Zombies have infiltrated the popular culture so much that it's easy to forget where it all really began. Let's for a moment just briefly acknowledge that the legends about people rising back from the dead to wreak havoc on the living date back to the earliest ancient cultures. But I'm not talking about that.

I'm talking about the God of Zombies: George Romero.

In 1968 he made a little film called Night of the Living Dead.



"The dead walk. Putrid corpses claw their way out of earthy graves and stumble towards civilisation. They are bloody, rotting, and hungry for human flesh - and it's all George Romero's fault.

With 1968's Night of the Living Dead Romero unleashed the modern zombie onto cinemas, annihilating their voodoo roots and resurrecting them as passed away friends and dead loved ones....Even today films like Land of the Dead have proven Romero to be a fearless anti-establishment filmmaker. He's a maverick, a man who frequently directs outside of the Hollywood mainstream, allowing his films to work as both chilling frightfests and impassioned comments on the American psyche."- [_{Excerpt from the back cover of George A Romero: The Pocket Essential}]

When you look at the zombie culture that Romero created, do not just look to the gore and extreme situations. Look at the social commentary. Look at how our society devolves and from the ashes rise the vision of how we really behave as a group of people.




More than 30 years later, comes along Danny Boyle, the director of 28 Days Later(2002) and reinvents the genre. These new zombies are meaner and FASTER. These creatures don't rumble along, they run... fast... and right at you. Boyle also takes it a slight step further to show that these creatures are actually just regular people that happen to be infected with "rage". Nothing supernatural here. But rather something much scarier.. that we ourselves will create the means of our own destruction. Despite the "upgrades", the social commentary is embedded in every drop of blood that drips from the jaws...




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The Dark Muse Collection
The Dark Muse III: The Exorcist
The Dark Muse I: Alfred Hitchcock
The Dark Muse II: Stephen King