The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead is a really great comic book that's about to be made into an ongoing serial on AMC.

I haven't read comic books in years. When I was a kid I used to collect them religiously. There are currently boxes upon boxes of comic books stacked in my mother's garage, each comic book individually wrapped in plastic with cardboard backing. Most of the Marvel and DC comics from my childhood are essentially worthless. When my friends and I were collecting we thought that our comics would someday be worth as much as the comics from the '40s, '50s and '60s, which is to say, a lot. But, thanks to mass-mass production that will probably never be the case.

Anyway, The Walking Dead is a lot of fun. Conceptually, it's great. The dialogue is often tedious and the characterizations are sometimes one-dimensional (classic traits of comic book writing) but after a while you really get into the post-apocalyptic suffering of the characters; the pace with which the characters come and go is...strangely refreshing. Most serials seem loathe to kill off characters here or there - but to see a story line in which even the most central characters are (or could be) killed off, I find somehow entirely cathartic.

You've probably noticed that there's been a huge vampire resurgence going on for the past few years - Joss Whedon's Buffy and Alan Ball's True Blood are the most notable - but I'll take a good zombie movie/show/story any day of the week. The thing about zombie movies is that they're movies about us. I know I'm not the first to say this but zombie movies are the perfect contemporary social satire, you know, what with our mass consumer liberal democracy and all. The herd mentality. I think you know where I'm going with this. The horror of a good zombie movie is the horror of ourselves. It's a beautiful (and very funny) thing when done well.

And so to celebrate zombies, an impromptu top 4 zombie movie list (in reverse!):

4) Dawn of the Dead (original), George Romero: His best film.

3) Mean Girls, Mark Waters: This is the best zombie-movie-that's-not-a-zombie-movie I've ever seen. Brilliant!

2) 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle: Overall, this might be the best zombie movie (even though technically I think you could make the case this is a virus film and not a zombie film at all but...)...it's certainly the best movie movie of

any of them...

1) Dawn of the Dead (remake), Zack Snyder: The

first five minutes of this film are outrageously scary and

phenomenal...the most authentic representation of what the first few minutes of a zombie outbreak would really be like.