes.

Where is the humanity in these people? These all too real people who have allowed their reason and sensibility to be overcome by ...what?


Everyday in all parts of the world we see stories of 'zombies' reported.

A man who made a child help chop up her mother after he killed her.

Another man who killed scores of young women who were prostitutes or just unlucky to be on the same road he was on. Not only were they abused and butchered, but fed to pigs afterward.

There is nothing left in these people in terms of humanity. No soul to speak of. They are empty shells.

They are walking cadavers, committing the most heinous acts upon their families and fellow human beings. They are zombies.

It's not the cannibalism that makes the zombie. It's the lack of humanity within them that makes them able to not only kill, but kill savagely and coldly.

To me , I am affected by zombie movies becasue they are the closest to being real.

Look past the walking corpse and see what lies within the zombies. They are already among us.