All aboard the Zombie Train!

You probably remember the first zombie movie you ever saw.

Mine was Return of the Living Dead, and wow, I haven't been the same since. My first encounter came during the summer between seventh and eighth grade, on a suitably dark and stormy night in New Jersey, at a meager strip-mall movie theater with a lax policy for barring 12-year-old boys from R-rated films. Whoever the usher was that night, I thank you, sir.

Hunkered down in my seat, I was transfixed, terrified. In possibly the single most transformational 90 minutes of my life, I absorbed my first look at 1) tar-faced zombies hungrily munching human brains, and 2) full-frontal female nudity!!! (Although years later I learned that Trash aka Linnea Quigley had been wearing a latex pubic cover-up. Childhood memories are never what they seem.)

Shaken, I emerged from the theater to find the rain hammering down on the parking lot, the pavement glistening yellow from reflected streetlights. It was as if the movie had followed me outside --- the steamy summer night air loaded with Trioxin 245, seeping into the ground, summoning rotten corpses to eat my brain. My friend and I scooted back to his house, scared out of our minds. Every ten steps I looked back, legs coiled under me to bolt if I saw zombies charging down the street.

We made it home alive. But for 25 years since, I've had nightmares about that damn movie. About zombies. And sometimes about full-frontal female nudity, but that's a topic for a different blog.

Now, probably like you, I've seen a hundred zombie films since then --- some great, some awful. The zombie genre has long been established, and as a writer, I'm here simply trying to make my own humble contribution. Of course, we're all essentially following in George Romero's (and Richard Matheson's) honorable footsteps. Sometimes it's easy to dismiss a movie or book as "Oh god, another zombie thing," but the fact is, every genre needs an influx of new material, or else it fails to propagate new fans and sustain itself.

We all join the zombie train at different points along the track, and there's no telling where people might climb aboard. If you're lucky, it's Night of the Living Dead. If you're not, it's Redneck Zombies. My point is, you never know whether the movie you make or the book you write will be somebody's FIRST zombie experience, good or bad. So, yes, I want to make mine good. Maybe somebody reads The Return Man and thinks it's kinda cool, and as a result they want more, so they look around and discover my favorites, the true canon --- Return of the Living Dead and the Romero trilogy and World War Z and Shaun of the Dead. That would be awesome.

So... what was your first zombie encounter?

---- Vincent
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