Zombie CSU (55 page)
Harrop admits that he no longer does all of it himself. “About 50% is staff written at this point. The concept is to allow readers to write their own reports. If it fits the story direction as a whole then I print it. Other readers may write additional reports that take the story in an entirely different direction. You have to reel some people in at times though. They want to get straight to the third act. Submitting reports of thousands of Zombies holding America under siege. Well, where do you go from there? I think the slow burn is always best. Pace it. One well-written report of a missing hiker, or an outbreak on a cruise ship is equally engaging as any epic Zombie holocaust. That helps make ZombieWorldNews.com so unique. It’s one huge, dynamic horror story told in real time with no specific author.”
Why Zombies?
“Our daily lives are filled with real monsters and real horrors. Monsters fly airplanes into buildings and abduct eleven-year-old girls from behind car washes and butcher their pregnant wives and strap their own children with bombs and send them to blow up other children. These are dark times that we live in, and people want an escape. People are scared of everyday life. Sometimes, it’s good to curl up with a make believe monster, rather than the one outside your door. Make believe monsters offer us a release valve—an escape from the very real terrors that surround us. Who would you rather spend time with—a suicide bomber or a zombie?”—Brian Keene- “Zombies tend to represent consumerism. Americans are the leaders of the world and the ultimate consumers in every way. For the future of the genre I’d like more exploration of the aftermath of consumerism—the post apocalypse and rebirth.”—Sarah Langan, author of
The Missing
. - “To quote a line from one of Romero’s movies—‘because we’re them and they’re us.’ I think that’s the key to it—we can become these nightmare creatures, and there’s generally nothing we can do to stop it happening. We can put it off, but it’s usually inevitable that the dead will catch up with you.”—David Moody, author of the
Autumn
series of zombie novels.
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Disasters are news. Death is news. Pain and misery are news. Catastrophic loss is news. Wars are news. Epidemics are news. There’s no doubt at all that if the apocalypse happened, you’d be watching it on TV or reading it in the morning paper.
The Rise of Zombie Pop Culture
The Dead Elvi
by Chris Palmerini
“Back in 1993, when the Chiller Theatre convention moved to a larger venue and a ballroom became available, promoter Kevin Clement asked his friend Chris Palmerini if he could help put together a band so Kevin could put on a costume ball. Thus was the birth of the Dead Elvi! Little did they think that twelve years later they’d still be performing, appear in several movie sound-tracks, have a cut on a Rob Zombie CD, and appear on at least a dozen ‘Something Weird’ DVDs…and to be the last band to play a gig with the late, great Bobbie ‘Boris’ Pickett!”
—Reprinted with permission from www.deadelvi.com
C
ecil B. DeMille is reported to have said, “Give me any two pages of the Bible and I’ll give you a picture.” We love taking the big (and small) events of our lives and making them into movies, songs, TV shows, documentaries, comics, and even T-shirts. We are a pop culture society.
How long after 9/11 did the first wave of movies hit the theaters? There are novels written about Hurricane Katrina. Whole TV episodes are built around recent headlines.
More than we love to write factually about the events of history—ancient or recent—we love to weave the top stories into the fabric of our pop culture. This is in no way a criticism—it’s who we are, and to a degree it helps us understand the events that shape our lives. By using a media format, we can explore the nuances of an issue that might otherwise not be something folks could or would talk about. Look at the original
Star Trek
TV show: Despite the cool phasers and warp drives that appealed to our innate geekiness, there were also the weighty social issues in each episode, cleverly disguised as science fiction. During the incendiary 1960s, the show openly tackled racism with a crew that was racially mixed, the very first TV screen kiss between black and white races occured between Kirk and Uhuru,
1
an entire episode was used to mock the very nature of racism by depicting a struggle between aliens who were black on one side of their bodies and white on the other (the nature of their contention being the orientation—one was black on the left side, the other black on the right)
2
; and the ongoing racism of human against Vulcan even among friends. Very touchy stuff back then.
But then theater has
always
taken issues of the day and made them into entertainment. Go ask Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Epicharmus of Kos; or jump forward and see where William Shakespeare was getting his ideas. Same goes for just about anyone who wrote a play or a book, or wrote scripts for TV and film.
At this writing, we’re all deeply embedded in the Iraq War. So far we’ve already had a number of movies set during this war, ranging from psychological studies, such as
Jarhead
, (2005) to pure exploitive entertainment, like
Transformers
(2007). We’ve had TV episodes and series by the dozen set in Iraq or touching on the lives of the men and women who have gone there to fight. Novels have been written about it; comics, too. Hollywood and the entertainment industries, political sides notwithstanding, recognize the war as a source of good storytelling. Or, more cynically put, they see it as a way to make money.
We’ve had feature films like
United 93
(2006) and
World Trade Center
(2006), and more of these are on the way. On a bigger picture scale, the global War on Terror is an endless source of entertainment. Middle Eastern terrorists and/or religious extremists have become the new standard movie villain.
