Pre-Rapture Special: How To Spend Your Rapture Weekend

Well, with the end of the world as we know it fast approaching, I’m sure you’re looking for ways to avoid having to spend your last few precious moments trapped into spending time with your loved ones and family. Here are a few events you should check out this last weekend, to make the end of the world go that little bit quicker.

Friday

Eco-Horror party and DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS screening 

Shortwave Cinema, London 9pm
Remember the good old days, when we thought that the end of the world would be brought about by man’s ceaseless meddling with nature, as opposed to the almighty wrath of God? It was a purer age.

Mark the occasion with this special screening of post apocalypse and zombie move precursor Day of the Triffids, organised by our very own Amy Cutler:

“Shortwave Cinema says they’re going to let all Passengerfilms fans have an amazing reduced rate at Friday’s eco-horror party. Everyone else is paying full price at cinema rates, but if you say you’re with us you pay anything between FREE and SUGGESTED DONATION £4. Amazing. So please bring all your leafy creepy friends for a horrible night in celebration of sprouting and germination.

At 9pm in the cinema bar we will have Triffid face-painting by Muna of Artistic Strokes, a huge Triffid cake designed by Cakes & Crunk, and bright green cocktails made by yours truly. You can have one for free if you come in a good eco-horror costume, so don’t forget the green paint.

Not only that, we’ll also have (real) carnivorous plants taking over the bar for the night!”

Art Love World Live!

Norwich Arts Centre, Norwich 7.30pmSome of you may not have resigned yourself to being left on Earth to suffer through the tribulation as your more deserving friends are whisked off to eternal bliss.

If this the case, you may want to score some last minute brownie points, and there’s no better way to do that then giving money to charity, is there?

“Art Love World will be hosting its first ever live event as part of this year’s Norwich Fringe Festival at the Norwich Arts Centre on May 20th. The event is being held in aid of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and all profits will go straight to a charity providing relief for Japan. 

The event will showcase some of the finest talents from East Anglia, including fantastic live bands, comedians, poets, beatboxer, magician and DJs so you can get your groove on for the evening, in addition to a host of other spectacular treats in store on the night. 

Music acts will include the rock, funk and jazz fusion of The Fuzz, the Lou Reed-esque sound of Axel Loughrey, the stunning singer-songwriter Gracie Wright, the talented and soulful Jordan Jackson, the diverse acoustic duo Cielo and, last but not least, the fantastic Norwich Ukulele Society. 

Other acts include the hilarious and talented comic poet Tim Clare, the acerbic hippie wit of comedian Andy Bennett and Chris Farnell, one of Norwich’s finest wits. As well as some surprising walkabout performances. “

Yeah, I didn’t say that bit about being one of Norwich’s finest wits by the way.

Saturday

Saturday is the day of the actual apocalypse. I actually recommend you keep this day free, although if you start drinking at breakfast it’s not necessarily a bad idea.

Sunday

The Beta Males presents The Bunker

Kings Place, London, 7.30pmTo celebrate the aftermath of Armageddon, and mourn those of your friends who, it turned out, were leading much better lives than you, why not check out this great comedy double bill, featuring Pappy’s All Business and (more thematically) the Beta Males giving their last ever performance of post-apocalyptic sketch show, The Bunker.

“Take your place in The Bunker; humanity's last refuge beneath the scorched soil. Witness a society living in the guttering light, 30 years into a mutated future. Hilarity – but mostly doom – ensues as we sketch the last 273 humans alive, and the last punchlines they'll ever share... “

Don’t believe me? Ask Beta Male Guy Kelly: “This was my favourite show in Edinburgh last year - I saw it several times and howled with laughter each night. Now I'm in the damn thing. I can't express quite how happy that makes me. The humour is pitch-black and the pace is unrelenting: I'm so glad we get to perform it one last time. Having that last time be the day after the end of the world is the icing on the horribly, horribly irradiated cake.”

Wednesday

To be honest, if you’re still alive by Wednesday, you’ll probably be feeling a bit silly about this whole apocalypse thing. If the world hasn’t been thrown into turmoil by now (you know, more than usual) than it’s finally safe to assume that God probably doesn’t exist and write off the beliefs of everyone who isn’t Richard Dawkins as idiotic.

Just because the world is safe from Biblical catastrophe doesn’t mean you’re safe though. There’s always the risk that we’ll all breathe a sigh of relief, only to be wiped out by a Vogon Constructor Fleet to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

That’s where this comes in handy:

Vogon Poetry Slam

The Miller Pub, London Bridge, 7pm
This event, run by Whippersnapper Press and one of our favourite zombie arrestees, Hannah Eiseman-Renyard, is to mark International Towel Day. So make sure you bring a towel.

There will be two categories:
* Nerdcore
* So-Bad-It’s-Good

There will also be:
* The most bureaucratic voting system we can devise
* Pan-galactic gargleblasters to drink
* Some damn snazzy costumes

Last I heard, the voting forms will also double up as vomit bags, so by the time the poetry’s been read, if the world hasn’t ended, you’ll wish it had.

