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The zombie movie has a lot of appeal under its decaying flesh. It is less pretentious than its brother genre, the vampire movie. It doesn't have that whole "should we really be trying to kill them" moral conflict of the monster movie. The violence is less emotionally brutal that the slasher film. Zombie movies are perennial favorites with audiences for several reasons, not the least being that they possess all the best of the horror genre, while resisting the worst.

Zombie movies are funny. They are supposed to be. When George Romero re-animated the genre with Night of the Living Dead, the frisson of undead humans rising from their graves to devour the living was set brilliantly against the backdrop of humor. Zombies going through the motions of their lives while having no conscious or conscience was hilarious. A film like Shaun of the Dead reminds us that there are undead zombies all around us making our fast food, working at the DMV, populating our schools. It's the humor of the zombie movie that saves it from being pretentious and dry, or worse, preachy.

Zombie movies have no message beyond "survival is good," and maybe, "being undead sucks." Those few movies that try to inject some socially conscious diatribe about the evil scientific-industrial complex animated by evil corporate sponsers, like the Resident Evil zombie movies, only do it with their tongue firmly implanted in cheek. Milla Jovovich is a fine and sexy actress, but let's face it, she's not Segorney Weaver. She isn't about to spend one iota of her acting talent trying to convince us that this is anything more than a really good excuse for her to shoot zombie dogs. The slew of monster movies with messages for us about global warming, nuclear testing, toxic waste dumping, only distract the viewer from enjoying a fun movie with some hammer-handed attempt at social relevance.

Zombie movies are completely accessible. Every viewer goes through what he/she/it would do if trapped in a world gone wild with zombies. I have so much fun screaming "Run up the stairs and burn them behind you!" at the screen. The discussion after the film almost always degenerates into a debate on the merits of a crowbar, shovel or ax in a zombie fight. This whole role-playing fun of the genre was capitalized by Max Brooks (son of legendary Mel Brooks) in his phenomenal The Zombie Survival Guide, which could have been funnier only if it had included a section on techniques for zombies to use in survival situations.

Watching zombies

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