All this offends a portion of our society, and these critics say that these are not fit subjects for entertainment, that it’s too soon, that exploiting tragedy is in poor taste; and to a degree they’re right. But they’re not completely right because pop culture is not necessarily as shallow and ephemeral as all that. When Homer wrote the
Odyssey
, he certainly profited by it, but did that diminish its value? The book’s been required reading for a couple of millennia and, let’s face it, he played pretty fast and loose with the facts in order to tell a more compelling story. Was Dickens a cad for writing
A Tale of Two Cities
, when clearly so much human suffering was associated with the French Revolution? Was C. S. Forester merely pandering to his audience with his Horatio Hornblower Napoleonic war novels?
The answer will always be yes and no. A little bit of yes and a whole lot of no because art imitates life. It always has, since the first time a caveman painted a picture of a buffalo on the wall and tried to convince his in-laws that he’d actually seen something like that. Art—literature, dance, film, music—has grown up around the need to tell us stories, and many of those stories will be based in whole or in part on real events. It’s how we explain our world to ourselves.
J
UST THE
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ACTS
Dead On!
Which brings us to zombies. If there was a zombie plague, there would be brand new zombie movies—even before the plague was resolved. I mean…we make movies about them
now
and there are no actual zombies. Do you want to sit there and tell me that if there were actual zombies we wouldn’t be making films about them? Or books? Or comics? Of
course
we would. And we can justly say that Romero told us to. After all,
Night of the Living Dead
was a statement about the times as they were happening. So was
Dawn
, so was
Day
.
So often pop culture is either a mirror that we can hold up to view all the big pores, warts, pimples, and blackheads of our society; or it’s a window into aspects of the world and points of view we can’t otherwise see. Zombie films and books have frequently polished the glass on those mirrors and windows, or provided filters that block out distractions and allow us to see a specific thing with great clarity. It’s a kind of Jonathan Swift effect. His
Gulliver’s Travels
was no more about giants and little people than
A Modest Proposal
was about actually eating Irish babies. Along those same lines,
Night of the Living Dead
was not about monsters attacking humans, not on the level where the writer envisioned the story. Zombies were a by-product. For Romero,
Night
was, among other things, a way of shouting out about the state of our society, about the disconnect between human beings and their basic humanity, about the fracturing of openness and how human dignity takes a beating in the presence of uninformed bigotry. It was no accident that the hero of the piece, Ben, was played by a black actor. It was not an accident that the white majority hides behind locked doors.
What’s so fascinating is that we probably already have a glimpse of what the pop culture would look like if zombies were a reality. We have zombie movies by the hundreds; zombie novels, zombie comic books, zombie art, zombie music, zombie toys, zombie everything. In the summer of 2007, JCPenney launched a series of commercials in which zombified clothes attacked school children (granted it wasn’t to munch on them but to amp up their post-grunge sense of style). Zombies are everywhere.
The Zombie Presidents
Mount Rotmore
by Yale Redd Bender
“Romero and his followers showed us that zombies and politics go hand in hand. Some people have taken that more to heart than others, and none more so than The Zombie Presidents. Founded by pop culture retailer Brett Dewey and Hollywood special effects artist Mark Tavares, the group promotes some very dry political humor (no one is spared) and also has a line of T-shirts and other merchandise. Dewey says, “The Zombie Presidents were conceived in the vein of the Zombie as social commentary. Seeing the current division in the country and frustration over the lack of inspiring leadership, the American voters cried out for leaders like the great ones of the past—and to everyone’s surprise they answered! Why look for the next JFK or Ronald Reagan when you can have the original!”
Johnny Gruesome
Johnny Gruesome
by Zach McCain and Greg Lamberson
Zombies are usually the villains of the piece, but for subversive horror author Greg Lamberson the zombie is definitely the leading man. His creation, Johnny Gruesome, is the ghost of a murdered high school student who reanimates his own corpse in order to exact a bloody revenge. Johnny Gruesome has been turned into a comic book, a video short, and a head-banging CD. Zach McCain renders the comic with moody brilliance, and songwriter Giasone Italiano crafted the thrilling theme music.
I asked people in different aspects of the zombie pop culture to talk about what’s hot in rot and what’s cool for ghouls.
Expert Witness
Derrick Sampson, an actor and theater teacher from Chicago, was very frank about the role of race in the Romero films. “Romero was ballsy to cast a handsome black man—Duane Jones—as the lead in
Night of the Living Dead
. Especially in rural Pennsylvania. Most people are unaware that Pennsylvania has more KKK members than any other state in America. And
Night
was shot during the 1960s…not exactly the least turbulent time in American race relations. Duane played a strong, sensible, courageous man trying to do his best to protect the people in his charge—all of whom were white. Another director might have done that as a kind of stunt casting, but Romero is, if anything, fiercely outspoken when it comes to fairness. He may be cynical, but at the same time there is a thread of hope built into what he does.”
Tony Todd, the actor who played the character of Ben in the 1990 remake of
Night
agrees. “I was always a big fan of the original
Night of the Living Dead
. It was so powerful, so iconic. And it had an African American leading man back in the 1960s, which you really didn’t see that often. Not enough. Duane Jones did a terrific job as Ben. He had real power, real humanity. For Romero to have cast the movie that way showed insight and it showed backbone.”