#14 Everything You Wanted To Know About Zombies (But Were Afraid To Ask Daniel Defoe): Everything New is Old Again

Welcome to our most belated, longest titled blog entry yet. Now it takes a great man to admit when he’s been wrong. From the very beginning of the blog, I have emphasised that the zombie apocalypse genre is one that is, for want of a better pun, cannibalistic. I have argued that everything in the genre today can be traced back to Night of the Living Dead, which itself is traced back to I Am Legend.

So it is with all due humility that I say- it turns out I was more right than even I suspected.

Everything You Wanted To Know About Zombies (But Were Afraid To Ask Daniel Defoe) was a lovely event held in London last week, hosted by the Birkbeck Literature Club where various academics and zombie geeks met up to listen to a series of talks and readings about the zombie apocalypse genre- and how it related to 18^th century literature- specifically, the historical recordings of the events surrounding the spread of the plague in that period.

From the very start the venue for the event gave off mixed signals. On the one hand, the walls were littered with red crosses and pleas for God’s mercy- on the other hand, there was free wine and nibbles. I poured myself a glass and found myself a seat.

The opening talk came from a man named Peter Jones, who told us about the “Anointers” from Alessandrro Manzoni’s  Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed).

Not this Peter Jones. He knows nothing about 18th century literature or the zombie apocalypse

Faced with the horrific death and destruction, medieval peasants (Here we are defining the word “Peasant” to mean- “Anyone who doesn’t own a TV”) reacted the way they always have in the face of horrific circumstances- a great big group prayer meeting. Modern scientists have responded to the idea of fighting a contagious disease by getting everyone in your community together in a poorly ventilated building, or having them march through the streets from one end of the city to the other en masse as “Oh for the love of God no! What are you doing! And Jesus Ever-Loving Christ do none of you wash your hands?” but community leaders at the time hung up a big “Mission Accomplished” banner and told everyone to go back to their daily business.

Known today as the Mayor Larry Vaughn Technique

Those of you who have just finished googling that pop culture reference (Come on! There was picture of a fin on the poster behind them! Surely that was a give away?) will probably be able to guess what happened next. If you guessed lots and lots more people dying, you can have a gold star.

As this highly crumpled hand-out I still have left over from the event says (In an extract from The Betrothed):

“The men who had fought so long and so resolutely against the view that a seed of a disease had from the beginning been near at hand, or in their very midst, which could multiply and spread by natural means to cause a disaster – those men were no longer able to deny that the disease was in fact spreading through the city. But they could not admit that it was due to natural causes without also admitting that they had completely misled the public and done great harm thereby. That disposed them to find some other reason, and to accept any explanation of the sort that might offer itself.”

This sounds not just like Mayor Larry Vaughn (For Christ’s sake people, he was the mayor in Jaws! The one who kept insisting that there was no shark because it would damage tourism? Jaws is only one of the most successful films ever made! For once, watch something that came out before Kung Fu Panda!) but also rings a bell pretty close to the news reports we hear at the beginning of every zombie movie. It’s taken as read that when the zombie apocalypse starts, our government will leap right into action to fuck it up. And while we’d like to believe that we’re better than medieval peasants (those of us with televisions anyway) deep down we kind of know we aren’t.

So, if prayer meetings don’t work, what do medieval peasants do next?

If you answered "Horror" have a gold star

Yes, it turns out, face with unimaginable tragedy and worrying uncertainty, people’s first reaction was to find people who “didn’t fit in” and weren’t from round these parts” and then torture them. Fortunately people are much more civilised now.

Specifically, in this book the plague was blamed on “Anointers”- suspicious, shady types who would sneak around, “anointing” people with plague. Now apparently there don’t exist that many visual representations of these Anointers, and other academics (for the purposes this article: Wussydemics) would have been stopped by that. Peter Jones however showed he was a good ten times more awesome than his Dragon’s Den counterpart by giving his talk dressed like this:

Peter Jones dressed as an Anointer. Photos courtesy of Hannah Eiseman-Renyard, the Jimmy Olsen to my Lois Lane.

Peter Jones’s talk was followed by a break, where we all got more wine and sat down to be suddenly interrupted by a man bursting in and angrily reading from  'God's Terrible Voice in the City' by Thomas Vincent, who stayed in London and was giving sermons during the plague. It was while he described the gruesome, terrifying sights of the plague to us in an underground room a little way out from King’s Cross, that I decided that I wouldn’t be going to any more apocalyptic pandemic based events in London. Thinking about this stuff is the best fun in a small, out of the way city that even the Romans had trouble clinging onto- thinking about it near the centre of a huge mass of humanity that has historically dealt with plagues by burning itself down is a little more disquieting.

I've no idea what I did to him but I am so very, very sorry!

