Alright, how many of you out there watched Return of the Living Dead 3 and got at least a partial chubby from the hot zombie chick? You know the one with the embedded glass shards that ate people.

You can’t tell me there weren’t more than a few wank sessions after horny 15-year-olds watched Zombie Strippers with the undead Jenna Jameson.

Zombies are supposed to be these ugly creatures with dripping flesh and in need of a desperate trip to the beauty shop, but there has been an ever increasing push to make zombies overtly sexy.

Lets face it, sex has always been an important part of the B-movie experience. Jason and Freddy never seemed to kill the girl until she had fallen down and her top mysteriously fell open, but for the most part, other than vampires, sexuality has been reserved for the victims or heroine. The creatures themselves have been left to their own less than sexy accords.

This got me thinking about the role of sexuality in zombie films. Can something be scary and grotesque and yet sexy at the same time. Glass shard zombie girl and strippers aside, can a true horror film have a sexy monster.

No one wants to see a George Romero movie filled with GQ and Victoria Secret models shambling about eating unsuspecting passersby. OK, yes I would, but that’s just because I am a freak. It wouldn’t be much of a movie because all of the model zombies would eat a pinkie and then have to throw it up out of the fear of getting fat.

I have only seen one zombie feature where sexuality was used in a way that was not campy and was very disturbing. Masters of Horror segment Dance of the Dead with everyone’s favorite egomaniac Robert Englund as a night club owner that specialized in reanimated dancers.

The premise was there is this substance that reanimated corpses into mindless animals. The didn’t attack or eat people, but they would respond to painful stimuli by thrashing about. Englund too dead girls and reanimated them, making them “dance” for his customers by administering electric shock.

This was  a seriously disturbing concept because there was an element of sexuality to it, but also pity and revulsion at the same time. It hammered the point that this was an immoral world where even the dead weren’t safe from abuse.

It’s one thing to make a zombie sexy for a humorous or campy movie, but to extend it into the realm of true horror requires a depth of depravity that only a few truly excellent story tellers can reach.