Chasing Zombies in Canada....

So, I'm heading to the airport to catch my plane to Halifax, Nova Scotia, so I can be interviewed for a documentary called Zombiemania.

The funny thing is, I never really liked zombies. Vampires, yes. Werewolves, sure. Serial killers, count me in. But from the time I was 12 -- which is when I read a Roger Ebert article about seeing a kiddie matinee of Night of the Living Dead at a local theater; the piece was reprinted in Reader's Digest, to which my grandmother subscribed and which I always read when I was at her apartment on Sundays after mass -- zombies have always been my default dream trope for anxiety nightmares.

Other people dream about being naken in public or arriving for an important meeting or test five minutes before it's scheduled to conclude. I dream about cannibal corpses.

But over the last couple of years I've become really fascinated by zombies; Max Brooks' World War Z has become one of my favorite genre novels and I just started reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I love Grace Lee's American Zombie,, and 28 Days Later (I know the argument that they're not really zombies, but if you go back to their Haitian roots zombies actually aren't necessarily dead...) and Shaun of the Dead and George Romero's Diary of the Dead. I've been revisiting films like the French They Came Back (the living dead as a social services problem) and the UK Dead Creatures (see photo above), which I swear is the zombie movie Mike Leigh would make were someone to persuade him to make a zombie movie. Oh, and Fido, which I think got a bum rap as too twee.

More on this when I return....