Americans relish having the bejesus scared out of them.
Want proof? The Walking Dead, a zombie epic aired on American Movie Channel (AMC), is the most popular series on cable television.
Some sort of virus has changed most of the Earth's human population into braindead "walkers" that crave living flesh.
The series features a few living beings defending themselves by avoiding infectious bites and shooting, axing, knifing and crushing brains of hordes of mobile carnivores.
Those monsters bear no resemblance to the original nonlethal celluloid zombies, the "undead" of Haiti conjured up by vengeful voodoo priestesses and witch doctors.
Haiti's mythical "bokors" were merely corpses involuntarily summoned to do slave labor on sugar plantations.
Film versions usually showed them staggering aimlessly through fog-shrouded marshlands terrifying wide-eyed villagers.
That all changed in 1968 when the classic zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, ushered in the modern era of cadaver cannibals. (16 DECEMBER 2012)
