Coral Amber

I've been told the photo on my main page makes me look like the girl from Night of the Living Dead (which is what I get for trying to go arty with a black and white photo). It's been a slow summer, and before the big fall schedule started up I thought I would take a quick look at the rising menace of zombies.

I never really thought much about zombies except for appreciating them as a classic monster of the horror genre that cropped up from time to time in cartoons, episodes of Buffy, and cheesy movies like My Boyfriend's Back. That all changed once I got to college.

My college roommates used to play the Resident Evil video games in the dark for maximum spooky effect. One time I was watching and my roommate said "Did you see that?" Apparently when his character walked by a zombie on the floor he saw it twitch, so when he had it walk by again I was focused for a small movement. Suddenly, the zombie grabbed the character's leg and took a huge bite out of it! I was so startled I squealed like the big wuss I am and, that night, I slept with my bedroom door locked.

Movies like Resident Evil and 28 Days Later are putting the horror back in what had turned into a campy genre. I, of course, prefer the slow moving "classic" zombies. You know, the ones I could feasibly outrun. Although modern filmmakers have amped up zombies to heighten action in horror movies, I'm still definitely more Shaun of the Dead than Dawn of the Dead.

With the new resurgence of zombies in popular culture, many artist and writers are taking the basic concept and making it their own. Recently I read a fantastic Salon.com article where they asked people to imagine their dream tv show. My favorite was a proposal for a funny but insightful zombie show called "Afterlife" with the tagline "We're here, we're dead, get used to it."

Greg Gutfeld describes his idea by saying: "The series focuses on the aftermath of a worldwide zombie uprising of 2007, triggered by a sexually transmitted virus that renders its victim physically dead, but still conscious and fully capable of carrying on "living." The key difference: They have no pulse, they smell, and without formaldehyde, they decompose."

My favorite character is the zombie grandmother named Rosie, 'she spends her time educating children on the stereotypes attached to the post-livers: that they are cannibalistic, that they are lazy, or worse, that they are really alive but simply "acting dead to get free stuff like welfare."'

Another terrific online zombie find is the flash cartoon Xombified about a good zombie named Dirge who is helping a lost little girl named Zoe get back to the last human city when she mysteriously ends up in the zombie infested outside world. I really like the pairing of the characters and the storyline. There is even a zombie dog. Check out the first seven episodes and you'll be dying (oh man sorry, I was hoping I would get through this article without an unintended pun) for the exciting conclusion.

For a little more gore check out Ross Campbell's The Abandoned, a graphic novel in which everyone over the age of 23 mysteriously dies and then rises from the dead. All the young characters must run for their lives and fight of their parents and the other elderly zombies. Uniquely, this story is drawn in black, white, and red. Tokyopop has the first volume up for online viewing.

I know someone who is convinced that something bad is going to happen in 2012 (based on the end of the Mayan calendar and various predictions) and that thing will be an uprising of zombies. He faithfully read The Zombie Survival Guide and has a secret plan for the zombie outbreak that he refuses to tell me in case I become one of the hoards of undead.

He was one of the many who were taken in by a very authentic-looking article about a "zombie parasite" in Cambodia: After death, this parasite is able to restart the heart of its victim for up to two hours after the initial demise of the person where the individual behaves in extremely violent ways from what is believed to be a combination of brain damage and a chemical released into blood during "resurrection."

Another April Fool's article used a picture of Sam, a three time champion of the World's Ugliest Dog contest, to espouse the discovery of zombie dogs. I'm sure zombie paranoia is felt by others, including Largo from the webcomic Megatokyo (he once mistook ravers for zombies) and songwriter Jonathan Coulton (who's song Re: Your Brains is mildly hilarious), and the cult classic will stay alive and well (oh damn, another one!) until at least 2012.

You've got six years to prepare for the zombie onslaught, so get cracking by checking out some zombie lifehacks.