The final talk of the evening, before the Q&A and the retreat to the pub, was Amy Cutler, who delivered a great paper on how Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is echoed by modern zombie movies.

Amy Cutler immediately admitted that her readings of the texts she was talking about were Marxist, which wasn’t a huge surprise. We’ve already mentioned Romero’s parodies of consumerism and capitalism in Dawn and Land of the Dead, as well as his take on I Am Legend as a story about revolution.

Although you could read it as the ultimate example of letting the free market decide...

She started out by drawing on some the more obvious parallels between zombies and plague victims- mainly that people walked around looking really gross, in the process infecting other people who then went on to look really gross. She pointed us to a quote from Defoe’s Journal that went “many People had the plague in their very blood, and preying upon their spirits, and were in themselves but walking putrified carcasses, whose breath was infectious, and their sweat poison”. She goes on to describe how: “The behaviour of the sick and infected also poses a form of geographical insurrection, for ‘they were with great difficulty kept from running out into the Fields and Towns, and tearing all in pieces wherever they came’”

Amy moved on from here to talk about more structural similarities however, such as “the ways in which the city space is performed and changed bodily by the actions of groups of people, of the bodies of the sick and the healthy.”

This is a key part of the zombie apocalypse genre- in the least few weeks I’ve furnished you with plenty of examples of pubs, shops and radio stations being reinterpreted as fortresses and streets and office blocks becoming battlefields. I think this is not only a key trope in the genre, but also part of its appeal. Unlike the Western, Space Opera or Historical Romance, you can easily re-imagine your own street as it is hit by the zombie apocalypse, a sort of instant Augmented Reality game.

Amy also talks about the mechanics of groups of survivors. She talks about plague survivors in Defoe’s book who “develop their own social, economic, and moral laws: they pool their money on the condition that any further money any one of them gains will be added to the public stock. In Epping Forest they build their own shelter, kill their own food, and almost totally avoid interaction with anyone outside their group.” She compares this to zombie movies where “The zombie film heralds the return of the ultimate democratised travel. There are typical scenes such as a hijacking on the road and the fall into what is basically land piracy. And there are no more zones of exclusion or privilege as each is broken into.”

I’m not sure how much I agreed with Amy’s idea that there is anything Marxist about your typical zombie movie survivors. If anything films like I Am Legend, Dawn of the Dead and Land of the Dead show the survivors as practicing the ultimate in Laissez-Faire capitalism, hording as much as they possibly can behind barricaded windows and locked doors, struggling to keep out or kill the baying hordes outside.

She did go on to point out some interesting trends that immediately seemed obvious after she said them, but hadn’t occurred to me before. Such as the prevalence and importance of petrol stations in pretty much any zombie movie you care to mention- which is odd considering that these same films are often built around static siege narratives.

So what do these talks teach us about the zombie apocalypse? Well, they teach us we keep retelling the same old stories, and that horrible things that happened centuries ago still haunt our nightmares today. They tell us about how we view cities- places of safety and civilisation that could be transformed into a jungle at a moment’s notice. But I think most of all these talks show that there is no threat so great, no common cause so important, no unifying action so crucial to our survival, that we will not act like a complete shower of dicks to one another.

Our zombie experts: Jennifer Cooke, Amy Cutler and Peter Jones, destroying your hope in humanity

I emailed Amy before writing this blog, asking for a copy of her talk and also inviting her to adjudicate the drinking game rules for this week’s blog (since some people still seem to think I’m being overly lenient). Her rulings were as follows:

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? (One shot) NO

Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent (One shot) or more dangerous than the zombies? (One shot) YES

Does nobody ever actually use the word zombie? (Two shots) YES

Is mankind the real monster? (One shot) YES

Has anybody said “They’re coming to get you Barbra!” (Two shots) NO (didn't actually mention that film or play a clip from it!)

Are the zombies walking dead (One Shot) YES who move slowly (One shot) NO (seemed to deal more with running zombies) and can only be killed by destroying the brain? (Head shot) NO 

Kiddy zombies? (Two shots) YES

Do the dead rise regardless of whether they were “infected”? (Two shots) NO it's all about infection.

#6 I Am Legend: Writing About Monsters

Yes, I made it back from London. It was a close run thing. In the tube stations it was hard to tell who was human and who was zombie, so I just swung my cricket bat at anything that moved until I made it to the exits. Ended up holing up in a pub called the Camden Head, where, as luck would have it, they were holding an evening of poetry, comedy and spoken word entertainment (I assume because the TV was no longer broadcasting). I won’t bore you with the details of my perilous trek back to Norwich, where somehow civilisation is managing to continue pretty much unaffected. All I’ll say is that on the coach trip I was able to enjoy rereading the excellent novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. It’s a novel about the last human being, fortified in his own home, desperately fighting off hordes of vampires.

