One of the problems with many industries is the parasite industries that grow up around it. One such example is that of entertainment journalism, which all too often, becomes the tail that wags the dog. Desperately spinning the plates in an effort to disguise the fact that all they do is indulge in sedentary recreation for a living, they invent meanings and layers to the things they watch, which in turn drives the entertainment industry to try producing works with such layers and meanings, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, because only people desperate for acclaim and applause put sufficient effort into breaking into mainstream show business, so when they find a source of acclaim and applause, particularly one which purports to possess some sort of elite status or superior insight, they gravitate towards it. Getting praise from the critics is better than praise (i.e. ticket sales & ratings) from the masses, because if the masses appreciated them sufficiently in their own eyes, they would not need to seek the applause of the theater & its bastard hellspawn, TV & movies. Meanwhile, when you get down to it, specialized journalism is about one notch below teaching on the "those who can't do" scale, so the journalists are gratified by the access to the famous and successful entertainers they obtain with their praise and promotion. It's a vicious masturbatory cycle, and kind of a closed loop, if not for money. Thanks to money, and the superior aggregate possession of it by the general public, the entertainers must, from time to time, stoop to make commercially palatable fare, before going back to give each other prizes & indulging their pretensions.

As we know, however, money doesn't solve everything, and while it drives a lot in Hollywood, possession of money and power has never guaranteed any particular ability to get more of the same. So when zombies become a big thing, and this percolates into the brains of Hollywood, they start looking to see how they can make money off of it. Unfortunately, by their very nature, the appeal of zombies is beyond the comprehension of the entertainment industry. Even the occasionally sucessful zombie property only seems to get it by accident, with the good stuff only being peripheral to the story about human nature or whatever shallow & trite musings the writers & directors want to show off.

As one example, take "The Walking Dead" TV show. A large part of its success before the most recent season, is due, I believe, to its monopoly of the zombie market. It's the only place to watch zombie stuff, so people watched it. The stories were utter crap and the characters so tiresome and despicable, that less than a handful of their deaths would have saddened the viewing audience. But it's also a critically acclaimed show, despite the absence of the requisite degenerate antihero for a protagonist (though they did retain the apparently obligatory "relationship with a hypocritical shrew" - no doubt a major factor in the critical success).

Usually, the second season of a show is its peak, rather than nadir, because that's when they worked out the kinks of the first season, and it's still fresh and they have not yet run out of ideas, and the actresses are still hungry so their looks have not yet begun to slip. On The Walking Dead, however, that season was bad enough to have killed a show about almost anything else, because Hollywood has no idea what to do with zombies, and told a bunch of stories that missed the point. However, because it was the only place to watch zombies, it retained its audience. In the current season, by splitting one member from the rest of the group, it has been able to tell its bullshit in one portion of the show while giving the audience what it wants in another. I guaran-damn-tee you, the intention of the creators, in the opening scene of the third season was to make the audience feel bad for the characters and their plight, when they were hungry, desperate and reduced to near-feral zombie-killing machines. The point of that scene for the creators was "look at how bad things are for them. This is how we establish that they are so desperate they will stoop to consider living in a prison". The appeal of that scene for normal people was look how FUCKING awesome they have become! Suddenly we could believe that the group of sniveling whiners and ethical debaters had manned up and become sufficiently badass to see the appeal of living in a prison. Who would NOT want to live in a prison (minus the guards, rules etc)? I'll tell you who - the same sort of people who don't see the appeal of the zombie apocalypse! A prison is a metaphor for the world, and in a zombie apocalypse, as in the prison in The Walking Dead, the world would be an awesome place, if it wasn't for the people who run the damn thing under normal conditions!

The appeal of the zombie apocalypse is a world where the rules and our positions in society don't matter, and have no meaning plus we get to kill people, and it's fairly easy as long as you're smart about it. To so-called entertainers, they don't get that. To them, the world is full of mindless zombies bent on joyless consumption (i.e. people who don't appreciate the specialness of the screenwriters, directors and actors), so a zombie apocalypse is nothing more than the same old, same old in new clothes, but with fewer servants. Thus, the only appeal they can find in a zombie setting is the opportunity to present their deep and thoughtful analysis of humanity (none of which says anything the Book of Genesis didn't cover in grade school). To such people and their symbiotic parasites in the entertainment journalism industry, the appeal of The Walking Dead is the double meaning in the title, and the new things it gives people to fight about, and the chance to parody what they dislike about the world in oh-so-subtle* ways.
*Not at all subtle

For normal people, the appeal of The Walking Dead is equal parts of the following ingredients:
- People Killing Zombies
- Zombies Killing People
- Daryl

Also, perhaps, living vicariously through Glen. It is not a coincidence that the very ordinary guy whose hidden qualities became apparent once the zombies rose up, is the one who gets to sleep with the hottest girl on the show, and peel out of Atlanta at maximum speed in a red sports car.

