lucky you, there are still 2 films then, that you haven’t seen!
and since Milla is schtupping Paul, she’ll return.
*Resident Evil (2002; Paul W. S. Anderson)
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004;Alexander Witt)
Resident Evil: Extinction (2007; Russell Mulcahy)
Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010; Paul W. S. Anderson)
Resident Evil: Retribution (2012; Paul W. S. Anderson)
Resident Evil 6 (2014)
* animated
*Resident Evil: Degeneration (2008; Makoto Kamiya)
Resident Evil: Damnation (2012; Makoto Kamiya)
*
thanks to you, I stumbled on this
*stand-alone short film, Biohazard 4D-Executer (2000).
*
which i will watch now.:D:D:):)p
Nah, those were just riding the wave already well in motion. I think the real upswing was the Dawn of the Dead remake in 04 or maybe 28 Days Later in 02 (even though THERE ARE NO ZOMBIES IN 28 DAYS LATER).
Because all societies eventually break down. I suspect the Germanic hordes looked an awful lot like the zombie apocalypse to the citizens of Rome in 400s and many feel the tremors of the past in the events of today but feel it more socially acceptable to speak of the zombie apocalypse than of the downfall of western civilization.
The reason we have so many zombies is because we have too many necromancers. The zombies are just the symptom. What we should really be asking is, where did all of these necromancers come from?
If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that zombies have more or less taken the place of nuclear war as the apocalypse-causing-McGuffin in after-the-end type fiction. The idea of an all-out nuclear shooting war between the US and another superpower seems quaint and unrealistic these days, and so there needs to be another way to get all of those cities emptied out.
While I agree with much of what was said in the column and in some of these messages, I would only add that the popularity of a zombie apocalypse is because everyone thinks it is survivable! Whereas with plagues, nuclear war or a cataclysmic event; your survival is based on the luck of the draw. Zombies are slow, relatively stupid humans; they are easy to kill, outrun and out think! Everyone thinks they would be the hero in such a scenario! There were no “this is my nuclear war survival T-shirt” for sale during the Cold war!
Bryan Suits, who does a weekly talk show about global security issues (Redirecting...) makes the same connection between zombies and terrorists.
Terrorists look like normal people, but they are driven to kill you for reasons we don’t really understand, and no amount of pleading or bartering can protect you. A vampire can be turned away by religious totems (i.e., by faith, by being reverent and good) but a zombie must be killed, and killed violently and messily. (In other words, to deal with the threat, we must become monsters ourselves.)
I have this suspicion, which I cannot prove, that the whole zombie thing started as a derisive riff on mainstream religious end times stories. Starting (as far as I know) with Zoroastrianism, many religious mythologies have stated that at the end of the world, at the time of Final Judgement, people would be raised from the dead. Someone, somewhere, thought about this promise of the dead returning to life as a reward for a well-lived life and thought with a fit of snark: ‘hmm, the dead are reanimated–we’ll all be zombies’. So I think the whole discussion has this element of rubbing it in to the people who would take a fundamentalist tack on these end times myths. And the reason there’s been this dramatic increase in interest more recently is because the whole attention on the idea of an imminent apocalypse came to a head with the noise over 2012 and the Mayan prediction.
I think perhaps there is an element of recognition of fantasy at work. In other words, the Cold War was a real threat and perceived as a real possibility, whereas the Zombie Apocalypse is largely recognized as being fantasy.
There has been apocalypse fiction based on genetic-plague versions of vampires (The Passage) and for all I know werewolves too. But I guess zombies are more popular because in a sense they’re almost more funny than scary. Their over-the-top repulsive appearance combined with the fact that they’re so stupid and clumsy that they’re only a threat enmasse.
p