2014-10-16 06:00:11Zombies.
I don’t get the fascination.
Aside from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, a few scenes of Shaun of the Dead, Warm Bodies, and a handful of children’s movies where zombies play a role I have not had much interest in zombies.
It is certainly has a wide fan base….especially in AMC’s The Walking Dead. Even though at least two of my friends (including my bff who is the whole reason I watched an ep) are diehard fans and after one won tickets to go to the season premier party and was extremely upset at not being able to make the trip to Atlanta.
I’ve seen a person cry over the deaths of characters and lust after one of the main characters. It’s a television show about staying alive while zombies are trying to kill them. To the person in question the characters on the show are more real to her than the people she associates with in real life. She is certain the world will end in a zombie apocalypse. This certainly isn’t the norm but an interesting psychological experiment.
Death is almost a certainly for at least a few characters when zombies are the primary antagonist.
I guess I don’t see the fascination of brain eating monsters with no purpose except to kill and eat brains. It’s why some of the elements of Warm Bodies made sense to me. There were two different kinds of zombies. Those who ate brains to survive and those skeleton monsters who were the evil creatures out to destroy the world. The ones who ate the brains received the memories of those they fed on and it was because of a virus and they could be changed.
This feeds into what my singular interest is with zombies: the occult and criminal justice portion. In voodoo, there are allegedly rituals that can turn people into zombies. There is also a drug that is being used to rob tourists mostly in South America. People have no memory of what they have done but they are completely pliant while under the intoxicating effects of the drug.
I actually asked my bestie, Kristen what her fascination is with zombies. She explained it from a point of view that I could understand. She said she thinks “Back in the day zombies were just people coming back from the dead for reasons people never knew, but newer zombies are usually somehow “man made” zombies (Idk if that term makes sense but look at 28 days later and that’s what I mean), so it could happen now. With the way we play God, we could f&*k things up and end up the walking dead. I think that’s what fascinates people.”
I could see this as I love I am Legend where vampires are created by a virus leading to some zombie fans to lay claim to Richard Matheson’s Bram Stoker Award Winning novel for “Best Vampire Novel of the 20th Century.”
As we enter into the Halloween season perhaps its time to give the zombie genre another chance.
TODAY’S GIVEWAY: Kristina is offering a free digital copy of Blood Reign’s first antho, Silent Scream. Comment below to enter or e-mail membership@horror.org with “HH Entry” in the header.
KRISTINA STANCIL is a supporting member of the Horror Writer’s Association currently serving as the Chair for the Horror Curriculum Committee and was interviewed as the HWA’s August 2013 Fresh Blood new member. Kristina currently working on her Master’s in Humanities, Creative Writing concentration at Tiffin University and on her first paranormal novel, The Terror Twins. She is the owner of Thrillerz 13 Entertainment which specializes in promoting horror and paranormal entertainment. At this time she is ranked #12 on Examiner.com’s Entertainment Reporters for the New Orleans market for her weekly horror column, “Supernatural Saturday Night.” In the coming weeks Thrillerz 13 will be holding open submissions for their monthly literary ezine and their annual anthology.https://horror.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/HH-60×60.jpgHH-60×60.jpg