So, spoiler alert. No, seriously, spoiler alert. If you have any plans whatsoever to read this book, do it before reading this article because I am going to give away the ending, and it’s of the Planet of the Apes is Earth/Bruce Willis is a ghost order of spoilers. The book is only 160 pages long, you could easily finish it in a weekend, so go away and come back when you’ve read it. You’ll thank me.

I’m sure some of you are saying “Chris, don’t worry about it! I’ve already seen the film starring Will Smith!” and to those people I shall politely suggest that you read the book anyway, while quietly damning the creators of that film to the circle of hell reserved for People Who Completely Miss The Point.

Go read the book. I’ll wait.

....

Have you read it yet? Good. No, it’s okay, no need to thank me. Yes, I’m sure Will Smith is very sorry too.

So, I’ll be honest, this is going to be a hard one to blog. There’s a tonne of things I want to talk about with this book: The way it sets up a whole genre and subverts it at the same time, the difference between Horror Fiction and Science Fiction and how zombie fiction in general, and I Am Legend especially, nestle in the crack between the two, why there are some books you really ought to read twice.

Let’s start by talking about horror and science fiction, because nothing is as worthwhile as arguing about genre definitions. Someone (I can’t remember exactly who and Google is letting me down) once described Night of the Living Dead as a science fiction movie disguised as a horror movie. I’ve already mentioned that George A. Romero nicked the idea for Night of the Living Dead from this novel and the sci-fi passing as horror quote applies just as well to this book. The monsters are vampires with pointy teeth who come by night to suck your blood, but have a dread fear of garlic and the cross (or Torah if it’s a Jew vampire), they are creatures straight out of the Bram Stoker tradition.

Yes. Once again the Atheists have doomed us all.

But Robert Neville, now that there is no one left to make fun of his name, systematically goes through everything we know about the vampire, the sucking blood, the aversion to sunlight, even the magically turning to dust when staked, and finds rational explanations with a microscope and a supply of text books.

I could totally become a self-taught bacteriologist if everyone else would just die!

My argument for I Am Legend as sci-fi in horror clothing comes from elsewhere though (although the chapters devoted to describing bacilli and spores certainly help- it’s better than it sounds). In his musing on the horror genre, Danse Macabre, Stephen King describe the horror genre as a “Republican in a three-button suit”. Sure, the conservative has a werewolf-life second identity, scratch the skin and there’s a monster underneath, but really, the monster is there to show us what a monster isn’t. Horror shows us strange and terrible things to that we know what normal is, and it’s not a huge coincidence that most of the time those strange terrible things happen to be about sex.

I would argue, probably with a pint in my hand and at a volume slightly above what the other pub goers are comfortable with, that science fiction does the opposite of this. From Star Trek, to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, from 2001: A Space Odyssey, to my own book that I’ve just remembered I haven’t plugged for several weeks, science fiction is a genre that tells you that your definitions of right and wrong are an arbitrary line in the sand, your universal truths are provincial custom and your sense of what’s important comes mostly from a lack of perspective.

At first glance zombies, and the vampires of I Am Legend, seem like the perfect horror villain. There’s a reason why they’re such popular enemies in videogames, and it’s not just that zombies don’t need that much in the way of AI (Turns out, they do). It’s that, even more so than Nazis and aliens, you can mow down hundreds of zombies without hesitation or remorse. In virtually every zombie movie, including the ones we’ve looked at so far, hesitation to smash in zombie brains is seen as at best, not understanding the gravity of the situation, and at worst dangerously irresponsible.

I Am Legend is no different. He spends the first few chapters of the book sharpening stakes to hunt the sleeping vamps by day while they sleep.  By the end of the book hunting for Cortman, one of the more persistent vampires, is Neville’s “relaxing hobby”. The necessity of killing off the vampires is never questioned, although at one point early on, when Neville is still experimenting to work out the “rules” for these vampires, he reluctantly asks himself why he always does his tests on women. Because when you’re the last living human being there’s nobody to stop you being a creepmeister.

Then he meets Ruth, another survivor (Or Is She?) and suddenly after three years Neville lives in a world where there are opinions other than his own. One of things that shocks him most about this girl (Who he absolutely does not want to sleep with at all, no sirree) is her response to his clinical and emotionless descriptions of killing the vampires. He’s surprised when she describes it as horrible, but dismisses it like a true zombie survivalist with “One gets used to these things”. He’s incredulous when he finally brings himself to ask “Do you think I’m wrong?”

Of course (and I’m saying of course because you followed my warning at the beginning of this blog, and read the book, and so this entry will hold no surprises for you) it turns out that the vampires aren’t quite the soulless stake-fodder they’ve been made out to be. While the reanimated dead are fair game, Neville has also been killing living people who have been infected by, but not yet succumbed, to the vampire disease. To those infected survivors it Neville who is the nightmarish monster, coming like a vampire and taking them as they sleep through the day. So, like the vampire, Robert Neville becomes legend.

Oh? You thought it was because he blew himself up with a hand grenade? Well, that’s poetic too... I guess...

