A Dark and Silly Night

It was a Dark and Silly Night . . . Of the Living Dead

Something cute and Z-Street friendly for the kids from Neil Gaiman...

Zombies are the New Vampires

A quick glance at Time Magazine is enough to show the demise of weekly news magazines. The website this month is little more than a collection of lists. One list-related story was this item: Zombies are the New Vampires.

Zombies Are the New Vampires

By Lev Grossman Thursday, Apr. 09, 2009

If there's a social hierarchy among monsters, zombies are not at the top of the list. They may not even be on the list. They're not cool like werewolves. There's no Warren Zevon song about them. They're not classy like Dracula and Frankenstein, who can trace their lineage back to respectable 19th century novels. All zombies have is a bunch of George Romero movies.

But the lowly zombie is making its move. For the past few years, vampires have been the It monster, what with Twilight and all, but that's changing. Diablo Cody, of Juno fame, is producing a movie called Breathers: A Zombie's Lament, based on a new novel about life (if that's the word) as one of the walking dead. Later this year, Woody Harrelson and Abigail Breslin will star in the zom-com Zombieland. Max Brooks' best-selling zombie novel World War Z is being filmed by Marc Forster, the guy who directed Quantum of Solace. In comic books, the Marvel Zombies series features rotting, brain-eating versions of Spider-Man, Iron Man and the Hulk. The zombie video game Resident Evil 5 shipped 4 million copies during its first two weeks on the market. Michael Jackson's zombie video Thriller is coming to Broadway. (See the top 25 horror movies of all time.)

Apparently no one is safe from the shambling, newly marketable armies of the dead — not even Jane Austen. Seth Grahame-Smith is the author of a new novel called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, about a strangely familiar English family called the Bennets that is struggling to marry off five daughters while at the same time fighting off wave after wave of relentless, remorseless undead — since, as the novel's classic first line tells us, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains."

It's surprising how easily Austen's novel succumbs to the conventions of a zombie flick. Much of Austen's work is about using wit and charm and good manners to avoid talking about ugly realities like sex and money. In Grahame-Smith's version, zombies are just another one of those ugly realities. "What was so fun about the book is the politeness of it all," says Grahame-Smith, who's a freelance writer in Los Angeles. "They don't even like to say the word zombie, even though their country is besieged by zombies. They're everywhere, and people are literally being torn apart before their very eyes, and other than the very few, like Elizabeth Bennet, who face this problem head on, they would almost rather not talk about it."

It's not easy to put your finger on what's appealing about zombies. Vampires you can understand. They're good-looking and sophisticated and well dressed. They're immortal. Some of them have castles. You can imagine wanting to be a vampire or at least wanting to sleep with one. Nobody wants to sleep with zombies. They're hideous and mindless. They don't have superpowers. Their only assets are their infectiousness, single-minded perseverance and virtual unkillability. (See pictures of vampires' 90 years on screen.)

Nevertheless, they seem to be telling us something about the zeitgeist. Once you start looking, you see them everywhere. Who hasn't had a high school acquaintance come back from the dead as a Facebook friend or a follower on Twitter? And what monster could be better suited to our current level of ecological anxiety? Zombies are biodegradable, locally sourced and sustainable — they're made of 100% recycled human. And look out for those zombie banks, President Obama!

Let's not forget that Night of the Living Dead, the founding film of the modern zombie tradition, made its appearance in 1968 as a commentary on the Vietnam War, evoking its extreme violence and the surreal dehumanization of the combatants. Now we're locked in another prolonged, sweaty, morally ambiguous overseas conflict, and — surprise — look who's at the door again wanting to borrow a cup of brains. "We live in an age when it's very easy to be afraid of everything that's going on," Grahame-Smith says. "There are these large groups of faceless people somewhere in the world who mean to do us harm and cannot be reasoned with. Zombies are sort of familiar territory."

If there's something new about today's zombie, it's his relatability. Sure, he's an abomination and a crime against all that is good and holy. But he exemplifies some real American values too. He's plucky and tenacious — you can cut off his limbs and he'll keep on coming atcha. And he's humble. You won't find zombies swanning around and putting on airs like some other monsters I could mention. They're monsters of the people. It was the beginning of the end for vampires when Lehman Brothers went under, those bloodsucking parasites. Down with vampires. Long live (or is it die?) the zombie: the official monster of the recession.

