The zombie is where it all ends. Not just this journey through the ABCs of Horror, but something larger as well. The zombie is the most millennial of monsters: the one that scares us not just because of its foul appearance or its nasty behavior, but because when it shows up you know that things are really starting to fall apart at the seams. 

Is there a good zombie movie that isn’t apocalyptic? Well, a couple. Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 classic I Walked with a Zombie, for example, manages to be a Grade A zombie movie despite the fact that there are very few zombies in it and that they wreak little in the way of damage as well. But by and large, a good zombie movie is about more than just zombies: it’s about the end of the world.

That things-are-falling-apart feeling that zombie movies deliver so effectively is at once frightening and strangely attractive. When the lights go out and the zombies break into the farmhouse at the climax of the original Night of the Living Dead, it’s more than just the farmhouse that gets taken apart -- it’s our sense of reality itself. Even if the radiation generated by the Venus Probe eventually dies down, life will never be the same after the zombie plague. Once the first dead body comes back to life, the rules of life itself change – irrevocably.

Interestingly enough, zombies carried this atmosphere of apocalypse on their backs long before that summer when George Romero set all those black-eyed extras loose in rural Pennsylvania. Many archaic cultures believed that time unfolded in a series of ages. When one age ground to a halt and another one began, the rules that ordinarily governed life came to a halt too. Fire rained down from the sky, animals began to speak… and the dead came back to life.

Contemporary zombie movies – like the 28 series in particular – continue this tradition and, if anything, intensify it. Zombies are hugely in fashion in these millennial times, and it only makes sense that they would be. They’re the imaginative equivalent of global warming or bird flu. But unlike those real-life omens of Millennium, they’re both ominous AND attractive. There’s a part of us that – secretly or not – kind of loves the idea that the world is falling apart, and that the old rules and regulations we were so used to waking up to every day are done and over with. “It’s about time!” that apocalypse-loving part of us shouts when we see a group of zombies shambling or sprinting towards us on screen. “I was getting a little bored with things as they are.”

So bring them on.