Given that you’re currently reading this on what we’re assured is called “the internet” it’s guaranteed that a decent percentage of people reading this have a plan in case, heavens forbid, zombies rise up and begin to take over the world. As weird as it’s going to sound though, George Romero, the father of the zombie movie genre, didn’t have a plan and thought that people who did were kind of stupid.
For anyone who doesn’t have a plan in case of zombie apocalypse or has no idea what we’re talking about, firstly, no you can’t hide in our awesome base if the worst happens and secondly, you’re actually part of a minority. No really, the idea of asking yourself what you’d do during a zombie apocalypse is so ingrained in pop culture that even the British and American government have revealed, albeit with their tongues planted so firmly in their cheeks they risked putting a hole through them, that even they have a plan in the event everything goes to shit and the Walking Dead happens. And you know an idea is popular when the government tries to use it a framework for explaining what you should do during an earthquake or some shit.
The idea of where to hole up during a zompocalypse, what weapons and food to hoard and who to entrust with the secret of where you’ve hidden those 40,000 tins of beans was largely popularised by author Max Brooks in his book, The Zombie Survival Guide, which goes into more detail than you ever thought possible about how to prepare for the dead rising and stalking the Earth in a quest to munch decisively on your butthole.
Brooks has made a small fortune cashing in on people’s fantasy of one day suffering no legal recourse for smashing their neighbour’s head in with a sledgehammer wrapped in barbed wire and has written several follow-up books on the subject, one of which was turned into a movie starring Brad Pitt. Something only a handful of authors and even less zombie fiction authors can claim to have accomplished.
As a self-professed zombie nerd, Brooks obviously considers himself a fan of George Romero, who told him on several occasions that he takes zombies just a little too seriously. Which must hurt coming from the guy who fucking invented the idea of the zombie as we know it.
According to Romero, he neither cared or gave any sort of a shit about “surviving” a zombie apocalypse and when asked about what how he’d go about surviving in one of his own movies by interviewers he’s usually reply “Go ask Max Brooks“. As an interesting side note, Romero also never understood why zombies eat brains and actually got kind of annoyed when people brought it up because it’s not something he ever put into one of his movies. So yeah, we hope if you ever had a chance to meet him while he was alive you didn’t ask him about that because chances are it would have ended with a really angry old man to slapping your shit.
