The Post-Zombie Apocalypse

Post punk, post modern, post zombie.

Zombies used to be damn scary.  Night of the Living Dead, for all of its black and white, hard to see, grainy murkiness was terrifying.  Dawn of the Dead in full, glorious color?  Pants wetting.  The idea of the walking dead was bad enough, but the execution and the technicolor gobs of flesh and squirting blood just pushed it over the top.  It was the Best. Thing. Ever.

And of course, there can never be enough of a good thing.  Zombie movies started to crowd the limits of the B-movie sandbox.  Then they started spilling over into the triple-A neighborhood with remakes, conceptual tweaks (infected, not zombies! And FAST!), and then finally, when the market was as bursting at the seams, the inevitable happened.

The Post-Zombie Apocalypse.  And it was good.  Shaun of the Dead and Fido at the movies, Stubbs the Zombie in gaming (Remember that?  Good times!), and in music, the surreal and entertaining Naked Ape video, Fashion Freak:

It’s a goddamn cornacopia of ironic, tongue-in-cheek zombie goodness.  But it wasn’t until I ran across this image by Jason Chan that I realized that zombies had officially gone from night terror to cherished childhood memory:

When the inevitable zombie apocalypse comes, we’ll look at it not with horror or panic, but with nostalgia.