At the climax of the book, as the infected survivors slaughter the vampires as they fight their way to Neville’s house, Neville sees them through the eyes of a monster. He is appalled by the casual brutality and violence they inflict on the vampires, and is heartbroken when they finally kill Ben Cortman. But Ruth reminds him, “Did you ever see your face when you killed?”

This is what makes I Am Legend a science fiction novel, rather than a horror. In science fiction, when the horde of monsters finally get hold of you, they crowd around and shout “Look! There’s the monster!” When the toothy, many eyed abomination comes face to face with you, it says “You look gross.”

I Am Legend is a subversion and a commentary of the horror fiction that came before it, and in even more effective commentary on the genre it inspired. But for what it’s worth, I think this novel’s sympathy for the monster is something that has passed right through the DNA of the zombie apocalypse. Romero made his movie after reading I Am Legend as a book where: “There’s this global change and there’s one guy holding out saying, wait a minute, I’m still a human. He’s wrong. Go ahead. Join them.” Through all Romero’s movies, and his many imitators, you’ll find at least a little sympathy for the zombie, and see the survivors becoming something a little bit less than human.

It’s Valentine’s Day, so eat a heart-shaped liqueur chocolate for each of these. Because nothing says romance like gorging yourself while reading something on the Internet.

The characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building, eat a chocolate. The people coming to rescue you are more dangerous than the zombies? Well, they’re not really coming to rescue you- eat a chocolate.  Mankind is definitely the real monster, eat a chocolate, hell, take two. The zombies are walking dead (One chocolate) but that’s the only Romero rules chocolate you get for obvious reasons. Oh, and the monsters are never referred to as zombies, on account of how they’re vampires, so take two chocolates for that.

Until next week, you’re ALL legend.

#5 The Walking Dead: You Say Generic Like It’s A Bad Thing

Those of you who’ve been following the blog so far will have come to expect my regular Monday updates. However, it just so happens that this Monday I am going to be in London, and in the event of a zombie apocalypse, those of us in a capital city will be the first to get chowed down by the undead. So I’m posting this early, so that my messy and untimely demise won’t deprive you of my zombie-related thoughts.

If I'm not back in time for next week's blog, come and rescue me

So, this will be my fifth blog, sixth if you count my introductory rant about writers, and their tendency towards thieving bastardry. So, care to take a guess how many zombie apocalypses we’ve looked at in that time?

Well, I’ve done a quick count, and it turns out, none, zero, also, zilch.

No, this isn’t because three of the previous four blogs have featured running zombies- we already had that argument. The zombie thing isn’t in question here. It’s the apocalypse part.

Night of the Living Dead’s zombie outbreak only affected a third of the United Stated. In 28 Days Later, the virus barely got off the British Isles. By the end of Pontypool the infection had only just escaped the eponymous town, and in Left 4 Dead 2 a map shows that there is still a sizeable portion of the United States untouched by necrotic, blood smeared hand.

So clearly it’s time to stop fucking about and starting about a real, honest-to-god Zombie smack down on the entire human race. Ladies and gentlemen, The Walking Dead. Here be spoilers.

Playing It Straight

The Walking Dead is a TV series, based on a comic series, about the zombie apocalypse. And it plays the tropes of the zombie apocalypse straight, absolutely straight. These are zombies straight from the Romero mould. They’re slow, they’re dead, they can only be killed with a headshot and (I had to google this, because the TV series hasn’t made it clear yet) if you die, for whatever reason, you’ll come back as one of them.

There is no clever subversion here, no twist on the rules of the genre. The first couple of episodes play out like the plot of well-made, but pretty formulaic zombie movie. The thing that sets The Walking Dead apart from its peers, is that it’s the zombie movie that never ends. Most zombie movies end with either everyone dying, or with the few surviving characters travelling into the horizon (where, most probably, they will die). But The Walking Dead sticks with those characters, because everytime they go over that horizon, there's another zombie movie waiting to happen. Despite its insistence on playing strictly by the rules laid down by the stories that came before it, The Walking Dead still manages throw some new elements into the mix, while reminding us of what we love about the old ones.

The TV series is very, very pretty. I’d go so far as to say the zombie apocalypse has never looked this good- the zombie make up, the abandoned city streets look better than any zombie movie I’ve seen.

It stars Andrew Lincoln, who you may remember as the likeable-but-useless one in This Life, or the likeable-but-useless one in Teachers. So no prizes for guessing who he’s playing here.

Pictured: The foppish, upper class buffoon from House

Yes, American TV is playing its new favourite game, taking British actors and casting them as American bad asses.

Except Rick Grimes, Andrew Lincoln’s zombie-killing Sherriff, isn’t really a bad ass in the traditional sense, he’s actually something remarkably rare in the zombie genre. He’s a genuinely decent human being. He cares deeply about his family, but is also willing to risk his life to save a stranger who helped him out once, or even the racist psychopath who he feels responsible for.

