I didn’t watch zombie movies as a kid. We lived in a small town with limited TV reception, and the nearest cinema was hundreds of kilometres away. Movies were hard to find, and horror movies were always way down the list of things to see.
Particularly after a series of school camps, where my 4th grade teacher scared the bejesus out of us by describing the horror of Halloween and Friday the 13th as campfire tales.
Not terribly scary for the kids who’d seen the films, but terrifying for a weird nine-year-old with an overactive imagination.
I avoided horror movies for years, despite loving horror fiction. My first zombie movie was Paul W. S. Anderson Resident Evil, which a friend pitched to me as “Aliens, but with zombies”, in late 2002.
I was twenty-five years old, and damn near crawled over the back of the couch as I imagined what could happen.
Still, I loved it.
I wanted more.
And so, my zombie education began. I’ve watched a metric buttload of great zombie stories since then, plus a bunch that were…well, not so good. Still loved them. There’s something about the walking dead that appeals to me as a reader and a writer.
I’ve got my own off-kilter zombie tales launching in August, but in the lead-up I’ve teamed with a bunch of brilliant authors offering their own takes on the genre in the July Zombie Read-A-Thon. You can get an early release of the first story in the Red Rain Collection, find some other weird takes on zombies, or find some more traditional fare among the fifteen titles on offer.
