In his story about the

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In his story about the current proliferation of zombies in movies, N.Y. Times writer Warren St. John lists all the recent commercial manifestations required for a story like this to be approved by his Times editor, but he fails to mention one important geographical distinction. Zombie Nation is pretty much anchored in the eastern region of the U.S., the Caribbean islands, New Orleans, and most recently England (i.e., Shaun of the Dead). If anyone has written about, drawn a graphic novel or made any kind of exploitation-horror film about zombie armies in the Pacific Rim territories...Los Angeles, the California desert, Seattle, the Hawaiian islands, Japan, Taiwan, Shanghai, Alaska, etc....I've yet to hear about it. (You'd think that one of Japan's horror-film directors would have taken a poke by now. Made a film, that is, a film about actual hordes of walking dead...and not just this or that individual ghost-zombie.) Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie was set in the West Indies, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead films have all been Pittsburh and/or Pennsylvania-based, 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead happened in England, and Shadow: Dead Riot is, according to reviews I've read and stills I've seen, set in some generic women's prison that's not brand-spanking new. There definitely seems to be something about older cultures (places with longer histories, creakier homes, graveyards that go back to the 1700s) that zombies seem to like. Am I wrong? Has there ever been a movie about surfing zombies on Oahu's North Shore? Or about zombies shuffling around San Francisco, Portland, Seattle or Vancouver? Think about it. I may be onto something here...