One of the things the creators of zombie fiction love almost as much as the sweet, sweet thrill of plagiarising each other’s work, is painting human beings as complete bastards who, on the whole, probably deserve to have their dead rise up and devour them.

It’s easy to see why. Writing selfish pricks is a whole lot more fun than writing decent, upstanding folk, and even the good guys are more entertaining when they do the right thing only after exhausting every possible alternative. It makes it easier to create that most precious of storytelling fuels, conflict, and it’s a short cut to making your story seem deep- “See? Are we any better than the zombies? I don’t need to shoot you in the head because I’ve just blown your mind!”

Grimes however, is brave, competent, and in short, exactly the sort of person you’d want running your post-apocalyptic survivalist compound.

Assuming that Bruce Campbell isn't available, naturally

Of course, not all the characters are the paragon of virtue that Grimes is, our aforementioned crazy racist being a prime example, but as a rule the characters in this series work together to solve their problems, resolve their differences through discussion and compromise and only occasionally beating the shit out of a guy who abuses his wife.

Brraaaaaiiiiinnns!

The characters don’t just talk, they plan. Every zombie-based problem the characters face is usually followed by a discussion of strategy and the creation of a plan, and it’s usually a pretty good plan.

This isn’t a subversion or even a new addition to the zombie apocalypse story. One of the things I love about the genre is that the characters in a zombie movie, on average, tend to be smarter than the characters in most other horror movies. In Night of the Living Dead, when Ben and Harry get into their dick measuring argument over whether to stay in the house or the cellar, both of them actually have pretty good points, they have strategies that have actually been thought out. Even in Shaun of the Dead, the characters think through their survival strategy, even if that strategy is “Go to the pub”.

Maybe it’s because the stupid ones are the first people to get eaten during a zombie apocalypse, or maybe it’s that the slow moving zombie give us more time to think things through rather than blindly running into a dead end while wearing a white negligee. The fact is, if you’re watching a zombie movie you’re far less likely to get a characters deciding to split up for no other reason than that it lets them get picked off one by one.

For the drinking game rules this week you better not by driving anywhere. Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? Depends, if we’re talking the whole series, no, but several episodes are shaped that way. Take a shot. Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent or more dangerous than the zombies? I don’t want to give too much away, but take a shot. The zombies are walking dead (the clue is in the name) move slowly, can only be killed by destroying the brain and rise regardless of the course of dead. Take four shots. Then two more for the kiddy zombie in the pilot episode. And while the word zombie doesn't remain unspoken, people tend to call them "walkers" instead, so what they hell, take another two shots. But you know what, this week, I don’t think mankind IS the real monster. Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy?

Assuming I make it back from the capital alive, I will see you next week.

#3 Pontypool: Orally Transmitted Disease

So, we’ve looked at the film that set out the rules for all the zombie movies to follow. We’ve found a zombie movie in denial and pointed out that yeah, it’s playing by the same rules as everyone else. Today we’re going to look at a film that’s well within the territory of the zombie movie, but does something completely original with the zombie apocalypse idea. Oh, and there will probably be some spoilers here, but hopefully not too much.

Okay, so we’ve already established that zombie movies tend not to focus on the big picture. They’re rarely interested in Frodo and his friends journeying to Mount Doom- they’re more likely to focus on the story of some anonymous Middle Earth peasant who gets his farm fucked over by orcs but never finds out why.

The majority of zombie films like to lock their main characters up in a room together, only giving them hints of the wider story through radio and TV broadcasts.

A Second Hand Apocalypse

Even the adventures of our main characters are often relayed to us second hand: In Night of the Living Dead we hear Ben tell us in detail about a gasoline truck he saw being chased down by a horde of zombies. In 28 Days Later Mark describes how he lost his family when Paddington Station was overrun. Telling us these stories second-hand does important scene-setting work. If it’s set in the early days of the outbreak, it helps give the impression that we are only seeing a fragment of a larger national or global narrative, set in the aftermath, it lets us know that we missed the party- that the war for survival happened long before the opening credits rolled, and we lost.

So it’s actually surprising it took this long for someone to think of telling the story of what happens in one of these radio stations, with the apocalypse relayed to us entirely second hand as the world finally goes to hell. Oh, we see a bit of it in Dawn of the Dead, as the TV station struggles to stay on the air while the city burns, but only long enough for our main characters to realise everything’s going to shit and decide to make a run for it.

With Pontypool we find out what happens to the characters who don’t make a run for it. Set in the small, snowbound Canadian town of Pontypool (That the setting is Canadian will prove important later) this film follows washed out shock jock Grant Mazzy, his put-upon producer Sydney Briar, and “technical cowboy” Laurel-Ann Drummond.

One of the first things we find out is- at the radio station Ben, Barbra and co were listening to, desperately hoping for an answer to the crisis, the announcers had no more idea what was going on than the poor folk stranded in the farmhouses, shopping malls and the Winchester Pub.

