Halloweenis

Halloween is a pretty fun holiday, all things considered. Kids go out and extort candy from adults under threat of damaging property. Adults go out and extort sex from each other under threat of continuing to wear horrible costumes. Everyone gets drunk off of something, either sugar of alcohol. Sure, it's commercialized, but what good holiday isn't? Still, if you ask me, ghosts and goblins are fucking boring. The real money-shot of horror is zombies.

Zombies are, unfortunately for my pseudo-hipster upbringing, somewhat en vogue right now. By which I mean they are fashionable, and not that the band En Vogue has risen from the dead (because why would I ever complain about that?). Movies, video games, t-shirts, and even Hellogoodbye seem to all be painfully aware that putting pirates, ninjas, and zombies onto anything will automatically sell it to greasy teens. This is really kind of a shame, because any time something becomes a cash-cow the market inevitably becomes over-saturated with low-end garbage themed around cashing in quickly. For example, when studio executives realized that Pixar's animated garbage was the new Disney cartoon they descended on the genre so fast that their digital, 3-D cutsey crap could blot out the sun. And sometimes I worry that the zombie theme is suffering from the same corporate bloat.

So, in honor of Halloween, I decided to put hate aside for a little bit and invited some friends to tell me what zombie shit they loved and why. I think it will be a soulful journey during which we get to know both the monsters we love, and ourselves, a little bit better along the way. To get things started off, long-standing friend of Hate/Nothate, Monseigneur Timecat, wrote this little ditty about why reanimated flesh gets him hard:

"I don’t know what it is about Zombies that I find interesting and cool. Maybe its the danger, action, and chicks who realize you’re the last guy on Earth, like in Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland. There’s something about films like these that make me just want to bitch-slap every person in the room to keep them quite while I’m wathin’ ma’ (zombie) stories.

I even admit that I find the idea of a small zombie outbreak in my area appealing. Who doesn’t think it would be fun to shoot some of the horrible monsters that live on your
street, zombies or not? As I’ve been thinking about it, that seems to be the one reason that I, like many other people around the world, am so fascinated by zombies in our culture. Just like any other action movie, they give you a great starting point for creating your own revenge fantasies for your stupid boss, whore-ex, etc… except, when you kill someone and they’re a zombie, you don’t go to jail for the rest of your life."

But I think that excuses to kill your neighbors is only part of the picture. So over the next few days I would like to try and really examine why zombies are the coolest fucking things under the sun. I would also like to try and get a working list of the cream of the slowly decaying crop in terms of zombie media, be it in book, film, or video game format. I hope that you will all join me in this touching journey into our hearts. I encourage my entire single-digit audience to break their longstanding feedback strike and comment away on this. As much as I admire your vows of silence I would love to get a serious discussion going. So read along and jump in. Critics are already calling it "the feel-good hit of the summer," which is impressive because it is currently Fall. And I promise, I will try to keep the zombie-related puns to a minimum, with emphasis on the word "try."