Lucid Dreams and Saturn Skies The Life and Writing of Andrew Kincaid

Tag Archives: George Romero

The Allure of B-Movies

June 6, 2012 10:08 am / 11 Comments /
Poster art from the 1954 B-movie classic, THEM!

I also like the posters from the old days. They’re fun!

Ah…B-movies.  I enjoy cheesy old sci-fi/horror movies from the fifties and sixties, especially the black and white ones.  Those are my favorite types of B-movies, and I think the most iconic of the bunch although the genre is alive and well in the 21st century.  If you want proof, just flip to SyFy on Saturday nights at nine and you’ll see what I mean.

Even so, the B-movies from fifty or sixty years ago are in a league of their own.  They have an innocent charm that modern B-movies often lack.  There was no CGI back in those days, and often these movies were made on a shoestring budget, but the cheesy special effects were part of the fun.  Often B-movies followed a set formula.  Typically they involved an incident of science gone wrong–most often the culprit was radiation of some sort, but it could also be the work of a mad scientist–that resulted in some freakish monster (usually a guy in a rubber suit).  The protagonists turn to conservative forces such as the military and police, or toward science to find the solution to the problem.  I use the word “science” loosely here, because by today’s standards the science they played with was laughable.  Another subset of the genre involved an alien invasion, which would once again be thwarted by conservative forces or by science.

Writers and directors back in the day took the formula I just described above and had all sorts of fun with it.  THEM! is a perfect example of the genre; in fact, it’s often cited as the textbook example of the B-movie genre.  The movie is about ants that become enormous as a result of radioactive fallout from nuclear testing out in Nevada.  These giant ants spread all over the world and establish colonies, and (naturally) it’s up to the U.S. Army and some scientists to clear the matter up.  It sounds silly, but seriously give THEM! a watch sometime when you can–it’s actually a pretty good movie.

Night of the Living Dead is also a B-movie modeled on a formula similar to the one I outlined above, but it’s noticeably darker and really helped to give birth to the modern horror movie (for better or worse).  NOTLD featured ghouls–the word zombie was never used in the movie itself–who were raised from the dead ostensibly by strange radiation from a Venus probe.  These ghouls were shown on film eating people.  And it’s hard to spoil a fifty year old movie, but suffice it to say the ending was NOT in line with the typical B-movie up to that point.  George Romero turned the B-movie formula on its head while simultaneously remaining faithful to the tradition–no small feat, that.  Night of the Living Dead is another example of a B-movie that, when you get beyond the cheap special effects and bad acting, was in the end a pretty good movie (one of my all time favorites, actually).

And that right there is why I like B-movies.  When you get beyond the goofy premises and hokey special effects and look deeply at the movie, they often tell pretty good stories.  They couldn’t rely on special effects like today’s movies–don’t get me wrong though, modern B-movies are great fun but they often rely too heavily on gore and SFX for my taste–so instead they had to attempt to tell a decent story.  That, and the actors actually had to act, while no doubt biting back laughter at the goofy looking dude in the rubber suit.  Granted, many B-movies were lousy in the story and acting departments both, but they at least made up for it with unintentional hilarity (Plan 9 From Outer Space comes to mind).

Zombies from George Romero's B-movie classic, Night of the Living Dead

Zombies. This picture has gotten a lot of mileage on this blog, I’ve noticed =P.

Those aren’t the only reasons I like B-movies.  Sometimes I get tired of the cynicism of our age, an attitude that leaks into our cinematic culture, as it must.  In terms of horror, that translates into nihilistic plots, gore, and copious amounts of sex.  There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but sometimes I get sick of it.  I want to interrupt myself at this point to say that I was brought up in a socially conservative household and live in a conservative area and while I do not subscribe to all of those beliefs now, their influence is still there.  So for me, it is a breath of fresh air to watch an old time movie where the most gore you might see is a bit of chocolate sauce smeared on someone’s shirt, that ends on a note of optimism rather than cynicism (NOTLD is an exception to all of this, of course).

The saying goes that “they don’t make’em like they used to”.  True to some extent.  While horror and movies in general have become objectively better in many ways than their predecessors from the old days, nothing can replace the fun and charm of the old time B-movies.

What are your cinematic guilty pleasures?  Do you like the B monster movies from the fifties and sixties, or do they bore you to tears?


