Welcome to Zombieland...

Not the movie, which I'm seeing tonight, but the world in which we live.

The Zombie Explosion

Twenty years ago, it seemed like all we had were three Romero movies, a few Italian oddities, CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS, and that funny one that convinced the public that zombies love to eat brains. In the printed realm, there was Skipp and Spector's BOOK OF THE DEAD, and Philip Nutman's novel-length expansion of his short story, Wet Work. DEAD/ALIVE came along and moistened things up a bit, but, beyond that, there really wasn't much for a zombie fan to chow down upon...

Today, one could say that our cup hath runneth over: zombies are everywhere. In less than five years, we've gotten three new Romero movies. Over the past decade, Skipp, Spector, and Nutman have been scooted down the shelf to make room for tomes by Max Brooks, Brian Keene, Kim Paffenroth, and a shambling and varied host of other zombie novels.

Romero predicted the zombie apocalypse, and it is here: the living dead are everywhere. Slim pickings have given way to an embarrassment of Rhodes-style open-belly feasts, and one has to wonder: how much is too much? Is the grue-filled balloon about to burst?

Yes and no.

Gamers have shown no sign of zombie fatigue. After a decade, Resident Evil--the spark behind today's zombie craze--is still going strong, and its progeny (LEFT 4 DEAD, DEAD SPACE, DEAD RISING) are among the most popular games on the market.

In movie theaters, zombies have yet to take a serious chunk out of the box office. Films like [REC] and DIARY OF THE DEAD receive limited theatrical runs, and a modern classics like SHAUN OF THE DEAD produce less-than-stellar box office numbers. Zack Snyder's remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD remains the reigning zombie box office king, and it's popularity is due more to the fact that it's a balls-out action packed horror film than to the fact that the movie-going public at large were champing at the bit to see zombies on the big screen.

As far as books are concerned, the public will move on. Some new trend will pass over the cultural landscape, and a few major publishers will get burned, having dumped too much money into a zombie book simply because Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sold well, and Max Brooks may very well never outsell The Zombie Survival Guide.

There will, however, always be an audience for zombie books. Zombies have niche appeal, and I don't believe the core audience--the folks who purchased 20,000 copies of DAY BY DAY ARMAGEDDON, for example--is going anywhere. They've been around for quite some time, and while their numbers are not strong enough to put anyone on the NY Times Bestsellers List, they are more than powerful enough to keep several small presses afloat for the foreseeable future.

Outside of games, movies, and books, zombies continue to disappoint nut-jobs the world over by simply insisting upon remaining fictional.

Big Book News

We're about to find out just how strong the zombie book buying audience really is: George A. Romero, the real Big Daddy, has reportedly been paid a $300,000 advance by UK publisher Headline to pen two zombie novels. The first, aptly titled The Living Dead, will reveal "the origin of the zombie realm," and will give us "glimpses of increasing chaos from around the globe."

A decade ago, Romero dipped his toe into these waters, with a serialized e-book, the somewhat Vonnegutian The Death of Death. The plug was pulled on that project one hundred pages in, but elements of the story have shown up Romero's recent work, and I suspect the minute-by-minute, around-the-globe time-line style of Death will carry over into The Living Dead and its sequel.

Click here for more.

Zombieland

Thanks to the fine folks at Sony Pictures and Moroch, I'll be attending a press screening of ZOMBIELAND tonight. Based on the trailers alone, I have pretty much decided that this is my favorite film of all time.

Stupendous advance word isn't helping, but I should probably lower my expectations...

Resident Evil: Degeneration

We owe the current zombie craze to Resident Evil.

Released in 1996, the Sony Playstation chiller created the survival horror game genre, spawned several sequels across multiple platforms, produced a string of imitators, and caught the ever-watchful eye of Hollywood.

It was obvious from the start that George Romero's Dead films inspired the video games, so it only made sense that he would be involved with the film. George's Resident Evil screenplay (the draft I read, anyhow--there were several) wasn't fantastic, but it was a damn sight better than the mess we got in March of 2002. That it featured a pack of zombie dogs devouring a character named "Russo" makes it some kind of unsung classic. But it was not to be.

The director of Dawn of the Dead was out. In his place, the director of... Mortal Kombat and Soldier? Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil was lousy, but for the first time in over a decade, there were zombies on the big screen, man. That alone was kind of cool.

Money talks, and though Resident Evil didn't set the box office ablaze, it performed well enough worldwide to triple its meager $33 million dollar budget. By the time its utterly rancid sequel hit screens in September of 2004, 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake had already made it clear: zombie movies were back.

Five years after the first Resident Evil film resurrected the living dead on the silver screen, George A. Romero had returned twice to the genre he created--this after twenty years had passed since Day of the Dead.

The success of Resident Evil also brought new life to the world of zombie fiction, dormant since Philip Nutman's excellent novel Wet Work, itself an expansion of his short story of the same name, found in Skipp and Spector's groundbreaking Book of the Dead. By 1998, zombie short stories (many of them very poorly written) were multiplying online, found chiefly at the Homepage of the Dead, a site frequented by longtime Romero fans who loved to play Resident Evil and Resident Evil fans whose love of the game prompted them to seek out Romero's films.

By 2000, the demand for zombie novels was growing, a demand initially answered by self-published writer Darrin Brent Patterson. Project Phoenix: Dead Rising, a nightmare abomination of bad writing, borrowed elements from both Romero and Resident Evil. Appropriately enough, the genre was eating itself.

Eight years down the road, thanks mostly to the small press, there are more zombie novels than any fan frowning in confusion over Project Phoenix could have hoped for, many of them far better than the shoddy fan fictions that announced their coming, and some not much different. Like the walking corpses within their pages, they just keep on coming, with no end in sight.

Zombies are everywhere now: on the big screen, the small screen, in video games and comic books, on toy shelves and book shelves. And George Romero is up at bat again for the third time in five years.

Thank you, Resident Evil.*

Oh, before I forget: Here are the first eight minutes for the fourth Resident Evil film, the all CG Degeneration. I'm not going to say it looks good, but it certainly looks... interesting, if a little lifeless and uninspired. The motion-capture work is convincing, the fluidity of which goes a long way toward making the textures and the facial animation all the more unnatural. Unless you're a hardcore fan, you'll probably just want to skip the eight minute clip and go straight to the Age Restricted Red Band clip. That's where the fun stuff is, anyhow.

While not real, Claire Redfield no doubt has a glowing future as a Japanese pop sensation.

*If you had anything to do the 30th Anniversary Special Edition of Night of the Living Dead, well, then... someone should kick you in the nuts.