So while I’m not the world’s biggest scary movie fan, I do have one big, fat guilty pleasure.  It’s zombie movies.   It happened by accident.  I think I was headed to some stupid action adventure flick and it happened to be sold out.  My only other option was Disney (gag!), an 1800’s period piece craptacular (double gag!) or a zombie film.  I thought, what’s the worst that could happen?

I’ll tell you.  I screamed like a 12-year old girl through most of the flick.

In movies, I become emotionally bereft.   I’ve seen how movies are made and I know the magic of special FX.   I think the first and last time time I cried in a film was “E.T.”  (Okay … and I may have gotten a tear or two at “Terms of Endearment”, but that’s IT!)  And the only movie that ever made me slightly antsy was “Aliens”.  (Well, you have to admit that Mama Alien did go a little nutso after Sigourney Weaver pissed her off and incinerated her hive.)

In this particular zombie movie, (“Dawn of the Dead”?  “Day of the Dead”?  Uh, “Dead of the Dead”?) I was literally screaming at the characters for a good majority of 90 minutes.  Apparently, the undead (or dead-ish) got under my skin.  I actually caught myself looking around the theater to see where the closest exits were.  And I kept reaching down to make sure I had easy access to my keys lest a zombie should burst through the door.

I never really used to think of zombies as frightening.  To me, they were more of a nuisance, like mosquitoes.  Slow-moving, brain-eating mosquitoes.   When they popped up and started breakdancing in MJ’s “Thriller” video, I was thrilled (get it?) for them.  Up until that point, zombies had gotten such a bad rap.  Now they were actually rapping.

In whatever film I saw, however, the zombies were sped up.  They weren’t lumbering at you anymore.  They were running at you full-speed.  These ferocious, sped-up zombies scared the crap out of me.  Some poor woman would be sitting there minding her own business when suddenly, BLAMMO, a zombie would run up and eat her face off.  Now THAT’S a bad day.

I now drag all my friends to zombie movies with me.  My big, strapping friend Eric will watch them with me … through his fingers.   My friend Gene (a former Marine), meanwhile, refuses to go with me anymore.  I once left a heinous bruise on his bicep when I clamped down during a scary scene.  Who could blame me?   No one expected that zombie to pop up from the backseat of the car, yo.  No one, I tell you.

To this day, I rarely have nightmares, but if I do it usually involves trying to outrun a pack of ravenous flesh-eaters.    In the dream I always escape, but only because I’ve had to sacrifice someone to get away unscathed.  (Sorry Mom.  Sorry Dad.)

Yesterday, was Halloween.  I didn’t go out.  Just my luck I’d run into some fool dressed like a zombie.  If that person wasn’t dead-looking before, he would have been after I was done with him.