30 Days of Night and Zombies, Baby, ZOMBIES!

BRRRRAAAAAIIINNNNS!

A zombie'd starve to death around me, huh?

Well, I can't help it; I'm positively giddy - like a little girrrll. Coming soon to a theater near you is the sequel to one of the all-time greatest zombie flicks, 28 Days Later (28 Weeks Later, appropriately enough), then in October (just in time for my birthday - or close enough that you can send me tickets) comes the screen adaptation of one of the all-time greatest zombie comic book series, 30 Days of Night!

I hadn't heard much about this, but it's been in the works for quite some time now. To be frank, I haven't had much time to do anything at all aside from work on the blogs and the website - more specifically, work on these damned computers that keep dropping dead everytime I get ready to actually use them (I think they're literally designing them just to surf porn now) - so I've been behind in my celebrity and entertainment gossip. It's all I could do to keep up with comics industry news and I haven't been doing that all too well. Still, Newsarama has a pretty good interview with the director, David Slade. He notes that the movie is sticking very closely to the original, so readers won't be too surprised. He also mentions that Steve Niles (original writer and still regular writer of the series, which is actually a series of mini-series) is getting a writer's credit.

Now I've been a big zombie fan since forever. One of the original games that will make it to The Weirding (some day) is a zombie-based game I've been working on since highschool, in fact. But the rest of the world took its sweet-assed time catching up to me. Still, on a lark I decided to do a cursory Google on the word and I was pleasantly surprised with all of the good, relevant results which turned up without any parameters or modifiers! I guess a lot of zombie fans stayed in the closet until recently.

Of course, a lot of industries - particularly the comic book field - have jumped on the zombie train the past few years and it's just another fad as far as they're concerned. But I've personally always been fascinated by the idea, thanks largely to my dad's decision to let me watch the MTV broadcast of the George Romero classic, Night of the Living Dead (NotLD), when I was a kid. Scared the living hell out of me! And honestly, excepting The Exorcist (which I saw when I was a young teenager - 13 or 14), it was the last movie that really scared me.

Oh sure, over the years there have been different scenes and/or concepts which have spooked me, but nothing really got to me like those movies did. By the time I was a Freshman in highschool, I was eagerly working on a RPG based loosely on one of my favorite books, I am Legend (also coming this summer to a theater near you). Over the years, I rented just about every zombie movie I could find - a handful of decent ones and a boatload of really bad ones - and then, when I hit about 30, came 28 Days Later.

And then came everyone else...

28 Days Later almost single-handedly revived the zombie genre and for good reason. I have to applaud the general movie-going public on their taste in the undead. But don't think for a moment that I am fooling myself; this zombie thing will come and go the way vampires did when my generation was coming of age. And that's a good thing. I'm just glad that this fad is one I actually like!

[ASIDE: I'm not positive all these links work or take you to the right page because I copied and pasted so many. The point wasn't to root-out a bunch of obscure zombie links; the point was just the opposite: to prove how popular, or "hot," and pervasive the concept is right now. Almost all of these external links came directly from Google, search term: zombies. I would have just included the search link but the post was so long, I decided to have some fun.]