It's 3 in the morning and I'm finishing up Diary of The Dead. Its one of Romeros least loved films, but I can't help but love it. It's got me thinking...even now, decades later, zombie films still know how to get under our skin. Or at least mine. They still have "IT". It’s not one trick... they combine fear, metaphor, and mood, and reflection in a way that just feels like HOME to me.

Zombie movies have always tapped into something deeper than just the fear of death. Something primal. They carry that what if feeling. It's the sense that everything we rely on is held together by thread. We live inside a system that, on the surface, seems stable. Traffic lights work, grocery stores stay stocked, the news keeps coming. The thing is though... it doesn’t take much. A few cracks... a train wreck, or something to disrupt that chain. A bad decision. A leader more concerned with power than people. And suddenly, the system we never questioned or even considered starts to break. That’s the fear zombie films echo... they're not just fear of monsters, but of the collapse we pretend can’t happen.

Romero wasn’t just making horror movies. He was throwing a spotlight on the world and daring us to look. Night of the Living Dead tackled racism and male dominance. Dawn of the Dead tore into capitalism and consumer culture. And he’s not alone... zombie films across the board have kept this tradition of reflection. The best of them aren’t just about the undead... they’re about us.

What makes zombies terrifying isn’t that they’re evil, it’s that they’re familiar. They’re people. Neighbors. Coworkers. Friends. They don’t kill out of some innate evil, but out of some deeper, unstoppable instinct. In most films, they’re still clinging to routines. They're shuffling through malls, reaching for door handles, wandering familiar streets. And that’s the horror: that even in death, we’re stuck playing the same roles.

All I know for sure is Zombies are scary as hell.