Okay, there’s this big craze over zombies (you know they’re big when they’re used in public service announcements and have their own “Zombie 5K“), and while I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing—I personally have nothing against zombies, like I do the overworked, beslutted, and “reimagined” vampire craze—I feel I need to make a differentiation, here, between “zombies” and…the “undead.”
Really, you ask?
Yes. There is a difference. At least to me, and I’m sure some will take opposition to it, but I assure you, I am only sticking to the “facts” as they prove my argument.
Cause, I am a fan of…The Great Undead.
You see, zombies…are alive…but are rendered monster-like through some sort of introduced agent, like a really really bad flu, a government-generated virus, voo doo whoop-de-doo, or cubicle-office work. Of course, many ignore the original zombie, as characterized in, say, the 1932 movie, White Zombie, where there is an Evil VooDoo Master pulling the puppet strings (there are other origins, see this link). I find that link interestingly tagged with “(fictional),” though know of the evils of tetrodotoxin and and The Serpent and the Rainbow discussion of “zombies.” Anyway, today’s versions are independent and hungry. They hunger for flesh, especially the much-prized delicacy of brains.
Zombies can be stopped: a simple penetration of their brains, brings their reign of horror to a quick, ignoble, end.
Now, the “undead,” on the other hand, are supernaturally reawakened corpses that crawl out from their graves and stumble around with no particular need for flesh, brains, or anything else, short of scaring and killing. Real spooky stuff. The undead can’t really be stopped (not in and of themselves, anyway)…unless you terminate whatever it is that reanimated them, or they completed their deed. You may decapitate them, but they just keep on coming. Incinerating them would take them out, I suppose, because of the near-total destruction, but still, I wonder….
And they don’t eat anything.
You see, the dead can’t eat.
Just like real vampires (and I prefer “vampyre” but these are not real vampyres…) have no frigging SEX DRIVE. No EMOTION.
Why?
BECAUSE THEY’RE DEAD.
Yes, dead, people. Did that fact escape everybody but me?
How can dead things have any kind of appetite, and how can they have sex? How can they enter into frigging relationships and pine over humans?!
Oh, “magic,” you say, because, well, how can the dead come back to life, anyway? That’s magic, too!, you cry. It is!
It’s fake magic.
Yesss, there I said it. Fake. Magic. Call me old school on the matter, but the whole “Twilight” thing rolls off my back like blood off an undead duck’s coat. I just can’t get into the displaced Human drives and appetites on the undead and their strikingly good looks. I’m constantly distracted thinking, strike a pose!
Twilight and True Blood “vampires” are just people with fangs.
Where’s the scary in that?
The spooky?
From what I’ve seen, “those kinds” of “vampires (which are undead—did I mention that?) are there to emote, and exhibit graphic violence and sex. Which we get where…?
Anyone?
We get that in any ShowTime or HBO show.
Again (important digressive point, here): today’s vampires are just people with fangs.
Okay, reanimating my thrust, here, so…zombies. While I am a huge Night of the Living Dead fan, I have, however, been more into the rising-from-the-grave-undead-by-supernatural-means more (I’ve always been into the supernatural, not the gore, but the etherial, the elemental, that which comes from beyond)…like Tales From The Crypt creepy, and any mummy movie (a fan of the Karloff versions as well as the Fraser versions). That’s where my favorites, uh, lie (even if “lay” is the proper word, not gonna use it with the undead; I’m not interested in “laying” any undead…).
So, I just wanted to clear this little distinction up. You know, to give the undead their due.
Man, I feel so much better now. Been wanting to do that for years. I can now crawl back into my own grave….
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