I know a guy in his early twenties who thinks about George Romero's zombies all the time. Whenever he enters a room, a little careful part of his brain makes him scope out all entrances and exits. He doesn't like to be alone, and facing the door or ground-level window only makes it marginally better. Outdoors isn't so bad, but there needs to be a lot of open space. Even then, he keeps in mind that Romero's first victims were in a big cemetery, and could see Doom come shambling a long way off: When Johnny jokes with his sister Barbara that "They're coming to get you," the guy I'm talking about figured Johnny was including him.
When he confessed this fear to me, no doubt during one of my ecstatic outpourings on movies, I probably wasn't even talking about Romero, but something in my wide-eyed rush of words provided him an opening to tell me of his fear. One madman to another.
At first, I almost congratulated him. After all, here we are in a time when we've slopped around in every evil, twice, and come up grinning, like those pretty young people I saw triumphantly clenching dead rats in their teeth on TV's Fear Factor. Think about it: We're even too Gonzo for the Good Doctor Hunter S. Thompson--who stared down the slavering jaws of the Were-Nixon. And we're too twisted for Bruno Bettelheim--who survived Buchenwald and Dachau and knew what the wolf dreamed of while waiting for Little Red Riding Hood to show up. And simply too much for Karel Capek (the Czechoslovakian writer who gave us the word "robot"), who wasted away, his heart broken, when it was clear no one was going to stop Hitler in time. You'd assume that after all those affronts, nothing could faze anybody under thirty anymore.
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