And so we reach the final film in the Month of the
Zombie. So far we’ve seen weird
dehydration comet zombies, voodoo zombies, and resurrected mortician corpses so
I thought I’d close things off with a much more contemporary film featuring a
more modern understanding of the zombie: the infected. The idea of “infected” rather than
zombies is part and parcel to the explosion of zombie popularity that hit
during the culturally defining years of 2007-2010. Zombies had been brewing for
a come back in the nerd culture sphere since the early days of the 21st
century with popular cult hits like 28
Days Later, Shaun of the Dead,
and the Dawn of the Dead remake
feeding the flames. However, from
2007-2010 we had the birth of Left 4 Dead,
the Call of Duty zombie mode, Zombieland, Dead Snow, and The Walking
Dead, a 5-way punch that cemented zombies as the defining cultural monsters
of the 2010s. However, with this
resurgence came change as the idea of zombies as shambling corpses gave way to
a more fast paced and destructive flesh machine zombie and the term “the
infected” developed to describe them.
Suddenly zombies became infinitely more dangerous and powerful than
humans but in only one film did they actually get smarter, 2010’s The Crazies.
