motorfirebox

I found a screener of The Walking Dead's pilot. It's shaping up to be a damn fine television show. I wasn't initially very interested in it, really. It caught my eye because it's based on a long-running comic--which I also haven't ever been very interested in--by Robert Kirkman, who also writes one of the best superhero ongoings around. What I like about The Walking Dead (so far) is that the characters are interesting and played well. The story itself--again, so far--is... well, it's a show about zombies, and this doesn't really deviate from the tried-and-true. You've got the hero waking up in the hospital to find the world overrun by the undead. You've got the husband dealing with his wife becoming a zombie. I guess maybe that's the point of the zombie genre: to take different characters, run them through a familiar process, and see what comes out the other side.

I've never really "gotten" the zombie genre, and I think I know why, now. Zombie movies/shows/comics are about the breakdown of society. Strip away the zombie mythos, and the basic question a zombie movie asks is, "What if most of the people in your society wanted to kill you?"

This is going to sound preachy, and it probably is, but that's a kinda privileged question to wonder about. I mean, if somebody made a movie about the trauma experienced by a billionaire who suddenly becomes a millionaire, it might be hard for most of us to dredge up any sympathy for the guy, right? In the same vein, if the dead began to rise in a couple of villages in, say, DR Congo, would anybody even notice?