I Walkman with a Zombie

I woke up this morning with zombies on the brain. That's on the brain, not eating my brain. I don't know what the deal was, but when I hopped into the car later to head for work, my iPod was cued up to the 1960s voodoo-pop classic "I Put a Spell on You," by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who used to make his stage entrance from a coffin and sport a plastic skull as a sidekick.

Then I learned that a zombie walk—a flash mob for the life challenged—was being organized in San Francisco the next day, a stunt for filmmaker George Romero's zombie epic Survival of Dead, opening May 28.

I've been summoned by flesh-eating corpses.

Swept up in the zombie zeitgeist.

Zombies are everywhere, which is to be understood, what with the impending rapture, plagues, zombie banks and the Mayan-certified global disaster right around the corner.

They're in Christmas musicals, video games, Hollywood films, the local mall (a popular place for zombie walks), literature, 115,000 YouTube videos and more than 5,000 iPhone apps.

Still, truth be told, I don't dig zombies.

Oh, I appreciate all those campy 1940s horror flicks—what's not to love about Jacques Tourneur's silly 1943 classic I Walked with a Zombie? And Romero's 1968 gore-fest Night of the Living Dead, with its post-Apocalyptic spin and racial undertones, is a bona fide classic.

I even read S.G. Browne's satirical Breathers: A Zombie's Lament, about members of a support group for zombies who start fighting for civil rights. Ex-stripper-turned-award-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno, United States of Tara) has optioned the film rights. Hopefully, she'll tap the fun-loving side of the undead and spin a suitable soundtrack.

Musically, the past five decades have been a mixed bag for zombies. Remember 1968's chart-topping hit "Fire," from the bombastic Brit singer Arthur Brown? Yeesh. On the other hand, Dr. John's night-trippin' New Orleans classic "I Walk on Gilded Splinters," with its evocation of voodoo priestesses, was the real deal.

Since then, everyone from the Cranberries and the Hooters to Michael Jackson and My Chemical Romance has paid homage to the undead.

Zombies can even be found on Seth Green's animated TV series Robot Chicken—the chicken-clucking tune heard over the end credits is a version of "The Gonk" from Romero's 1978 zombie paean Dawn of the Dead.

But most zombie flicks are larded with metal (though Woody Harrelson's 2009 film spoof Zombieland did cagily incorporate lots of country music). It's time for filmmakers to embrace the gloom-and-groove of psychobilly, with its dark brew of punk, surf and rockabilly fused with themes from cheap sci-fi and horror flicks.

Such psychobilly acts as the HorrorPops, the Rev. Horton Heat, the Creepshow, the Meteors, Coffin Nails and the Nekromantix (whose frontman plays a coffin-shaped upright bass), the Hellbillys and the Bay Area's own Phenomenauts all fit the bill. But the night belongs to the seminal L.A. psychobilly band the Cramps. Their campy catalog includes "Zombie Dance," "Rockin' Bones" and "Creature from the Black Leather Lagoon," as well as the sardonic 1986 album Date with Elvis, all rife with the tongue-in-tattered-cheek humor and menace of the undead.

You can just hear them rattling on the opening credits now.

Hey, Diablo Cody, are you listenin'?

—by Greg Cahill