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The Fear of Andrew Sullivan

Reading an article about blogger Andrew Sullivan, I came across this reference to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It links well with my ideas about fear and yellow peril

His readership figures surged after the 2001 massacres in New York and his home-town, Washington, DC. “I experienced 9/11 very personally,” he says. “The jihadists attacked my dream, my place—I felt like I had been beaten or raped. I succumbed to the fear a lot of us felt—panic really—about this country being in mortal danger. And neoconservatism seemed like the only ideology on the shelf with a plan for how to react immediately, and I turned to it.” ... He then savaged the “decadent left enclaves on the coast”, saying they “may well mount a fifth column” within the United States.

Source: moreintelligentlife.com

Zombies are Everywhere: USA Today

Here's an article from USA Today. So it's not my imagination: it's really a "zombie phenomenon."

ZOMBIES ON THE LOOSE

By CRAIG WILSON

USA Today

April 12, 2009

Vampires are all the rage in books, on TV and at the movies, but another contingent of the undead is storming our pop culture landscape.

Zombies are everywhere.

There are books galore, movies in the works, perhaps a Broadway play. There's even a zombie march in Cambridge, Mass., at noon this Sunday.(In recent months, there have even been zombie marches in Asbury Park, NJ, and zombie pub crawls in New Brunswick, NJ.)

Not since George Romero's seminal bloodfest Night of the Living Dead has so much flesh been munched by so many reanimated corpses.

"Other monsters may threaten individual humans, but the living dead threaten the entire human race," says Max Brooks, author of the 2003 best seller The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From the Living Dead, of the undead's popularity. "Zombies are slate wipers."

This fall, Three Rivers Press will release a novel version of Brooks' guide, and a major movie version of Brooks' second foray into zombie lit, World War Z, is in preproduction at Paramount.

Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies written with Jane Austen (Quirk Books, $12.95), a book best described as Mr. Darcy meets Dawn of the Dead, says zombies connect because they're lovable menaces, funny, and easy metaphors.

"They've always been used to skewer the ills of society," he says. "It's not surprising they're making a comeback in these intense times."

They're not just for grown-ups.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan (Delacorte Press for Young Readers, $16.95) is a tale of teen angst in a post-apocalyptic world. There's also Zombie Queen of Newbury High by Amanda Ashby (Speak) and You Are So Undead to Me by Stacey Jay (Razorbill), both in stores, and Strange Angels by Lili St. Crow (Razorbill), on sale May 14.

"In the world of traditional horror, nothing is more popular right now than zombies," says Katy Hershberger of St. Martin's Press, which is coming out next winter with an all-original zombie anthology. "The living dead are here to stay."

ZOMBIE HORDES ARE EVERYWHERE!

There's no stopping the zombie invasion:

On screen: Diablo Cody (Juno) will produce the movie version for Fox Searchlight (Slumdog Millionaire's distributor) of S. G. Browne's just-released novel Breathers: A Zombie's Lament (Broadway Books, $14). It's about a support group of zombies who rage against Breathers, aka "the living."

On stage: Zombies might be taking center stage, too. Producers have acquired the rights to bring Michael Jackson's Thriller (complete with dancing undead) to the Broadway stage.

FIND MORE STORIES IN:
Massachusetts | Broadway | Cambridge | Paramount | Pride | Night | Dawn | Prejudice | Jane Austen | Living Dead | Mr. Darcy | George Romero | Teeth | Max Brooks | Three Rivers Press | World War Z

Searching for Jeff Barnaby's "Blood Quantum"

Canadian First Nations filmmaker Jeff Barnaby is working on, or has he already completed, his first full-length feature film: Blood Quantum. It is a zombie movie set on a First Nations reservation, where the residents of the Mi'qmaq Nation are uninfected but forced into dealing with refugees and (I'm guessing) the hungry dead. Barnaby has described it as allegory for the ongoing Native plight in Canada. This film sounds like it should be up front and center in my research on the zombie phenomenon.

How can I contact Barnaby, and how can I get a copy of this film?

Below is a trailer for Barnaby's award-winning short film The Colony, a picture he's described as a love story but which has some critics placing it within the horror genre. (And equally difficult to get a hold of.)