Tag: CNN

Zombies

by MAÔ, posted in Social

Heard this piece from The Why Factor on BBC World Service, all about zombies. It was the noise at the start that got me – this sort of clicking, vocal low growl. It was a little unsettling. But listening through, it got me thinking.

It seems that AMC’s The Walking Dead led this current phase of popularity, and while I thought that maybe the zombie was waining, it seems to still be going strong. Last year’s Zombieland 2 (which I still haven’t seen), popular games like The Last of Us, and the white walkers from HBO’s Game of Thrones all point to a strong showing by the reanimated corpse.

The zombie, and the wider horror genre, is a cyclical beast. While zombies have been en vogue starting from the October 31, 2010 airing of Days Gone By, the first episode of The Walking Dead, they were made popular first, and in their current iteration, by George Romero in his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Though Romero lost the rights to that film, it became a lucrative franchise for him as he created five more films in his Dead Saga. Dani Di Placido at Forbes wrote this history of the zombie legend following Romero’s death in 2017.

Before Romero, Americans knew of the zombie mostly from White Zombie, a 1932 film about a Haitian honeymoon with voodoo and raised corpses. The Haitian zombie wasn’t bloodthirsty – it was merely a resurrected person to be used as a slave by a sorcerer. Director Wes Craven revisited this aspect of the zombie legend in 1988’s The Serpent and the Rainbow. In A History of Zombies in America from NPR’s Rachel Martin and Rund Abdelfatah, the Haitian beginnings of zombies are explored in depth.

Through the 80s and the 90s, zombies got more of a B-movie treatment. Slasher films were the mainstay, with films like Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Sleepaway Camp following up on the popularity of 1978’s Halloween. The masked killer got a revamp in 1996 with Wes Craven’s Scream, ushering in a smarter, meta-version of the slasher film.

While the film industry wasn’t doing great with zombies, video games were killing it. The Resident Evil series, started in 1996 for Playstation, was immensely popular and eventually got its own film adaptations as well. Additionally, new life for the zombie came in the 2000s, including the 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, and the 2004-remake of Dawn of the Dead. In 2003, Robert Kirman began the long-running series Walking Dead for Image Comics, which would be adapted to television by AMC.

And books as well get the zombification treatment, with popular novels like Max Brooks’s World War Z, Stephen King’s Cell, and M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts, not to mention the Seth Graham parody mashup of Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.

So while I echo Romero’s sentiment that the zombie genre has become overrun in recent years, there is still plenty of material to pull from for a bevy of stories to tell about the living dead. I suppose horror, and its fan-base, is just waiting for the next resurgence – maybe it’ll be Universal Monsters this time around.

Further reading:

America the hateful?

by MAÔ, posted in Government

What a terrible week for the Country. External threats, such as North Korea and Iran loom large in the political arena, but it’s the domestic disturbances that are invading the national consciousness.

  • On Tuesday, President Trump retweeted a cartoon of a train bearing the Trump logo killing a CNN reporter, just days after a protester at a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was fatally run down by a driver who participated in that rally. The cartoon reads “Fake news can’t stop the Trump train.” Thirty minutes later it was deleted from Trump’s Twitter feed.
  • Texas A&M University has called off a white-supremacist rally that was scheduled on campus next month. The rally organizer said he was inspired by the Unite the Right demonstration in Charlottesville for his White Lives Matter event planned for Sept. 11. Known white supremacist Richard Spencer was invited to speak at the event.
  • Charlottesville riots left one dead and nineteen injured, following a car slamming into a crowd of people. The gathering of alt-right protestors coming to oppose the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee collided with leftist counter-protestors, and a large-scale riot erupted, with white supremacist driver plowing into a crowd of people.
  • Protesters in Durham, North Carolina, brought down a Confederate monument Monday night. The monument, which is engraved with “The Confederate States of America,” is of a Confederate soldier. Activists had previously campaigned for its removal. Protesters tied a rope around the statue and pulled until it fell over, doing extensive damage to the piece.
  • Boston Police arrested one person suspected of shattering part of the city’s New England Holocaust Memorial. The person is suspected of throwing a rock at one of the memorial’s six glass towers at around 6:40 p.m. Monday. The memorial was also vandalized in June. A 21-year-old man was arrested for the first incident.
  • The Lincoln Memorial was vandalized with red spray paint, stating what appears to be: “Fuck (law, or perhaps Islam)”.
  • A Google software engineer wrote a contentious memo that has “enraged advocates of greater diversity in the technology industry. The memo has also served as a rallying cry for conservatives and the alt-right who view Google — and Silicon Valley — as a bastion of groupthink where people with different opinions are shamed into silence.” The memo proposed that differences between men and women — like a woman having a lower tolerance for stress — help explain why there were fewer women in engineering and leadership roles at the company. He said efforts by the company to reach equal representation of women in technology and leadership were “unfair, divisive, and bad for business.”

-Stories as reported in New York Times, Daily Beast,
CNN, Fox News, and Washington Post

I get through all of these, and there are more that I could list, but I feel sick. This is what we’re dealing with right now.

But, I continue on, finding that the father of the poor young woman who was murdered at the Charlottesville rally forgives the man who had driven the car. His compassion, even in the face of unimaginable grief, is something that I think many of us would have a hard time practicing.

Yes, the world is terrifying. Or it can be. And it’s contentious being an American. But we can do better. We can be better.

America is beautiful because of its diversity, and its tenacity.