Posted in: Life & Writing, Monsters & Mythology, Movie Reviews, Our Weird World, Reviews / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Zombie Apocalypse: You. Will. Not. Survive.

June 1, 2012 8:29 am / 3 Comments /
An image depicting a female zombie from George Romero's seminal zombie movie, "Night of the Living Dead"

Probably a bad day if you see somebody looking like this coming your way.

As I am certain you have noticed, zombies are pretty much everywhere today.  They’ve stumbled from books to movies to television, and now they’re even in commercials.  They’ve gone from B-movie horror fare to a pop culture phenomena.  It is at the point now where you hear the phrase “zombie apocalypse” on nearly a routine basis, and not only from die-hard zombie fans; even average non-rabid fans plan (hopefully only in good fun) what they would do in the event of the zombie uprising.

When I hear people talk so casually about zombies, the question always occurs to me: “Do they realize just how AWFUL that would be?”.  Seriously.  Step back for a moment and think about what you’re saying when you wish the zombies would come.  You’re talking not only about the dead rising from their graves (or people becoming infected with a rabies-like pathogen, or some combination of the above) but you’re talking about death on a massive scale.  The zombie plague as shown by the movies and books would make the Black Death look like an outbreak of chicken pox.  We’re talking a highly virulent, easily spread pathogen with nearly a 100% mortality rate ripping through a global population of about 7 billion people like a wild fire through a forest doused with gasoline.

But it gets worse.  The dead don’t stay dead (obviously since we’re talking zombies) and they come back to feast on the living.  Let’s stop there for a moment; you don’t just get infected, you get cannibalized by your friends, neighbors, and family members.  It would be difficult if not impossible for people (who aren’t sociopaths) to shoot their friends and family members–there’s a reason those sorts of scenes appear often in zombie fiction, because it would probably be true.  That alone would kill more than half the folks who believe they’d go out and be an apocalyptic cowboy, survival plans be damned.

Speaking of, let’s look at survival plans.  All have one fundamental flaw, at least for most folks in Western countries like the US.  Most of us have not truly had to survive, to live off the land.  Most of us do not know what it is to live in constant fear of imminent death.  We laugh and mock the characters in zombie movies for the often objectively stupid things that they do which are inevitably are punished by the cinematic equivalent of karma.  As I often point out when I’m watching these types of shows with people, we viewers are sitting comfortable, warm, and safe so the most logical and sensible course of action seems obvious.  The situation would be quite a bit different if zombies were real as fear makes people do funny things.  Stupid things.  Things that would probably seem pretty laughable to people in less trying circumstances.

But let’s say you manage to survive the initial onslaught of the zombie plague and hole up somewhere safe.  There is one thing that most survival plans likely aren’t going to take into account: co-infections.  When there is a huge outbreak of a disease, its spread leaves huge chunks of the population that aren’t dead with weakened immune systems, which allows other nasty diseases to take a foothold.  The most recent trend in zombie lore has the entire species infected with the zombie pathogen, that only becomes active upon death or contact with a living form of the pathogen.  If that were the case, then the scenario I outlined in the previous sentence would probably be true.  Things like measles, mumps, whooping cough, and the flu would run rampant through survivors, likely killing a good portion of them in the absence of things like public healthcare and ready access to medication.

I could go on, but I won’t belabor the point.  A zombie apocalypse would be bad (ummmkay?) and no matter how badass a person might think they are, the likelihood of survival is really, really slim.  I’ll never forget what one of my biology professors said in reference to pandemic disease: “Someone is going to be immune.  But not you.”  In light of that, I think we ought to count ourselves lucky that plague zombies are nothing more than fantasy.

What’s your take on all of this?  Are you a bit sick of hearing about zombies too?


Posted in: Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World, Weird Science / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Creepshow 2

December 19, 2011 12:41 pm / 3 Comments /
Creepshow 2 is a horror anthology from 1987 directed by George Romero. It featured three short films based upon works by Stephen King

Creepy skeletal guy? Looks legit!

Creepshow was a a fun movie–all kinds of EC comic goodness translated into movie form (note to self–try to find some of the old EC comics.  They look like they’d be a fun read).  Especially good was Stephen King’s performance in “The Lonely Death of Jordy Verrill”, where he literally brought to life one of his own characters.

