Zombie pondering

What is it with the current fascination with zombies, and vampires?

Well not-vampires in the current incarnation: I know they went from scary detestable monsters who were sometimes charismatic and charming, to mostly-scary detestable monsters who could be sexy and handsome as well, then Buffy the Vampire Slayer added the (one or two) 'good' vampires. But the latest versions, vampires who walk in the daytime? Who aren't scary bloodsuckers but sexless adoration objects? That just offends my sense of literary propriety I guess.

Aaaanyway, I kinda get the whole sublimation of sexual desire thing, especially for the teen market: and I definitely get the zombie apocalypse thing as part of the whole live-through-the-apocalypse survivor thing - after all, it isn't me that's going to be one of the zillions of dead - I remember getting bitten by that bug reading John Wyndham's apocalyptic SF*

But the absolute explosion of both genres, and the way they are being massively over-exploited and over-sold, just astonishes me. It's like the geekboys I grew up with managed to lay hands on control of the movie/tv/publishing empires, and started ramming their own tastes down everyone else's throats. And I suspect that's closer to the truth than I initially thought, after considering it some.

Of course, part of it is the barbarity of Hollywoodland**, always travelling in a pack and falling on the chosen victim to savage, drool, and cannabilise the flavour of the month, something that's been snowballing since at least the '60s.

I guess part of it is also just a massed flight into fantasy, an unconscious (or not) retreat from reality - it's too hard, it's too complex, it's too depressing, at least when you think about trying to change some of the more intolerable problems on the collective plate, and it's all just too much. Hmm, sounds like an old geezer rant at that point, am I talking collective cultural senility?

I should add, I don't especially feel like this - so far, I still find the complexity fascinating, and I haven't given up on effecting change, even if in the most zen-like fingerdrops on boulders fashion.

I don't really have any conclusion to this, by the way, just rambling on, really. But I do have a picture in the back of my brain, of a movie theatre being picketed by a bunch of werewolves and ghouls, holding up Equal Rights signs (in between tearing apart customers).

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Update #1:
This was a real giggle, even if you know nothing of the books/movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlTtmtAQwfY

Update #2:
If you didnt see the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Go watch it, especially the first three series: provided you swallow the basic premise, it is an amazing exploration of basic feminism, growing up, and the quality of heroism (the movie, eh, not so much)

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*Not just Day of the Triffids, but Kraken Wakes & Chrysalids spring to mind
** that is, Big movie studios plus TV studios plus the publishing houses they mostly own, and the gaming software houses, i.e. the whole Empire of Taste thing.