Zombie Weekend

It was a zombie kind of weekend. It was certainly too hot to do anything but sit inside and wait for fall. While no actual undead appeared, there were many references and coincidences regarding them.

Firstly, I am reading a terrific series of online novels, Monster Island, Monster Nation and Monster Planet, centered around a zombie-caused apocalypse. They were written as a serial novels last year (Monster Planet is in progress) by David Wellington and they have a great short chapter suspenseful feeling in each post reminiscent of the movie serials from the early days of movies.

On television, in cableland, where every movie is on sometime, somewhere, we happened to catch a lot of zombie movies this weekend. The 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead" was on, so was "Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse" with Mila Jovovich (just say the name a few times slowly, trippingly on the tongue). A hilarious send up of the zombie genre, "Shaun of the Dead" was also playing. I recommend this movie, as it has some great deadpan british humor, and is set in England, which greatly diminishes your access to guns should a zombie breakout occur. This leads to some constrained and difficult weapons choices (a cricket bat for instance). The zombie movie that started the modern myth is George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and is available at the Internet Archive.

Other zombie resources on the web include the Zombie Infection Simulation, a little JAVA applet that lets you simulate a zombie breakout in a city, very useful for planning purposes. There is also the Zombie Preparedness Initiative or the The Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency, both with helpful survival hints in the event of a zombie incident. In fact zombies are a potential major cause of the apocalypse and one of the reasons I suggest having an apocalypse team picked and ready to go.

Just remember, aim for their heads.