So, when I heard about Creepshow 2 and I heard it was a very “special” movie, I had to watch it.  And I really had to watch it when I saw that it was on the instant queue on Netflix.  I have to say that it didn’t disappoint–it was the cheesy, goofy fun I’d expected from a sequel to Creepshow.

The movie consisted of three stories set within a frame story about a little boy who gets his issue of Creepshow and then gets attacked by bullies.  Each of the three stories are supposed to be comics within the book the kid got (mind you, the comics were flung at him from the back of a cube truck by a demonic looking old guy–a legitimate source of horror comic goodness if there ever was one).

I should stop here and point out that each of the three stories were written by Stephen King, and boy does it show.  I’ve noticed that oftentimes, especially if King is involved directly in the project, the characters in his stories are played exactly as they are written.  And it doesn’t usually translate very well–they turn out to be really, really cheesy.  Something about his characters, who really come to life on the page, become just goofy when they’re put on film.  For some examples of what I mean, compare movies where King was involved to movies based on his stories that actually did well critically and at the box office.  For example, compare Thinner, The Stand, IT, and Creepshow 2 to The Shining, Misery, 1408, and Stand By Me.  The difference is night and day, let me tell you (although the first three are fun, don’t get me wrong).

Anyway, back to Creepshow 2.  The first story in the movie is called “Old Chief Woodenhead”, about a wooden Native American statue who wreaks vengeance against a trio of hoodlums who rob a quaint general store in a dying Western town.  I couldn’t help but laugh at the statue when it came to life–it was just so goofy looking.

Story number two is called “the Raft” and it involves a group of four college kids (one who insisted on wearing a horrible yellow mankini, which truth be told was the most horrifying image in the entire movie) who go to a lake to swim and engage in general college kid shenanigans (i.e. smoke dope and have sex) but wind up being attacked by something that looks like a giant floating trash bag that dissolves its prey using slimy looking digestive fluids.  One of the funniest moments, I thought, was when the yellow mankini guy claimed he didn’t believe in oil slicks because he hadn’t seen one.  It’s so ludicrous and silly, but that little gem of dialogue fits perfectly with the feel of the entire movie.

This is what you call a “mood-killer”.

There was another moment that was kind of…disconcerting.  It had nothing to do with the slimy trash bag critter; instead, it involved the nerdy pre-med student and the Eighties pretty brunette girl.  She falls asleep and the pre-med kid starts feeling her up and sucking her nipples.  The scene was way too rapey for me and I found it pretty disturbing–although the next moment when the monster dissolved her face got things moving away from it pretty quickly.

And, last but not least, we come to “The Hitchhiker”, where an extremely Eighties business lady is on her way home from a tryst with a man-whore and she runs down a hitchhiker on the side of the road.  The hitchhiker comes back for revenge, constantly groaning “Thanks for the ride lady!” as he doggedly endures the horrific amount of punishment Eighties business lady inflicts on him.  This one is just silly, even sillier than the last two.  The hitchhiker is the least threatening Revenant I’ve ever seen, and his repeated groans of “Thanks for the ride lady!” are more funny than frightening.  Then, that’s probably the point isn’t it?

I’d recommend Creepshow 2 for anyone who likes B horror movies, is a fan of Stephen King or George Romero, and for anyone who is a fan of Eighties cheese.  This is a very “special” movie and a must watch for any horror fan.


Posted in: Ghost Stories, Monsters & Mythology, Movie Reviews, Our Weird World, Reviews / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Creepshow

July 4, 2011 8:33 pm / 6 Comments /
Creepshow is a horror anthology written and directed by Stephen King and George Romero. This is the poster art for the movie

“The Most Fun You’ll Ever Have Being SCARED”

Unfortunately, I’ve not had much of a chance to read the old EC horror comics.  They must have been great stuff though, as they brought about the Comics Code of Conduct in ’54 and almost effectively ended comics as we know them.

Lucky for those of us who didn’t get a chance to experience them, Stephen King and George Romero made Creepshow, an homage to the late great horror comics that chilled them as kids.

Creepshow features five short films framed by the story of Billy, a young boy whose father throws his horror comics in the trash.  The films, in order of appearance, are: “Father’s Day,” “The Lonely Death of Jordy Verill,” “Something to Tide You Over,” “The Crate,” and “They’re Creeping Up on You!”  Each story is supposed to represent a story told in the pages of the comic book, “Creepshow,” that Billy’s father threw out.