The writers LOVED having Lori on that show - she was a walking conflict generator, and it was plain with her erratic and contradictory actions from week to week. They had her die to save her child and have a heartfelt farewell to her young son, and I will bet you that NONE of the die hard audience really missed her or shed a tear. Lori had nothing to do with the appeal of a zombie show. Lori was an obstruction and represented the societal ties we look forward to the zombie apocalypse eliminating. A few weeks before her death aired, on a different cable show, a murderous gun-&-drug-dealing thug, who blew off his kids, leaving them in the care of a porn star whose child-rearing abilities he himself had denigrated, to assault a cop and go to jail on purpose, died in a prison brawl for the sake of a criminal organization with racist practices that had murdered his innocent wife. And his death probably inspired exponentially more grief among the fans of his show, than Lori's death among fans of the Walking Dead! The actor said that the Twitter messages he was getting in response were making him cry. I find it hard to believe that more people shed tears for Lori than spontaneously broke into a chorus of "Ding dong the witch is dead".

The point? The writing & directing & critically acclaiming types have no idea what to make of a zombie apocalypse setting. They can't conceive of why it is so viscerally appreciated & embraced, or why zombies are such a thing on the internet. Proof of this is probably in the inability of Hollywood to capitalize on the seemingly huge audience for any such work. In the last few years, there have been very few original zombie works, aside from sequels, a video game adaptation franchise and a bunch of ironic versions of the theme, like Shuan of the Dead and Zombieland.

All things considered, however, the industry has been servicing the genre adequately, by what I can only assume is a fortuitous coincidence. They throw in the violence and stuff we like to see, while we ignore their stories about consumerism or whatever. They get to deconstruct society with exposition about Woodbury, throwing in the occasional shirtless Maggie or Andrea's collarbone to appease the base appetites of the masses, and we get to see Daryl & Carl making headshots. Everybody's happy.

Up until now, that is.

With this "Warm Bodies" tripe that is coming out, the industry has finally gone too far. They fooled us by promising "World War Z" and then they slipped this in, while everyone is enjoying "The Walking Dead" and anticipating WWZ.

Now the reflexive criticism is that with the "undead falls in love with an almost-pretty human girl", they've given zombies the Twilight treatment, but that isn't fair. In reality, Twilight is not an evil thing done to vampires, it is the ultimate expression of Hollywood not understanding vampires any more than they do zombies. You get to Twilight from Gary Oldman's Dracula, and Moonlight and Buffy the Vampire sLayer. What Hollywood did with the vampire was overlook the monster, and focus on the fancy tuxedo. They see a handsome guy in a tux with superhuman powers and all they can think is "Mm-hmm, I'd like to climb all over THAT," (the anthropomorphic version of Hollywood is androgenous & bisexual, if you were wondering). Insulated from danger, enthralled by power and addicted to attention, Hollywood finds the vampire appealing, and Twilight was the inevitable outcome.

But that was not as much of a problem with vampires. They are pure monster, and all you want to do with the monster is get rid of it before it does something unspeakable to you, or takes your woman. You can't ruin a vampire in the same way you can't ruin a prison rapist, because there is no appeal to a situation where you must defeat one to survive (and the movies/shows that focus on people who make a practice of hunting or killing vampires - Buffy, Superntural, Vampire$, etc. turn them into a kind of glorified zombie, rather than a Dracula-like villain). Edward & co. is simply degrading a ravenous wolf to an ankle-biting terrier. Fine ladies, you think it's cute and want to put one in your purse, that's your business. We don't even have to aknowledge that's the same thing as our foe, and we can content ourselves with the certain knowledge of the outcome of yours running into ours.

The problem is that Hollywood sees the zombie as a kind of filthy underclass, like criminals, and like all such people who don't grasp the threat they represent, they start leaning towards making pets or mascots of them. Hollywood loves to imagine charismatic felons are actually wronged rebels, and flock around Tookie Williams and his ilk like they were a new variety of avant garde celebrity. They like to imagine a little love and tenderness will thaw their abused hearts and turn them into regular folks again, and their aberrant and anti-social behavior is never their fault. It's more like a disease (*cough, cough* zombie virus) or something! The only genuinely bad people are strong paternal figures, like the one in their own lives who either wasn't there, or else couldn't see the appeal of prancing around in makeup or expected them to get a real job some day. Because if even robbery & murder are outside the responsibility of the indvidual committing them, the imfamous degeneracy & vapid selfishness of entertainers is equally not their fault - Daddy should have appreciated them more! That's also why they love making shows & movies about criminals and antiheroes and "finding the heart" in them, or justifying their violence and self-destructive tendencies.

