Zombies shuffle through Hollywood
I’ve taken a bit of a break from zombie fiction for a few weeks in favor of participating in Script Frenzy, a month-long script-writing social event that encourages people to get out and write for a month. Having just finished, my thoughts have turned back to zombies.
Last weekend, my journalist girlfriend Caitlin M. Foyt and I decided to go check out the So.Cal Zombie Walk, a gathering for charity that had participants covered in makeup and stumbling down Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame. Caitlin was searching for a stranger to interview for her blog project, BeautifulStrangerLA.com, which documents her meetings with various interesting people throughout Los Angeles. (As it turned out, she found Chanel Jensen, who was dressed as a zombie Marilyn Monroe.)
Editor’s note: We know it’s been a really, really long time since we posted here. Sorry about that. Site master Phil Hornshaw recently made a cross-country move from the suburbs of Detroit, Mich., to Los Angeles. Things have been a little hectic. Our apologies.
Recently, I was wandering the Internet trying to think of things to blog about here – my recent 2,500-mile move having left me without nearly any DVDs to speak of, including films of the undead variety – and I stumbled on a forum question in which someone was interested to learn exactly why it is that zombies seek out and devour the living.
Recently I watched for only the second time “Night of the Comet,” a mid-80s zombie movie making use of one of pop culture’s favorite zombie-making horrors, cosmic radiation.
The movie’s not great. A campy, tongue-in-cheek horror/comedy that includes maybe three total zombies in the whole film, “Comet” is fun but brings little to the fold as far as progressing the genre. In fact, it’s only barely a zombie film to begin with: radiation from the comet turns people into homicidal monsters, that’s true, but the process is so gradual that most characters spend the film stuck somewhere between human and monster.
I find the concept of fast versus slow zombies to be almost inconsequential, because neither iteration is particularly better or worse than the other.
Of course, fast zombies on the whole are more deadly. They sprint up and attack you, making an individual much more dangerous than their slow-moving counterparts.
Slow zombies, of course, are much less difficult to deal with, and their strength isn’t in being especially dangerous, but in being surprising or attacking in heavy numbers. Whenever one considers a zombie outbreak, the sheer fact that it’ll take humanity a few minutes to realize what the hell is happening is what gives slow zombies time to multiply.
The other day while perusing my favorite tech blog, I came across the a loosely zombie-related post (someone had re-done Star Wars movie posters to appear as though zombie flicks) and noticed the following exchange among the comments:
"What’s with all the zombie stuff lately?"
"Yeah. They’re like the new vampires."
My initial thought was that this comment displayed an ignorance of monster history. Truly, the two super-natural genres share little cultural commonground: vampires have often been lumped in with monsters of old (Frankenstein, Mummies, and other manner of creatures found in Van Helsing), while zombies have been something very much their own.
There’s the technicality in the realm of zombie movies that some fans take to heart.
It’s born of films such as Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, which die-hard zombiites are quick to point out is not, in fact, a zombie film. It’s a movie about murderous psychopathic humans, made evil by a virus they pass to the people they attack, provided those people don’t die from said attack.
But they’re not zombies – they’re not driven by any kind of paranormal or extra-special force. They’re just crazies.
“Left 4 Dead 2,” the sequel to phenomenal zombie-blasting title for the Xbox 360, was released last Tuesday (Nov. 17), to heavy fanfare. Whereas the predecessor enjoyed good sales, the hype surrounding “L4D2” was standard for blockbuster titles in the gaming world.
It’s another zombie game that’s received considerable attention, and to me, it’s indicative of the success the genre enjoys across several media.
But video games have done more for the modern zombie than anything or anyone since George A. Romero.
Editor’s Note: This post is a companion piece for “The Desert Stretched Before Him” by Phil Hornshaw.The blog, written by the author, is meant to explore the process of writing the story and the influences or inspiration that went with it. This post contains spoilers – read the stories involved first.
“The Desert Stretched Before Him” was more or less directly inspired by my reading of “Dune Messiah,” the sequel to Frank Herbert’s sci-fi masterpiece “Dune,” way back in high school. “Messiah” is set on Dune, the desert planet that’s central to the entire space-faring society described in the novels, and concerns greatly the somewhat-nomadic desert tribes of people who live there.