Night of the Living Dead Santa

While I'm generally a fan of low-budget horror films, I never have really gotten into the whole zombie thing. George Romero's Night of the Living Dead was an inventive piece of work that broke new ground and pretty much created the modern zombie myth, but much of what followed was simply derivative. It's rather telling that 28 Days Later was hailed as a brilliant innovation in zombie storytelling because it had zombies that moved fast instead of slow.

Now I'm not pointing that out to slam the latter film, which as I see it did its best to change up the old trope. There's just not a lot you can do with zombies - they're mindless, bloodthirsty, contagious monsters. In fact, that's kind of the whole point of Romero's original vision. But I guess I'm one of those viewers who likes my horror villains to have some personality. After all, if they do, they usually get all the best lines.

At any rate, here's one more reason that the zombie thing is a bad idea, and for me it's close to home. Over the weekend, a drunken zombie Santa showed up at a home in Saint Paul, frightening two teenagers before vomiting and passing out.

A 14-year-old boy was doing the dishes when the door opened. He turned to find a man "dressed like Santa," but with "a zombie head. The boy immediately ran out of the house to tell neighbors and call police, while his 16-year-old sister locked herself in the bathroom and phoned her parents, the Twin Cities Pioneer Press reported. When cops arrived, they found the jolly, undead old elf sleeping in his own vomit and booked him for trespassing.

Saint Paul is just across the river from where I live in Minneapolis, so obviously a Twin Cities zombie outbreak would be of great concern to me. The wayward zombie Santa didn't actually eat anyone in the house, though there's no report on whether or not the vomit contained fresh brain matter, and so far there's fortunately no sign of further contagion.

But is this where zombie hysteria leads? Do we really want a world in which the only presents Santa brings our children are fear and puke? I hereby call on the perpetrators of all this zombie nonsense to cut it the hell out before somebody gets infected and develops a taste for fresh brains.