Sugar and Zombies - Not Very Nice

What happened to Zombies?  They were originally reanimated corpses that were mindless monsters with one purpose – to eat your brains.  I didn’t want to go anywhere without a machete by my side just in case an outbreak occurred.  I didn’t stock up on water and canned foods for Y2K, I stocked up to prepare for the zombie apocalypse!   

But now….they’re….they’re cute. Yes, cute!  I do not want my zombies cute!  Add in some comedy, and that’s fine, as long as the zombies stay horrifically gory.  Shawn of the Dead and Zombieland rocked the zombie comedy genre.  And in video games a little dose of silliness like in Lollipop Chainsaw is welcomed.  But good god, do not make zombies huggable!

Not Huggable.

Who doesn’t want to pinch the cheek of the zombies in Plants v. Zombies?  And while I am still known to panic and almost run into lava to avoid the hiss of a Creeper in Minecraft, I still don’t find that face all that terrifying.  Give me a shot gun and a horde of the undying mobbing me in Left 4 Dead, and I’m happy.  Give me a smiling dancing daisy and some garden plants to kill zombies floating on balloons, and I’ll down a few drinks and then swap to something like Silent Hill 2 to make me petrified. 

Cute AND Dumb - Just makes me want to snuggle!

Because fear of the unknown is what gives us the horror genre in the first place.  But for some reason our society cannot handle that kind of fear any longer, since we are replacing a decomposing face with a cute green one (and please, don’t get me started on how we replaced Nosferatu with a sparkly, stalking love interest…).  I hope that The Walking Dead stays strong and steers our society back down the road of fearing the undead.  Because I swear, if my future children are falling asleep snuggling with a stuffed toy zombie, I’m not sure whether I’ll high-five my husband for our child-raising skills, or sit my child down in front of a Romero film and make them fear these creatures.  Hopefully I won’t have to make that decision…

Actually, I'll just make the decision to bring my child to a Zombie Crawl.
A+ in parenting, sir!