I may not have been able to read the old EC comics myself, but from what I’ve read about them Creepshow is a spot on interpretation of the kind of material you should expect to find in one.  Each story was penned by the master of horror himself, Stephen King, who even makes an appearance as Jordy Verrill in “The Lonely Death of Jordy Verill.”

Many of the stories are a kind of morality tale, where a supernatural force of some kind or the other deals a brutal form of karmic justice on its hapless victims.  The stories are darkly funny as well as being rather spooky (humor and fear seem to go hand in hand, after all.)

In “Father’s Day,”  a murdered father get’s revenge on the daughter that killed him in a spooky (and humorous) way.  In “The Lonely Death of Jordy Verrill,” the titular character has a strange encounter with an extraterrestrial presence.  In “Something to Tide You Over,” a jealous lover seeks revenge, only to see it turn back on him in a most unexpected way.  In “The Crate,” a henpecked college professor finds the solution to his marital problems in a mysterious crate.  In “They’re Creeping Up on You!” a merciless business man is brought low by some of the Earth’s most humble inhabitants.

Horror fans of all walks of life should give this one a look if they haven’t yet.  It’s a horror classic, and belongs in every horror buff’s collection.

 

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Zombies A-Go-Go!

June 10, 2011 2:11 pm / 11 Comments /
A history of zombies in film and folklore

A zombie from Lucio Fulci’s splatter gore masterpiece, Zombie.

The zombie – ever present horror villain, hero(?), and cannon fodder.  We love us some zombies!  They’re everywhere these days: movies, books, video games, and even music.  Being a zombie fan I’m happy to see it.  The cool thing about zombies is that they’re pretty hard to mess up.  Werewolves have been neutered (literally–the ones in the Twilight movies don’t have genitals), vampires have lost their bite, and Frankenstein’s monster hasn’t had a decent showing in theaters for years…

…but zombies?  Zombies are chugging along just fine.

And boy have they chugged a long way.

Zombies have taken many forms throughout the centuries.  Every culture in history had some concept of undead monsters that consumed the flesh of the living (or in some cases, the dead.)  The Arabs had the Ghoul, a demon that haunted cemeteries and that devoured the flesh of the living and dead alike. Norse mythology had the Draugr, a sort of zombie/ghost hybrid who could increase their weight to monstrous amounts and swim through solid rock.  They would crush victims or devour them whole.  In Chinese folklore, the zombie is the Jiang Shi, a hopping zombie/vampire hybrid that sucks chi from those unfortunate enough to cross its path.

Clairvius Narcisse was a real life zombie, a man who fell victim of a bokor. Enslaved, he escaped from the bokor's farm when the man died.

Clairvius Narcisse: a real life zombie!

The word ‘zombie’ comes from the Haitian voodoo tradition.  Unlike the undead of folklore and legend however, these zombies are all too real.  If someone commits a taboo in the community (many times something like an unfair land deal involving a family member,)  the wronged will go to a bokor or a voodoo shaman, and put what amounts to a spiritual hit out on the perpetrator.  The bokor will mix up the zombie dust, a witch’s brew of ground bone, secret herbs, and all sorts of other nasty things.  The active ingredient of the whole mix is believed to be the poison from a puffer fish.  It is a neurotoxin that causes paralysis.  When the dust is administered (blown in the victim’s face), the toxin does its magic, inducing a death like state that even to Western medical professionals looks like real honest to God death.  Thing is that the person is fully aware of what’s happening to them the whole time; they just they can’t move or respond.

But nobody around is aware of that fact, except the bokor of course.  So the unfortunate zombie-to-be winds up being buried alive.  That my friends is what I call a bad day!

Later the bokor returns to the burial site and digs the victim up.  The victim is fed hallucinogens  to make him/her pliable, and set to work on the bokor’s plantation  (for a more in depth account of Haitian zombie lore, check out the Serpent and the Rainbow)

There you have it: the Idiot’s Guide to Making a Zombie.  The Haitian tradition was the starting point for all the madness.  It’d be awhile before they would become cannon fodder for gore hounds everywhere though.  In the mean time, they were used in movies to portray the inferiority of any civilization but Whitey’s.  In one delightfully goofy (and horrifically racist) instance, zombies were the center of a Nazi plot to produce an unstoppable army!

