'Zombie' cases stirring America
Pop culture would have us believe that one out of every three people walking the Earth is a vampire, mostly young, good looking and with a lot of nice qualities.
But the blood-sucking undead now have some competition for their human food source.
Zombies. They’re everywhere.
Zombies. They’re everywhere.
Movies like “Dawn of the Dead”, “Shaun of the Dead”, “28 Days Later”, and the television series “ The Walking Dead,” all have a courageous few pitted against hoards of hungry zombies.
The recent horrific news of a growling man alleged to have been found eating the face off an unconscious victim in downtown Miami may reaffirm the beliefs of zombie lovers — and erstwhile zombie hunters — that the staggering, putrefied dead people reawakened by witchcraft are making their way to their neighborhood for a meal, despite the fact that Miami’s aberration may have been under the influence of “bath salts,” a new street drug experts are calling the new LSD.
Then Thursday news broke from Maryland that a 21-year-old college student told authorities he had eaten the heart and brain of another man.
North Riverside resident Doug Wojtowicz, an author of science fiction and thrillers, has also been a visitor to the Zombie Squad website message board.
According to the website, Zombie Squad “...is an elite zombie suppression task force ready to defend your neighborhood from the shambling hordes of the walking dead. We provide trained, motivated, skilled zombie extermination professionals and zombie survival consultants. Our people and our training are the best in the industry...”
It goes on to say “... When the zombie removal business is slow we focus our efforts towards educating ourselves and our community about the importance of disaster preparation. If you are prepared for zombies, you're prepared for anything...”
So, what’s the attraction to zombies?
“It’s a whole bunch of things,” Wojtowicz said. “For some people it’s the fear of conformity, of being like everyone else, like in “Dawn of the Dead.”
There is a metaphor here, Wojtowicz said.
In “Dawn of the Dead,” zombies converge on a shopping mall. There they shuffle through malls without purpose, without goals. Not unlike the hordes seen everyday in malls all over.
Zombies can even serve as a moral compass of sorts, he said.
“What scares me personally is the idea of having no goals, no focus,” Wojtowicz said. “It’s like having a job you don’t like, working a daily grind.”
As for the Zombie Squad, Wojtowicz said participants like to ruminate over how they would have survived a particular scene in a movie, how they would prepare for a zombie onslaught. Also it’s just gross-out fun, he added.
“George Romero (director of cult-classic ‘Night of the Living Dead’) once wrote zombies are the working class of monsters, the working class stiffs, no pun intended.
“And conversely, when you have a zombie apocalypse going on, you don’t have to worry about those conventional things you routinely do,” Wojtowicz said. “Now I don’t have to wait in lines, pay bills, worry about having the right clothes to go anywhere. You don’t have to go events you don’t care about or meet with people you don’t like.
“You no longer, have to say, ‘No honey, you don’t look fat in that dress.’ Zombies come by and you push that all aside, you don’t have to worry about it.”
Hornady Manufacturing, a well-respected name in ammunition, has capitalized on the current Zombie love by offering “Zombie Max” ammo, an absolute necessity for the coming Zombie Apocalypse.
From June 29 to July 1, Hornady and the Nebraska National Guard will sponsor the “Zombie 3-Gun Match: Zombies in the Heartland - Pandemic 2012” at Heartland Public Shooting Park in Grand Island, Nebraska.
Now, of course, the people at Hornady certainly don’t believe in zombies and the event is just some good, clean fun for shooting enthusiasts.
Then again, it might not be a bad idea to go out and get a box of “Zombie Max,” just in case.
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