For the first half of the film, we only hear fragmentary reports, a doctor’s office getting mobbed by what looks like a protest or riot, a BBC journalist asking if the rioting and military roadblocks are the result of separatist terrorists, and the DJ isn’t convinced it’s not all some War of the Worlds style radio hoax. Anybody who’s seen a zombie movie will recognise the signs, but you won’t see a zombie directly until over 50 minutes into the film, and it’ll be over an hour before the horde appears.

Everything else we hear from listeners calling in, from the pilot of the radio station’s traffic chopper (which is actually a car parked on a hill) and from the news wire. It’s a claustrophobic, doom-laden film and if that was all there was to this movie it would still be a great addition to the genre. But that isn’t what makes this film stand out.

It’s the nature of the infection. This epidemic isn’t brought about by a crashed Venusian space probe, or by some sort of hyper-rabies. In Pontypool the infection is spread by words- specifically, the understanding of words.

Despite the sprinty/not undead nature of the zombies, these zombies are much closer to the Romero zombies of old, because they are as much objects of sympathy as fear. When we see an infected person hurling herself at the glass of the recording booth until the glass is smeared with her blood, we’re not frightened she’ll break in, we just don’t want to see her killing herself. When the military come in and begin putting down the infected, Mazzy’s outraged cry is that “You’re just killing scared people- it’s what you always do.” There’s none of the usual self-justification that “he’s not the person he was” when a zombie gets killed. We see the terror in their eyes as they lose their ability to speak, and when they finally turn to violence it’s almost understandable.

Everybody’s Heard About The Word

There is a theory that in the event of a Rage virus style zombie outbreak, it would go something like this:



I would watch this movie.



But a virus spread by words? Well let me make my point in the most painful way possible: The Game.

For those of lucky enough not to know what that means, and are therefore not swearing out loud and trying to punch your computer monitor in the face click here. I’m sorry, there’s no going back.

In a wider sense, words behave virally all the time, the infection stands as a metaphor for memes, ideas, religion, you name it. But purely in the terms of the film, it also presents a host of unique problems. Certain words are infected- but how do you find out which ones are infected. If you find which words are infected, how can you communicate that to anyone else?

This is where it becomes important that this film is set in Canada. The military that moves in to put down the outbreak (and who turn out to not be much help- don’t worry, we’ll tally up the shots at the end of the blog) is explicitly stated to be the French Canadian military. When the radio station’s broadcast is interrupted by an announcement in French, telling people to avoid terms of endearment, baby talk and “rhetorical discourse” it also warns people to avoid the English language, and asks that listeners not translate the message. To contain the disease, there is an attempt to actually quarantine the English language.

But we’re never in any doubt about how effective this strategy will be. If there is an effective way to contain an idea I haven’t heard of it (So, you know, well done!) and this is a film fascinated by language and ideas and the way they propagate. When zombie movies show you anything of life before the outbreak, it will usually be a shortcut to whatever themes it wants to explore. 28 Days Later starts with stock footage of riots and wars and the everyday violence humans inflict on one another regardless of any “virus”.

Shaun of the Dead opens with shots of people lumbering about their everyday lives, doing the same tasks over and over, looking like zombies. Pontypool starts out with Mazzy’s producer telling him that his attempt to spread the truth in a small town is pointless because “Gossip is way ahead of you”. The film opens on a monologue from Mazzy, talking about the meanings and etymologies of words, repeating them until they lose all meaning.

Zombie movies never being afraid to stick their subtext up on a fifty foot high billboard, we see plenty of examples of the kind of dangerous, viral ideas they are talking about. From the dangerous inflammatory rumours of booby trapped marijuana farms Mazzy is spreading at the start of the film, to the singers of a Lawrence of Arabia musical that come to perform in the studio, and feature a black-faced actor playing Osama Bin-Laden.

Pictured: Satire

Perhaps the lesson of this film is that some of the worst things humanity can produce are simply spread by words, and it forces the audience to ask itself- have you heard the word?

Right, let’s bring out the drinking game shall we? (Yes: You just lost The Game again)

Our characters spend most of the story under siege in a radio station (one shot) where the French-Canadian military coming to contain the situation are incompetent, and more dangerous than the zombies (two shots) because mankind is the real monster (one shot) also, there is a kiddy zombie (two shots) and nobody ever calls them zombies (one shot).

Next week I’m going to be writing about the Left 4 Dead games, and also Batman.

#2 28 Days Later: Measure of a Zombie

This blog will contain spoilers for the movie 28 Days Later. Also, Romeo and Juliet die at the end.

Is 28 Days Later a zombie movie? This has been a subject of much debate among people who care about this sort of thing. So I’ve decided that now I’ve got a blog, I can end this argument once and for all, because nothing puts an end to a controversy like somebody writing a blog.

