LITERARY BEEFALO

MY ZOMBIE MOVIE

by
S.E. Shepherd

With the recent success of the Dawn of the Dead remake, I decided it was as good a time as any for me to dust off the screenplay to my own zombie masterpiece entitled Watch Out, Here Come the Zombies.

I’ve been working on it on and off for the last fifteen years. It will serve as an homage to every zombie movie ever made, yet it will be a completely original piece of cinema, conspicuously free of any derivative material. To the studio that decides to purchase this genius script, I guarantee two things: it will thrash all the box office records set by Mel Gibson’s weak-ass Jesus flick, and it will spawn a line of merchandise so popular that the hacks at Disney will immediately reëvaluate their bullshit approach to market saturation.

Here’s a sneak peek at my zombie opus, Watch Out, Here Come the Zombies:

• There will be, literally, hundreds of zombies. Fat zombies with stretch marks. Zombies with bad teeth that will have remnant memories of their desire for adult orthodontia. A cute lunch lady zombie. A very serious stockbroker zombie. A zombie that bears an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Christy, my longhaired, Shakespeare-loving, high school English teacher (in a close up shot, you’ll be able to see that his rapidly decaying hand still clutches a leather-bound copy of The Taming of the Shrew, and his ripped shirt pocket stills holds half a pack of filterless Pall Malls). The sheer number of zombies will make you shake your head and mutter, “Shit, man, those zombies mean business.”
• My protagonist will be a charismatic African-American gentleman named Chris. He will be remarkably strong, able to effortlessly flip over a kitchen table, kick the legs off, and then nail it over a doorway using only four thumbtacks and the heel of his shoe. He will be unnervingly quiet; so economical in his words will he be that when he does speak, others will shut their yammering traps to imbibe his no-nonsense wisdom. Throughout the entire film, he will sport a tattered short-sleeve Z. Cavericci dress shirt and a skinny tie adorned with purple peace signs. He also will be very proficient in the fine art of wielding a pump-action shotgun.
  
  
• The primary setting will include a small farmhouse that sits near a sprawling cemetery; a medical supply warehouse that stores dozens of freshly frozen cadavers; an underground military facility where crazy, mustachioed Lieutenant Campbell and his rogue group of grunts hunt zombies for sport; and a shopping mall.
  
  
• There will be a scene where the survivors attempt to secure the farmhouse by nailing boards over the windows. Jay-Z’s “So Ghetto” will inexplicably provide one of the film’s more memorable soundtrack moments. The scene also will contain several shots of the survivors searching the house for useful items. For comic relief, the wisecracking vacuum salesman, Gary (played by Carrot Top, most likely), will stumble upon a box full of old 1950s stag films. He will smile and say, “Beat-off time!” It will become something of a catchphrase among the hipster set.
  
  
• You know the Mall of America? The shopping mall will be smaller than that. It will be more like a suburban strip mall. The kind that has stores with weird names, such as a shoe store called Kicks, Etc., that sells knock-off brands of shoes that you’ve never heard of like FreeSpirits and American Eagles.
  
  
• In one crucial scene, the survivors will be holed up in a comic book store on the second floor of the mall. Using information they find in The Dungeon & Dragons Monster Manual, they will discover that zombies don’t like fire, so they drive the undead back with a flaming stack of old Archie comics.
  
  
• One of the other survivors will be a frightened young woman named Sarah. She will spend the first 45 minutes of the movie crying in the corner of the farmhouse. She will momentarily snap out of her funk in the 46^th minute when she helps Chris and the others fend off an early morning siege led by the stockbroker zombie. Just when you think she’s about to emerge as a strong female presence in an otherwise testosterone-soaked situation — BAM! — she gets her fucking brain eaten by her dead Uncle Raymond who she mentioned in a two-line monologue during the opening credits.
  
  
• The role of crazy, mustachioed Lieutenant Campbell will be played by Jeff Foxworthy. I wrote the role specifically for him. Have you seen the Jeff Foxworthy show? That son of a bitch can act and, simply put, he has one of the ten best mustaches in the history of facial hair. If the studio won’t let me cast Foxworthy in the role, it will be a major deal-breaker. This movie will not be made without Foxworthy. He is my muse.
  
  
• The film will be action-packed with subtle social commentary on important topics like capitalism, environmentalism and necrophilia. In a scene that will ultimately provide the most memorable movie-poster image since Brian Bosworth stared down Lance Henriksen on the poster for Stone Cold, that kid who plays Lex Luthor on “Smallville” will have his genitals eaten when he tries to have sex with a hooker zombie played by Natalie Portman.
  
  
• In the movie’s final scene, Chris and the two remaining survivors will find an old World War II-era biplane parked in the farmhouse’s two-car garage. Having served three tours of duty in the Canadian Air Force running low-flying reconnaissance missions over the infamous marshlands of Detroit, Chris will have to choose which of the survivors he will take with him on the plane. Never one to mince words, Chris shoots both of the dudes in the stomach and makes off with the coveted box of vintage porn. As he takes off from the end of the driveway, Chris looks at the two guys agonizing over their fresh gut shots and utters the film’s titular line: “Watch out, here come the zombies.”