I’d never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I’m starting to grow tired of zombies.

There’s been a huge resurgence in the popularity of the living dead over the past five to ten years, and while we’ve gotten some excellent films, video games, and comic books out of the deal, the shambling corpses’ welcome is being worn out.

Case and point: the upcoming film Zombieland. In it, a mixed band of humans are trying to survive and hunt zombies in a post-apocalyptic near future. That sounds an awful lot like Left 4 Dead, a video game in which a mixed band of humans are trying to survive and hunt zombies in a post-apocalyptic near future. There’s also the game’s sequel, Left 4 Dead 2, in which a mixed band of humans are trying to survive and hunt zombies in a post-apocalyptic near future. In Robert Kirkman’s excellent comic book series The Walking Dead, a mixed band of humans are trying to survive and hunt zombies in a post-apocalyptic near future. Or we can look a bit further back, to the “romantic comedy with zombies” film Shaun of the Dead…where a mixed band of humans are trying to survive and hunt zombies in a post-apocalyptic near future.

I think you get the message.

While some of the zombie media out there is quality stuff, there’s still plenty of dreck, and the problem of oversaturation exists, regardless. The aforementioned Walking Dead is great, but Marvel Zombies got stupid by the second miniseries, and they just keep cranking them out with no end in sight. DC Comics’ big crossover of the moment is Blackest Night, which is also about zombies, but we’ll have to wait until the end to see how that one turns out.

Due to this excessive popularity, we’ve also got creators trying to break the zombie mold, as it were. The problem is that it often doesn’t work; while many cite the film 28 Days Later as a reinvigoration of the zombie film, there’s one colossal problem: the “zombies” in the film aren’t zombies. They were never dead, and they never rose from their graves in order to chew upon the flesh of the living. Therefore, they’re not zombies. Period. (Note: I know zombies originally came from voodoo legends, where they were not necessarily dead, but that’s not the popularized version of the zombie in modern culture, which is the definition I’m sticking with here.)

While media exposure can truly bring out some quality work in a genre, oversaturation is the surest way to kill it. Ironically, characters in zombie media always seem to have trouble disposing of the undead hordes…so perhaps oversaturation will actually do the job for them? Vampires (the wimpy, emo kind, not the dangerous kind) are beginning to eclipse zombies on the current pop culture landscape, and who knows what’ll come next. In the meantime, though, I’d like to see the dead stay in their graves for a while.

Of course, if a film was made where a slew of zombies dismembered those fruity vampires, I’d be in line opening night.