Zombie Love: Aim for Some Head?
As I mentioned in yesterday's entry, Miranda will be blogging every Thursday. You can learn more about Miranda here.
Hello, readers! Welcome to the first blog installment in “Zombie Thursdays!” What started out as a joke has now become a collaboration of sorts. Most of you probably do not know me at all, but that’s okay. Horror and love of the grotesque is a unifying factor in the world-- we will soon be great friends... the kind who will shoot each other in the head if we ever become infected.
This first blog is something I wrote a few weeks ago around Halloween and touches briefly on “Zombie Love.” Enjoy!
Zombie Love: Aim for Some Head?
Most of my friends know that I am obsessed with zombies. I LOVE zombies. Zombie movies, zombie books, zombie artwork, zombie games, zombie pinups.... everything zombie culture! Naturally, this time of the year is perfect for someone like me. Being Halloween, every where one looks there are zombie movies on TV, and decorations for your home, haunted houses full of "zombies," zombie walks, zombie pub crawls, etc.
But lately I have noticed that zombies just seem to be "in." Like, all the time, year round. I can't tell if this is a recent phenomenon with the rest of the world or if it is something that has been slowly invading our popular culture for awhile now. Is Zombie Love something that only affects a certain group of people? I don't like to think of myself as a "goth" (although maybe I am?), but perhaps I only see the zombie infiltration into society because I hang out and talk with like minded people-- the goths, people in horror culture, countercultural individuals, and so on.
In college, I wrote my thesis on the attraction to horror monsters, starting off with the forerunners to modern monsters, freak show performers.
The “Reader’s Digest Version” of my basic theory on why people watch and are drawn to horror movies (and this is more biased to a female point of view) is due to sexual attraction to the Other-- or we like to watch horror films because we want to get it on with Freddy Krueger. Although I went on for 60 pages about this idea, I don't know if I necessarily subscribe to it myself (although I would make an exception for Pinhead. And Dracula, but only if it was Gary Oldman's Dracula), and I'm not sure if my thesis would pertain to zombies. After all, sex with zombies would be messy. There would also be a good chance that without proper protection, one could end up as a zombie as well! That's not to say this theme hasn't been explored in films and books. I'm reminded of the film 'Dellamorte Dellamore' (also known as 'Cemetery Man' in the United States) and even Re-Animator. I recently finished reading a young adult novel called 'Generation Dead' that is about teenagers coming back to life after death. They are "zombies," but not in the traditional brain-eating way. Two of the protagonists, a living girl and a "differently biotic" boy (as they are called in the book) have a romantic sort of relationship going on. And of course, there is the very serious and real condition of necrophilia.
All of this has made me think about what would really happen if the dead came back to life? What would society really do? What if zombies came back and didn't want to eat your brains? They were just normal people... but dead. Stuck somewhere between one life and another. Would you be friends? Could you love a zombie? And what about that sex?
Maybe that is why zombies are so popular at the moment. Perhaps zombie culture is just a manifestation of the fear humans have about their own mortality. No one wants to die, and no one knows what happens to us after we do die. Would you want to come back? Would you want your friends to come back? Even if it meant that they came back differently than before... I guess you could always chain them up in a shack and play video games with them. But really, what would you do? How would you act?
Hello, readers! Welcome to the first blog installment in “Zombie Thursdays!” What started out as a joke has now become a collaboration of sorts. Most of you probably do not know me at all, but that’s okay. Horror and love of the grotesque is a unifying factor in the world-- we will soon be great friends... the kind who will shoot each other in the head if we ever become infected.
This first blog is something I wrote a few weeks ago around Halloween and touches briefly on “Zombie Love.” Enjoy!
Zombie Love: Aim for Some Head?
Image courtesy of Bahman. Most of my friends know that I am obsessed with zombies. I LOVE zombies. Zombie movies, zombie books, zombie artwork, zombie games, zombie pinups.... everything zombie culture! Naturally, this time of the year is perfect for someone like me. Being Halloween, every where one looks there are zombie movies on TV, and decorations for your home, haunted houses full of "zombies," zombie walks, zombie pub crawls, etc.
But lately I have noticed that zombies just seem to be "in." Like, all the time, year round. I can't tell if this is a recent phenomenon with the rest of the world or if it is something that has been slowly invading our popular culture for awhile now. Is Zombie Love something that only affects a certain group of people? I don't like to think of myself as a "goth" (although maybe I am?), but perhaps I only see the zombie infiltration into society because I hang out and talk with like minded people-- the goths, people in horror culture, countercultural individuals, and so on.
In college, I wrote my thesis on the attraction to horror monsters, starting off with the forerunners to modern monsters, freak show performers.
The “Reader’s Digest Version” of my basic theory on why people watch and are drawn to horror movies (and this is more biased to a female point of view) is due to sexual attraction to the Other-- or we like to watch horror films because we want to get it on with Freddy Krueger. Although I went on for 60 pages about this idea, I don't know if I necessarily subscribe to it myself (although I would make an exception for Pinhead. And Dracula, but only if it was Gary Oldman's Dracula), and I'm not sure if my thesis would pertain to zombies. After all, sex with zombies would be messy. There would also be a good chance that without proper protection, one could end up as a zombie as well! That's not to say this theme hasn't been explored in films and books. I'm reminded of the film 'Dellamorte Dellamore' (also known as 'Cemetery Man' in the United States) and even Re-Animator. I recently finished reading a young adult novel called 'Generation Dead' that is about teenagers coming back to life after death. They are "zombies," but not in the traditional brain-eating way. Two of the protagonists, a living girl and a "differently biotic" boy (as they are called in the book) have a romantic sort of relationship going on. And of course, there is the very serious and real condition of necrophilia.
All of this has made me think about what would really happen if the dead came back to life? What would society really do? What if zombies came back and didn't want to eat your brains? They were just normal people... but dead. Stuck somewhere between one life and another. Would you be friends? Could you love a zombie? And what about that sex?
Maybe that is why zombies are so popular at the moment. Perhaps zombie culture is just a manifestation of the fear humans have about their own mortality. No one wants to die, and no one knows what happens to us after we do die. Would you want to come back? Would you want your friends to come back? Even if it meant that they came back differently than before... I guess you could always chain them up in a shack and play video games with them. But really, what would you do? How would you act?