Locusts are a common agricultural pest around the world. They swarm in great numbers and cause havoc in farming communities due to their voracious appetite.

Like this, but with more moaning and marrow-munching.

Those old zombie movies would be strange to us today.  Racism and camp aside, they featured the Haitian Voodoo zombie. The zombie we all know and love is a specific variety.  Call it a Plague, if you will.  Like locusts, they swarm in ridiculous numbers.  Sure one or two are simple enough to handle.  But what about ten?  One hundred?  One thousand?  How about a million?  That’s a tall order for even the most trigger happy among us.

The Plague of Zombies.  Now that’s a beast!  As unstoppable as Frankenstein’s monster, as blood thirsty as a castle full of vampires, and as savage as a whole pack of werewolves.  Infinite.  Vast beyond imagining.

And worse…they’re us.

But more on that later.  For now, let’s suffice to say the first instance of the modern Plague zombie appears in Richard Matheson’s I am Legend.  Yes, the Will Smith movie.

Vincent Price was the star of The Last Man On Earth, a film adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend.

Vincent Price taking care of business.

Actually the book has been adapted to film several times.  The most accurate adaptation was the film The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price.  The film is about a flu-like germ that sweeps the Earth, killing the bulk of the population.  Those that it doesn’t kill, it turns into vampires who are forced to feed by night.  Our hero Dr. Robert Morgan, struggles to survive and find a cure, while staking a ton of vamps in the process.

The modern zombie started as a vampire, but other than that the elements of a modern zombie flick were all there: a mysterious agent raises the dead from their graves to attack the living, who are forced to take on a siege mentality against impossible numbers.

The universal symbol for radiation.

May cause loss of coordination and cravings for the flesh of the innocent. If these symptoms last longer than 4 hours, you maybe a zombie. Kindly shoot yourself in the head.

It took George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead to birth zombies as they’re known and loved today.  During the movie, survivors have to hole up in an abandoned farm house in the middle of rural Pennsylvania to escape a horde of hungry undead.  Romero gives no clear reason  why corpses are up and walking about when by all rights they should have been fertilizer.  Radiation from a Venus probe was the throwaway answer given, but no one had any real clue.  Keep in mind that it was the Sixties; radiation was responsible for just about everything in those days.  Night gave the zombie its modern characteristics.  It was the first film to show zombies as cannibals.  They sucked blood before; now they feasted on flesh.  They were actually called “ghouls” in the film rather than zombies, a throwback to the corpse eating fiend from Islamic lore.

So there was a horde of ghouls wandering around  trying to turn us living folk into a running, screaming buffet.  What chance did we have?  Romero provided the answer: “Kill the brain, kill the ghoul.”  His zombies are the first to require a head shot to take them down.

They were also uncoordinated, mindless except for rudimentary abilities, and pretty damned slow.  If a person kept their wits about them (and ignored all those pesky primitive impulses that screamed “OH MY GOD RUN!!”) they could easily out walk a zombie horde in those days.

28 Days Later was a zombie film set in England, where a virus called Rage wipes out the population by turning them into flesh hungry maniacs. These were zombies for a new century - faster and deadlier.

…okay…who gave the zombies Red Bull?!?

The modern zombie still has all the ghoulish goodness Romero’s old zombies had, but somewhere along the line somebody decided to give the old shamblers a shot of mingled caffeine and adrenaline.  The first appearance of this new breed came in 28 Days Later.  Sticklers will say they aren’t really zombies but rather infected, and hence the movie doesn’t count.

Romero’s zombies weren’t zombies; they were ghouls.  And Matheson’s zombies weren’t zombies; they were vampires.  A bokor would probably sit down to a zombie flick (post The Last Man on Earth) and spend half the movie scratching his head, trying to figure out when the zombies showed up.

Right there is the key zombies’ success: they evolve.  Survival of the fittest monster.  Werewolves and vampires have split off from their roots and radiated into other segments of pop culture. They’ve lost their teeth.  They’ve become safe.

Not so with the zombie.  The zombie is infinitely adaptable.  Zombies can be whatever we as a culture want…no..need them to be.  Walking metaphors for communism? Check!  A representation of the mass consumerism that has overtaken our lives and our culture? Check! Living embodiment of our fears about germs and infection?  Double check!

