Beware the sentiments in this post may offend some people. If this is the case frankly my dear………………………….!

You probably guessed that I like playing zombie games. No I really, really, really like playing zombie games, especially Last Days”. Despite enjoying these games this does not mean that I am unaware of the messages that zombies are being used to represent in these movies.

For Romero, the Night of the Living Dead zombies represented what he called “the 1,001 indefinable anxieties tearing at the world”. They personified the unrest and wariness of a not-even-close-to-being-integrated world.

The assassination of a president was still not so far off in the rear view mirror and the movie was released just five months after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

The Night of the Living Dead teems with political undertones that address the world’s turbulent race relations. The 1960s were rife with assassinations, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and counterculture rebellion, and were among our generations most turbulent years.

The fact that Duane Jones broke ground as one of the first men of colour to be the lead actor in a movie was a significant statement made by Romero.

In the midst of all of this came a movie that entirely changed the zombie film genre as we know it.

George Romero’s 1968 epic begins with a young woman named Barbara arriving at a cemetery to lay a wreath on her grandfather’s grave.

A zombie stumbles forth, and she runs through the countryside, taking refuge in a farmhouse.

Here, she encounters a young black man named Ben and a small group of other survivors. Ben avoids an onslaught of hundreds of zombies and emerges as the house’s sole survivor, only to be shot and killed in the final scene by a bigoted police officer.

The ending is bitter and unjust, and comes out of nowhere. The posse are presented as saviours. They are escorted by the police and dispatch the remaining zombies surrounding the farmhouse, but when they kill Ben, they toss his corpse onto a pyre without remorse, along with the other zombies they were hunting.

This was more than a great zombie movie and the messages that he was portraying are just as poignant now as then. The current “right to choose” debate demonstrates nothing much has changed and the far right wing still dominant the world’s politically scene.

I apologize for the quality of some of the photos but it was difficult trying to take good pics whilst wrangling rugrats and keeping them from mauling the figures. Love em dearly but………..!

Despite the message of this post and the pics the games’ zombie figures are still great minis!