On zombies
I am not a fan of zombies. This is because they rank at the top of my personal pantheons of both squick and wiggins. Although it has been nearly 30 years since I saw Night of the Living Dead, it is still easy to wig me out simply by intoning, "They're coming to get you, Baaaarbara."
I can handle zombies in one context: if they are leavened with humor. Night of the Comet? Fine. Whichever "[time of day] of the Dead" movie looks really fake and takes place in a shopping mall? No problem.
Zombieland? Awesome. That had such verve that I could forgive the endgame plot hinging on the two girls (who until then had been quite smart) being utter dumbasses in the amusement park once the zombies show up. (Seriously, you bail out of the Hummer? Shake them off. Mythbusters demonstrated conclusively that it's impossible to hang onto a vehicle if the driver doesn't want you to.)
Anyway, I noticed an interesting phenomenon as I was driving home from seeing Zombieland. It was around 7:30-8:00, late-late-late twilight. And all the people walking across the street, all the funny shadows on the side of the road... They were zombies. My imagination was stuck in the movie, and was painting reality with that brush.
This is what always happens. This is why I don't like scary movies in general, and zombie movies in particular.
So I started wondering why this phenomenon happens to me with some scary movies and not with others. I didn't see xenomorphs in every shadow after I saw any of the Alien movies. The Shining scared the crap out of me, but again, did not linger to general fear of haunted, possessed hotels. Jaws made the ocean fractionally scarier for about five minutes the first time I went to the beach after seeing it. The Birds made me look askance at avians for a bit, but I didn't see them around every corner, or feel fear while walking past a flock of pigeons.
I had to conclude it's the human factor. Movies in which the Big Scary is decidedly nonhuman (or a human is controlled by a supernatural Big Scary) don't continue to bother me after the fact.
But zombies? The main difference between zombies and all other horror creatures is that zombies are human. Sure, they're dead or diseased humans, but dead and diseased humans exist in the real world. The wall between movie and reality is much thinner for zombies than for aliens [1] or demons or ghosts, which do not exist in reality. [2]
The magic that makes zombies in the fictional world is likewise minor, in the sense that zombies are animated...just like real, living humans. The only difference between a zombie and a real person is the whole cannibalism thing, and frankly, with the existence of guys like Jeffrey Dahmer, that's not such a big leap, either.
(I should note that the other sort of horror movie baddies that I simply cannot take and will refuse to watch under all circumstances are ones where more-or-less regular humans are evil, sadistic fucks. These would be things like Saw and Hostel and their sequels. I do not understand the appeal of those films at all. I think there is something profoundly wrong with people who like to watch them. I am torn between a desire to talk to those people so I can try to understand what they get out of those movies, and a desire to lock them up far away from the rest of us.)
So, yes, the zombie thing. It's the human thing.
[1] In an infinite universe such as ours, aliens may be real, but we haven't found any yet. Ergo, they don't exist in the day-to-day world where we live our lives.
[2] Please don't claim demons or ghosts are real. You will only force me to mock you.