Wow! Those Zombie Movies Are Deadly Accurate!

Since about last Halloween my kids have been interested in zombies.  It started with Karenna asking, "What is a zombie?"  From there, the following:

• As a techie, I went to my new favorite place to send newbies for easy explanations: CommonCraft, for Zombies in Plain English.  They watched this several times.
  
• Since CommonCraft's reference to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" was clearly lost on two children born two decades after it, it was on to YouTube to be educated.  (I soon regretted this, as Jude made me watch "Mackel Jackson" again and again and again...)
• Later, we used our favorite DRM-free music provider, eMusic to get some Jonathan Coulton.  The kids enjoyed listening repeatedly to "Re:Your Brains" on Daddy's iPod and finding the World of Warcraft-rendered You Tube video.  (And Karenna now knows what the word "impasse" means.)

For a while I thought the interest in zombies had died, but this afternoon over lunch, their interest in zombies had been newly resurrected in a game.

Karenna walked around like a zombie chasing Jude throughout the house, threatening to eat his brains, and Jude would run.  (Karenna actually had the Zombie walk down pretty well, much more like a real zombie walk than a "Thriller" dance move surprisingly.)

Chris and I watched as Karenna chased Jude around the kitchen, tried to bite his head when he hid behind the curtains, and then followed Jude down the hall to his room.  It was then we heard the door slam.

"You know," I said to Chris, "I'm thinking Jude's behaving rather like a stereotypical zombie attack victim."

"You mean running into a corner, hiding, and getting trapped?"  he asked .

Apparently all those repeats of these zombie shows have done nothing to prepare him for the real—or in this case, "the pretend"—thing.