Zombie Film Conceit

I don't know as much about Zombie lore as some, but, since I'll never get round to writing the screenplay, here's my idea for a zombie film, or at least my conceit for a twist on the form.  (If you make it, please give me a part).

A recent documentary for Nat Geo (which I narrated) , The Truth About Zombies , argued that cult leaders can hypnotize their followers into doing the most ridiculous and horrendous things (9:11 Attacks; the mass suicide of Jim Jones' followers etc), while they lose all sense of their own identity. Thus, in a way, they are zombies.

The notion of the zombie is said to derive from the slave culture of Haiti. And if you imagine the slave, slowly, mindlessly plodding away in a Haitian field, all purpose, life and identity taken away from him, and you can see how the notion came about. (This image is actually of the Southern US)

My idea for a zombie film is to follow the conventions of the form, at least initially. We are in the modern world; a zombie infection breaks out; a few survivors missed the cause of the infection, strive to save themselves, eventually do so and save the world from the zombies. 

I'll explain the twist in a moment. But here are a couple of scenes. 

The image of the (Haitian) Voodoo ritual , where, to pulsating drumming,  a dancer goes into a trance as the witch doctor hypnotizes him or her is pretty compelling.

In my film we have a scene in a nightclub , a really groovy, sexy club. Scantily dressed people are dancing, we have throbbing music, sweaty dancers. But the whole club goes into this trance - and comes out of the other side a zombie. 

(For some reason our hero was meant to go the club, but didn't. Perhaps he had a row with his girlfriend, whatever).

Then we pull back and realize that meanwhile, across the country everyone has been going into this zombie trance as a result of being hypnotized by whatever they were watching on the TV. In fact, whatever electronic media they were consuming has consumed them.

This is not your traditional, rabies-like spread of the zombie virus. Instead there is some kind of mass mind control going on. That is the conceit. Almost everyone , except a contrarian few, has been hypnotized into zombification, like cult followers are brainwashed.. And the more people that are enslaved to this, the more the mind-control spreads and the harder it is to resist.

An evil villain is behind it all, we gradually learn. He has taken control of all media and is trying to turn the whole world into his slaves.

Somehow our hero and his band of brothers have to survive the zombies, work out how this has come about, get to the villain, overcome him and free the world.