Well, let’s start by going right to the source- Danny Boyle, who directed the movie. He’s gone on record to say: “I keep saying, ‘It's not a zombie movie, everyone. It's not a zombie movie!'… They're infected. They're not zombies."

Other masters of the genre agree. Simon Pegg, writer and start of Shaun of the Dead and that zombie-themed episode of Spaced has chimed in describing 28 Days Later as “an excellent film misconstrued by the media as a zombie flick” but which actually features “rabid propagators of a virus known as "rage".”

A lot of zombie purists will agree. The argument is that the Infected sprint about like Olympic Athletes desperate to get to the loo and they aren’t dead. If we go by the definition of zombie listed in our zombie drinking game rules, your throat will go dry.

I’m Right- Everyone Else is Wrong

The reason I’m calling on such high authorities as the director of the film, and famed zombie nut Simon Pegg, is that I want to make it absolutely clear what calibre of people I am more right than.

28 Days Later is a zombie movie, and the infected are zombies. Deal with it.

Don’t get me wrong, like many geeks one of the few things that brings me more pleasure than sci-fi and fantasy, is getting really anal about sci-fi and fantasy. If you ever want to see what I look like when I’m really irritated, describe the Daleks as “The robots that fight Doctor Who” (The Daleks are the mutated aliens in armoured travel machines who fight the Doctor). Distinctions like that are important because they change the story. It matters whether the baddies are creatures who used to be like us, or machines made by someone like us.

But in 28 Days Later, while the infected are clearly different from George Romero’s creations, the story DNA is right there. Let’s start with the drinking game shall we?

Our merry band of survivors spend the last third of the film with some soldiers who are under siege in an old country home(One shot) where it turns out, that the people they have gone to for rescue are more dangerous than the... ahem, “infected” (One shot) because it turns out mankind is the real monster (One shot). On their way to find rescue, our hero, Jim, has to kill a kiddy... ahem, “infected” (Two shots).

In fact, it’s worth pointing out that the scene with the kiddy infected is almost beat-for-beat identical to a scene in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. The survivors stop to refuel; one of them stupidly wanders off on his own into the building, and is forced to kill a murderous child (or two). (To be fair to Danny Boyle, he has admitted that “There are certain things in that we did that I didn't even realize were complete steals from Romero.”)

Still, the novel I Am Legend will lead you to drink quite a few shots under the drinking game rules as well, possibly more, since the monsters Robert Neville is fighting off are technically dead, but they are explicitly vampires. One of the texts Alex Garland and Danny Boyle openly admit to nicking from for this movie was Day of the Triffids, which will also see you downing a few shots, but even I’m not going to make the case for walking plants as zombies.

"Fools! Don't you realise? If we combined out powers, this wretched planet could be ours!"

So I’m going to have a make a better case if I’m going to crush all Internet debate on this subject forever (and I will settle for nothing less).

Spread the Love

Under the movie’s own terms, there are certain things that don’t really make sense for people who are just supposed to be really, really angry and bleeding a lot. If I was that pissed off I’d probably by laying into anything that moved, but several times during the film, the Infected don’t seem to have the much interest in attacking one another. When an enraged horde of Infected chase the survivors’ taxi until it’s out of reach, the hyper-violent, super-testosteroned nut boxes don’t immediately start kicking the shit out of each other. Instead, they give up running, and just watch the taxi slide out of view.

They were bitten by a chimpanzee infected with the half-arsed virus

When the infected soldiers are charging round the mansion at the end, looking to spread the love, two of them meet and instead of biting each other’s faces off, they stand around, sniffing the air and looking for someone less gore-splattered to attack.

This doesn’t make sense under the movie’s premise that these people are all just really pissed off, but it does make sense in the framework of the zombie movie, where the zombies’ behaviour is all geared towards making other people into zombies.

I would argue that this, more than anything else, is the most useful definition of a zombie: Something that used to be human, that as had all traces of intelligence and humanity permanently wiped away, and is now driven to spread this condition to others.

Simon Pegg’s argument for the Romero zombie as the only “real” zombie is that zombies “personify our deepest fear: death”. Except they also personify consumerism, or in Shaun of the Dead, couch potato culture, or the mob mentality. Over the years vampires have come to represent our fear of sex, the corrupt aristocracy, drug addiction, and being creepy glitter-saturated stalkers with promise-keeper rings. But regardless of whether they turn into bats or have a fetish for leather, whether they’re soulless demons or the victims of some sort of bloodsucking-based STD, we all know a vampire when we see one.

Zombies can be just as flexible, and it’s worth remembering that the original definition of a zombie has nothing to do with Romero’s creeping hordes. Traditionally, a proper zombie is an individual raised from the dead by Vodou witch doctors using a special type of cucumber, and is interested less in eating human flesh than serving his master.

Meanwhile, in Night of the Living Dead, you won’t once hear the word “Zombie”. In fact, that’s it. I’m adding it to the list.

Does anyone actually call the psychopathic, bloodthirsty hordes “zombies”? If no, take two shots.