One of the many weird side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is, surprisingly, panic buying paper towels and toilet paper. There’s no real reason why this has been happening, but when videos of consumers looking like a zombie horde straight out a George Romero movie start to pop up, you know the situation is serious. Serious enough that all it takes is the right noises added to such a video to draw the approval of The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman.
The story gets even better though, after watching the video for yourself:
Not only is this particular tweet funny because zombie guru Robert Kirkman got a kick out of this footage looking like something his comic-turned-TV show could even get behind, but the joke was actually furthered in its quality by none other than Uncut Gems masterminds, the Safdie Brothers.
As it turns out, they were the ones to share the video on Twitter, which Kirkman then reshared with a caption that lovingly referred to the footage as a clip from the 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead. Though you’d think even the people that shot the footage had that eventual idea, as when you look at the man standing in the middle of the voracious crowd, he’s waving his arms like a victim of a zombie attack.
While the world isn’t nearly as bad off as any of George Romero’s Dead saga would have you believe, it’s still pretty scary out there when people will tear into a pallet of paper products without a moment’s hesitation. Though if you were a tree, you might feel like every day of your existence was as horrific, even in the before times.
Assuredly, this is the sort of influence that Robert Kirkman and anyone working on the future films for The Walking Dead franchise might want to keep in mind when drafting those adventures. Life is always a pretty impressive inspiration for art, and once the normalcy of the world is presumably restored, it’s almost certain that these happenings will find their way into fiction.
Though if the Safdie brothers are in the mix and want to collaborate with Robert Kirkman, they could always cook up a short film about what would happen if Uncut Gems’ Howard Ratner would hold up in a confrontation with Andrew Lincoln’s silver screen bound hero Rick Grimes.
The Walking Dead continues to air on AMC, Sunday nights at 9 pm ET, Meanwhile, Uncut Gems is available on Digital HD, Blu-ray, and DVD, just in time for home audiences to dig into its tense, non-apocalyptic disasters. Keep checking in with CinemaBlend for more updates on movie and TV news, especially when it comes to how the spread of the coronavirus is shaking things up.
