All I Want For Christmas Is You, Baby!🎁
Listen, I know you're still recovering from Halloween and absolutely nobody asked for this, but we need to talk about the elephant in the room. Or rather, the shambling corpse in the food court.
I can already hear you preparing your counter-arguments about Amazon and, "changing retail landscapes," and economic factors, but consider this: Dawn of the Dead came out in 1978, and what's been happening to malls ever since? Exactly. They've been slowly deteriorating into the very zombie apocalypse sanctuaries we see on screen. Life imitates art imitates life eating brains.
The evidence is irrefutable if you squint hard enough and ignore all contrary data. Every October, we collectively consume zombie media like it's candy corn we pretend to enjoy. We binge The Walking Dead. We play zombie video games. We even do zombie-themed 5Ks, which is truly the most American thing imaginable—monetizing our cardio with fictional monsters. And then, come Black Friday, we're supposed to enthusiastically shuffle into these massive retail spaces like... well, like zombies seeking fresh consumer goods instead of flesh.
The correlation is stunning. The more zombie content we produce, the more our urban centers decay. Strip malls become actual strips of abandoned real estate. Downtown shopping districts transform into movie sets that don't need set dressing. Even the phrase, "dead mall," has entered our lexicon. DEAD. MALL. We're not even hiding it anymore.
Of course, the only people sounding the alarm are fundamentalist Christians, who've been warning us for decades that zombies, shopping, and cities are a unholy trinity leading us to ruin. Were they right? Has our obsession with the undead literally manifested the apocalypse in architectural form? According to a very specific interpretation of causation that ignores literally everything else, yes, absolutely.
The mechanics are simple: We watch zombies shambling through abandoned malls. We subconsciously start viewing our own malls as future apocalypse bunkers. We stop shopping there because we're conserving them for the inevitable collapse. The stores close. The zombification is complete. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, except we're doing it to real estate.
And now here we are, facing down Christmas shopping season with all the enthusiasm of someone who knows they're just going to order everything online anyway while half-watching another zombie series. The Sears is closed. The JCPenney is on life support. The Gap is a gap. Hot Topic persists through sheer spite. Somewhere, a fundamentalist is saying, "I told you so," while we're all just wondering if that Orange Julius is still open?
So this holiday season, as you navigate the digital wasteland of your browser tabs instead of the physical wasteland of the local Northgate Mall, remember: we did this. We manifested the zombie mall apocalypse through pure collective imagination and a refusal to admit we just really hate parking.
