Are flesh-eating zombies taking over the U.S.?

[Dino Velvet]

Sort of on-topic but for fans of Lugosi and Karloff I recommend The Body Snatcher. Karloff was bone-chilling. Karloff was another good actor. Watch him in The Mummy. The Ghoul is another one.

[Ben]

Chomsky (see Ben’s post #7) sees the Zombie phenomenon as symptomatic of a culture wide paranoia. It’s true that Americans are plenty scared and always have been. During the cold war and the concomitant nuclear buildup our movies featured alien invasions and mutant monsters. Suspense and terror were the main elements, from Arnold’s It Came from Outer Space to Hitchcock’s The Birds.

However, today’s movie goers are hardened stoics. They are immune to suspense. They are gamers who like blowing things away. They adore anti-heros who can point a gun at someone’s head and blow it to smithereens. It doesn’t have to be zombies, but zombies do provide easy, ethics-free targets. Certainly the violence suppressed within that is expressed on film is a key factor behind the popularity of zombie movies.

I’m not disagreeing with Chomsky, because zombies do pose a threat. The fear is that of being turned. Americans aren’t afraid of being killed and eaten. They aren’t afraid of invasion and occupation, or even of being forced to serve their overlords as slaves. They’re afraid that they themselves will be changed in some fundamental way. They already harbor doubts about, sexuality, God, guns, capitalism, climate change etc. They perceive music as threatening, clothes as threatening; and they shoot each other. They are beginning to doubt the legitimacy of their own hegemony. They fear change; but not simply change: they sense a change in their own opinions, their own minds. This is the fear, I think, that boils beneath the zombie genre.

Of course vampires are all about sex

And --

Language Design - Noam Chomsky:

[Genetic]

I think Chomsky is off the mark.

Zombies represent the very primal fear of death - you can run, you can hide, you can fight but slowly it inches up on you and inevitably you will be caught. Romero always said that the zombies would always win because of numbers and how every loss on the survivor side adds one to the zombie side.

In terms of the current fascination, well it's cyclical. Nuclear war was the big fear of the 70s, 80s brought us robots and aliens, early 90s was all about diseases; late 90s were natural disasters, then the early 2000s brought us the fascination with natural disasters on a bigger scale (asteroids, gulf stream, climate change) and then the late 2000s to now is zombies. People simply have a morbid fascination with worst case scenarios and how they'd deal with them; it's escapism. Escapism is why the TV came about, then the Video player, then the walkman, then the mobile phone - we don't want to interact with the world because it brings us misery, so we lock ourselves in our fantasy world.

You see it in public transport where no one acknowledges each other, hell the zombie apocalypse is here already - it's everyone walking round listening to their iPods while using smartphones to ignore the world.

I recommend [REC] to everyone too. I liked [REC] 2 also but haven't caught the third one yet.

[REC] 3 is truly awful and best not watched so the first two remain unsullied.

[Dino Velvet]

[REC] 3 is truly awful and best not watched so the first two remain unsullied.

Thanks. I'll just watch it with low expectations. I didn't let Henry 2: Mask Of Sanity ruin Henry, Portrait Of A Serial Killer. I've seen Mask Of Sanity a couple times as a goof after the first viewing. Just made sure to stop by the liquor store first.

[trish]

Zombies represent the very primal fear of death

But zombies aren't really dead and they don't kill. They transform.

[fred41]

I would be a zombie of the as s eating kind...

[francisfkudrow]

i would be a zombie of the as s eating kind...

Aaaasssses! Aaaasssses!

[trish]

bite my ass

[robertlouis]

bite my ass

That may be the most you've ever tantalised us, Ms Trish. Very tasty.

[fred41]

bite my ass

Oh I'd be munching up that beautiful thing with gusto!!...




....respectfully of course.