Walking Dead, evidently a hit show

by nonjwspouse 66 Replies latest social entertainment

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  TD

  I'm not a fan, but I'm very curious about the cultural fascination with zombies.

  There had been zombie movies here and there since Night of the Living Dead in 1968, but none of them got anywhere near the cultural traction as Dawn of the Dead in 2004. The spoof, Shaun of the Dead was released in the same year, followed by All Souls Day (2005) Automatic Transfusion (2006), American Zombie (2007) and I Am Legend (2007).

  In 2008, there was a popular FPS video game entitled Left for Dead, which was remade just a year later into the sequel Left for Dead 2, with charactes loosely based on the movie Dawn of the Dead. L4D2 was even advertized on billboards, which is fairly unusual for a video game.

  A year later the series, The Walking Dead made its debut. There was a flood of zombie movies from that point including Beverly Lane (2010), Bled White (2011) The Battery (2012), Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies (2012) and World War Z (2013) just to name a few.

  Zombies are everywhere in popculture now. American ammunition manufacturer, Hornady has even released 'Zombie Max', which were simply high performance hollow point pistol cartriges repackaged with a zombie theme.
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  hamsterbait

  After almost 40 years watching the Walking Dead at the Kingdumb Hell I think I'll give it a wide body-swerve.
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  talesin

  hahaha, yes, berrygerry, maybe that has something to do with my zombie-phobia. :P

  TD, it's the same with vampires - very trendy this century!

  tal
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  AndDontCallMeShirley

  I do wish they would get the physics right, ... you cant poke a blunt crowbar thru a zombies head with just a moderate thrust.

  Yes you can.
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  TD

  TD, it's the same with vampires - very trendy this century!

  Yep. There's definitely a fascination there too. It's a little easier to explain though, because the appeal is usually openly sexual and gender specific. It's not men who made Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer best selling authors and it (mostly) wasn't men who went and saw the theatrical adapations of those books either. The Blade and Underworld series are exceptions, but most vampire stories fall into that pattern.

  The violence and flight or fight predicaments in zombie stories appeals more to men, but the viewership is mixed and there seems to be something more to the fascination than just that.
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  talesin

  Hmm, I'm not familiar with Meyer (guessing she wrote the "Twilight" series, which I didn't bother with), but I get your point. The vampires have always been around, too, and quite popular. Thinking of a Clooney movie about vampire hunters, and a few others, too.

  Haven't there been a variety of BIG video games (I'm thinking Final Fantasy), that really got the Zombie thing popular with the younger set going back a couple of decades, and then the Will Smith remake of Legend ......... maybe it's just cycling. Time will tell!

  t
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  EmptyInside

  I really can't handle blood and gore. But,I saw "Night of the Living Dead",when I was 5,lol. So much for my JW parents monitoring my viewing habits. I watched with my older brother. That was the original one. It wasn't as gory as they are now.

  But,I do like Anne Rice's vampires. Everyone is different. They are showing old episodes of "Walking Dead" on regular t.v. I'm not sure how much editing is done on it.
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  keyser soze

  Love the show, even though I'm not a big fan of the genre. The zombies are actually far less scary than some of the humans they encounter. I find the show is less about zombies than it is what lengths humans are willing to go to survive.
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  Island Man

  "I Am Legend" with Will Smith is great! It was the first modern Zombie movie I watched while waking up from JW propaganda about demonic movies. The most exciting/frightening part of the film, the first time I watched it, was when his dog ran into the dark building filled with zombies and he went in with his flashlight . . . man, that was an adrenaline high!

  I think there is something about Zombies that touch the human psyche in a very deep visceral way. I think it has to do with a combination of the human fascination with death and dead bodies and the depiction of the human body as a gruesome, unthinking, uncaring, feral danger. It combines death with dehumanization to create a monster that challenges our notion of what is to be expected of a human form.
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  free2beme

  Everyone always claims to know someone famous, or attached there too, right? Anyway, the series is amazing, love it.