Now, with "Warm Bodies", some director/writer with a stereotypical Hollywood name and zero credits anyone has ever heard of or enjoyed under his belt, has found a way to translate this dysfunction into a zombie film. If this thing is done with ANY technical competence at all, it WILL receive tons of acclaim and attention and has probably already inspired all new ways to utterly and completely destroy the zombie film genre. We will NEVER again get a real zombie film or show, one that appeals to what we know and love about the setting.

An essential part of the zombie setting is the rules. The rules can vary for vampires and werewolves, because the nature of the threat is the important thing, not the details. It is basically about the fear of a predator that doesn't play by normal rules and the evil beneath the facade of humanity, respectfully (the Terminator and Predator are pretty much vampires, to a certain extent - note how Hollywood also fucked up the former franchise by getting more interested in its human potential than in explosions). For zombies, however, if you change zombies too much, you no longer have zombies. We can stretch enough to accomodate fast zombies, and armed zombies, and even zombies that can think their way around certain obstacles or set up ambushes and diversions. We cannot EVER accomodate a setting where the zombies CAN GET BETTER.

Dead is dead. After dying, your meat sack goes bad. Period. End of story. Maybe, if it's done well enough or a plausible loophole is worked in, you can have a good undead killing his own kind, but only to highlight how the rest of them are irredeemable, or else how unworthy and inexcusable the exception's virtue proves their evil to be.

"Warm Bodies" is not that. "Warm Bodies" is about a spunky chick getting saved by an underclass male thinking with his genitals, but somehow this establishes his virtue. She then proves her own independance and virtue by defying her father and her cultural assumptions about the nature & quality of the male, and her acceptance paves the way for the widespread embrace of the underclass as equals, the obvious logical deficiency of that proposition notwithstanding. Translation: Every non-violence/explosion-oriented Hollywood movie ever. And they are going to call this crap "original"! Just wait.

The point of a zombie movie is that it is not merely another flavor of undead-nemesis (otherwise they'd have more than just an obligatory one-shot appearance in things like Supernatural or Buffy or the Dresden Files). The real story in a zombie apocalypse is the second word. Zombies are just an excuse for it to happen, to keep on happening, and to feature violence and gore. We can have eco-disaster apocalypses, we can have pandemic apocalypses, or nuclear holocaust apocalypses, but the problem with all of those, is afterwards, all you have are other people, but with fewer cool explosion-generating toys, and no more of the thing that killed people. Maybe you can have mutations, but then they are too easily coopted into a bigotry story. Robot uprising apocalypses can offer violence, but said violence has all the visceral appeal of unplugging a toaster. Zombie apocalypses are an excuse to kill people and make blood splatter. That is the reason why they are the preferred apocalyptic mechanism. If there was a plausible means for featuring sexy sex and nudity in an apocalypse (with sex replacing head-shots), that would rival zombies in appeal. That's all there is to it.

The appeal of the zombies is having everyone who is not immediately useful to the protagonist/you DIE, and/or become rendered easy-and-acceptable to kill. Zombie works are, by their very nature, misanthropic. There is simply no place for a story about their redemption or humanity, because it defeats the point of zombies and becomes a not very original romance-cum-pandering-to-the-immature-and-hormonally-unbalanced film.

Unfortunately, the Hollywood collective mind is going to say "Finally! A way to tell zombie stories without having to pander to the visceral interests of the riffraff we moved to LA to avoid!" The business end of Hollywood will have a way to go after the zombie bucks their market research tells them is out there, and a way that is acceptable to the dancing monkeys who have thus far mostly balked at giving the customer what they want. And the same sort of people who swarmed into the theaters to watch Kate Winslet and Kristen Stewart miss the point of boat crashes and vampires might very well embrace this. Between the sycophantic critics & the bottomless pool of imbeciles' money, the zombie genre is literally doomed.

I said the movie must be stopped, but really, it's too late. I'm playing Cassandra but the horse is already inside the gates, and we're just waiting for the theatrical release date when Odysseus and his band of pretentious filmmakers and Hollywood accountants drop out the hatch to raze the city of zombie films to the ground. Folks, it's been fun, but all we have left is hoping they screw this up so badly that Season 4 of The Walking Dead doesn't feature Andrea's romance with zombie Merle.