We, the Zombies

Geez—shouldn’t we have had disclosure by now?

This morning I woke up to a flood of texts from my friends (as is customary among millennials), all urgently telling me I had to read a particular New York Times piece: He Created the Original Zombie. His Family Wants to Define What’s Next by Jason Zinoman.

Zombies? I was skeptical. I don’t usually read the news—especially not from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. My head’s off somewhere else, caught between geometry among the stars and literary magazines with five subscribers. But something about the urgency made me click.

Photo by Aedrian Salazar on Unsplash.

The article was about the zombie movie franchise left behind by George A. Romero and the family disputes over what to do with the legacy. Should they revive the undead again? Change direction? Finally lay the whole thing to rest?

But as I read, something felt off—like when you’re at a work cocktail party and some guy in a suit, the kind who thinks he’s very clever, starts mocking everyone around him without quite saying anything offensive. He’ll veil the insult in metaphor, in allegory, in some high-sounding turn of phrase—just subtle enough that the “lesser minds” won’t catch on.

That’s how this article read.

We’re the zombies.

And the creators—the ones who scripted the whole thing—are now trying to figure out what to do with us. Do they keep us staggering forward? Reboot the myth? Or shut the whole story down before we wake up?

So the franchise—our fate—gets handed down to the next generation of the “creator.” Enter Tina, his daughter. Her big idea? A dance-off. I’m not kidding. Divide everyone by demographic, tribe, or trend—then make them dance and fight it out. She describes this as a lighter kind of horror, not quite real horror and themes "of The Substance"—a film (which, full disclosure, I haven’t seen—I don’t really watch movies) in which people’s essence is harvested and injected into the elite to keep them young and beautiful. Soul-goo aesthetics. Dystopia with contouring.

Meanwhile, the zombie creator’s widow—the second wife—claims he never wanted the franchise to go this far. He wanted people to wake up. To stop staggering through the cycles of consumption, war, entertainment, and doom. In her eyes, the story should’ve ended long ago. But despite her objections, the producers moved ahead with yet another zombie film—changing the title from Enough of the Dead to the more marketable Survival of the Dead.

And then there’s the original wife, content to keep the rights flowing—as long as she gets a cut. She’s fine with selling off the whole mythos to whoever bids highest. I quip, she’s basically like, “Legacy, shmlegacy—where’s my check?”

So here we are, the zombies—caught between three factions:

1. The offspring of the creator, who wants to turn our slow shuffle into a choreographed death spiral, putting demographics against other demographics.

2. The (young) widow, pleading for an end to the madness and a final awakening. But despite her objections, the producers—oh the profiteers and money-class!—moved ahead with yet another zombie film.

3. And the ex-wife, who doesn’t care where we wander, as long as she profits from the reruns.

Not one of them—not one—seems to care about the state of the world, the planet, or what’s good for the people still staggering around out here.

It’s as if they’re arguing over the next season’s script while the set’s about to catch fire. And maybe that’s the final horror: the story isn’t fiction anymore. It’s us.