Either I'm late to the party or there's been an outbreak of zombie movies lately. After watching the Korean Train to Busan last year, I recently watched The Girl with All the Gifts (Britain, 2016), Cargo (Australia, 2018), and Ravenous (Canada, 2017). Though an original zombie film fan - having as a teen watched too many 1970s zombie films, as well as the disturbing George Romero trilogy that kicked it all off - lately the thought of a zombie story gave me ennui. After all, how long can you suspend disbelief about the dead returning to life as mindless flesh-eating monsters. For years, I skipped zombie movies and was never drawn into The Walking Dead (I found a few episodes of iZombie on Netflix to be trite, contrived, predictable and poorly-acted like most web serials).

The recent films were engrossing; each wanted to break out of the inherent limitation of the genre so each opted for novelty to produce a gripping story. The zombies gave me food for thought, and since I was on Twitter a lot recently, following the #MeToo disclosures, it struck me that zombies are now a different metaphor than what they were in Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978), a first such movie with grotesque scenes of cannibalism. In it, survivors hide out inside a sprawling shopping mall, and the slow-walking zombies meandering with easy listening music playing over the PA system appear no different from Americans spending the afternoon shopping. Yes, it is clearly a statement on consumerism.