Zombies are the ultimate ‘Other.’  They are humans, but stripped of humanity.  It’s no longer acceptable to blow the crap out of Russians, or Germans, or even terrorists.  But zombies?  Hell! Feed ‘em into the meat grinder!  Blast ‘em, crush em, bash ‘em!  Whatever it takes to destroy the ‘Other,’ the outsider.

Host to more drama than a junior prom on a soap opera.

Fear of the ‘Mindless Other.’ It’s all around us, every day.  Just take a glance at your Facebook news feed, or your Twitter timeline.  How many posts are there bemoaning how stupid, thoughtless, and immoral everyone else is?  Listen to the cable news.  It’s all sex scandals, murders, and  political shenanigans.  It’s all about people acting nothing but bad, bad, bad.

None of that applies to you and I of course.  Why, we know better than all those ‘Others.’  We’re smarter, better looking, and are virtual paragons of virtue!  Well, maybe not all that.  But at least we’re better than ‘Them!’

THEM! is an iconic 1950's B movie about radioactive ants on a rampage. It's a classic monster movie.

THEM! isn’t about zombies at all. Still an awesome movie though :D

Them.  It seems they shamble around. Mindless and adrift, they seem confused by the simplest of things.  They’re driven by primal appetites, with no concept of morality higher than “getting what I want, when I want it.”

Us versus them.  It’s the siege mentality. Those who think as I do and act as I do, versus those who don’t.  The zombie film puts this dichotomy in stark contrast.  The living versus the dead.  On one side, the norm.  On the other, the ultimate deviants.  The two are locked in a mortal struggle from which only one side can emerge victorious.

In Night, the agents of the norm win.  The sheriff’s posse sweeps in and destroys the bad guys.  (Note: they also kill the movies only black character, leading to decades of assumptions that the movie was a heavy handed metaphor about race relations.  It wasn’t; it was about fear of communism.  Duane Jones just happened to be the best actor who tried out for the role.  He didn’t get it only because he was black.)

Now that the new century has dawned,  it seems that more and more the Outsiders are winning.  In an age of terror attacks, drug wars, illegal immigration, a weakened economy, a world where Japan and China are rapidly emerging as the world’s next economic hubs, is it any wonder that Americans aren’t quite as optimistic as they were some forty years ago?  Maybe, just maybe, it seems that the ‘Other’ is winning.

There is a deeper level to our rotting, moaning friends, beyond modern politics and culture.  It reaches deep into the human psyche, deep into our collective soul.

An image of a male lion.

The last thing a lot of our ancestor’s ever saw.

What animals did our ancestors compete with for survival?  The first answer, the logical one, is big predators.  Lions and tigers and bears (oh my!).  You’ll notice many of the monsters in our mythologies have features similar to these sorts of predators. Many of the monsters that terrified our ancestors around the cook fire were amalgams of lions, snakes, eagles, and the like. This stems from an ancestral memory of our time in the jungle, when the night held perils the modern mind can scarcely comprehend.

The first answer is logically sound.  It’s also wrong.  Our ancestors faced a more sinister enemy; an enemy who could mimic and even exceed their own abilities.  An enemy who used same resources they needed for survival.

That enemy?  Humans.

Animals of a given species tend to compete not with members of other species but with members of the same species.  Give it a deeper look, and it makes perfect sense.  Look at it in business terms.  If I make shoes, other shoe makers are my competition in the market place.  Someone who makes pottery is no threat to me in my particular niche.

In our ancient past it was a similar sort of thing.  Predators ate us of course; they were a legitimate threat as evidenced by the fact they still haunt our dream almost two million years later.

Dangerous though they were,  they weren’t competing with us for the exact same food resources.  They weren’t competing with us for mates.  But other humans were.  Other humans could plot, could steal, could humiliate.  Other humans could kill, and kill in horrific ways worse than any animal.  Is it any wonder we grew to be wary of one another over time?

And so we come back to the zombie, and the real reason they scare us.  The real reason they’ve endured and still remained potent even as other monsters have become safe and toothless.

Zombies are us.  Us, stripped of life.  Us, stripped of morals.  Us, stripped of that most powerful and unabashedly human capacity: love.  They reflect the worse parts of humanity and none of the good.  They reflect what life can do to a person, if they don’t take care to nurture what is best in humanity.

They are us.

The deadliest monsters of all.


Posted in: Monsters & Mythology, Our Weird World / Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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