#49 Katya's World: Submarines and Smart Protagonists

You know what I really love? Intelligent protagonists. Not genius protagonists – your Sherlocks or Greg Houses or Lord forgive me, Doctors who solve the entire plot the instant somebody says something by chance that’s a convoluted metaphor for the actual solution to a mystery.

Then of course there’s your Harry Potter style protagonist, who doesn’t solve any problems or mysteries as much as follow a series of carefully laid out breadcrumbs and coincidences while being ever-so-brave the whole time and, despite being basically a child, constantly being put in situations of near-fatal danger by supposedly responsible adults.

Anyone who knows me knows that I devoured the Harry Potter books, loved (most) of House right until the end and am eagerly awaiting the next episodes of Sherlock and Doctor Who, I love all of the examples I just gave, but it’s very rare even among these favourite things of mine that you find a properly intelligent protagonist. One who isn’t a magical genius, but isn’t oblivious to the plot twist the readers saw broadcast three chapters ago.

This is what makes Katya’s World, which comes out at the start of November, special. Jonathan L Howard has, in Katya Kuriakova, created that most difficult of things, the intelligent teenage action hero. You might disagree if you’re much smarter than I am, but throughout Katya’s World I kept seeing Katya figure out the next twist in the tale always a page or two ahead of me (and occasionally a page or two afterwards). Howard doesn’t cheat- Katya doesn’t work things out because she’s been gifted some knowledge that the writer refuses to share with you for dramatic tension, she has the same clues you do and she shows her working and when she tells you the answer you immediately see how you should have figured it out first, only you didn’t did you?

Katya’s World is Russalka, a human colony on a planet filled with valuable minerals and resources, but no landmasses above water. The cities are networks of tunnels and caves that have been drained of water, the primary method of transport is the submarine.

Before we go any further can I just say, why isn’t Submarine Opera a thing? Katya’s world is a great example of the awesome potential of the genre, and completely puts the only other examples I can think of, SeaQuest DSV, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Stringray and recent Beeb series The Deep completely to shame. Where the best of those examples (and I know I’m risking pissing off a lot of Roy Scheider fans here) manage to achieve the feel of a slightly damper version of TNG, Katya’s World creates a claustrophobic world where the weight of the water outside is constantly weighing down on you and your best method of finding out about the dangers beyond your submarine amount to listening really hard.

In a world like this is not hard to see why Katya, at the age of not-quite-16, would be expected to shoulder near adult responsibility, and while there is a certain amount of the common YA trope of the one teenage character being constantly manoeuvred into the centre of the action it’s not hard to see why the adults around her believe she’s capable of dealing with the dangers that they face.

#48 Play Dead: The Most Adorable Zombie Movie Ever

It’s time I admitted it. If you set yourself the challenge of updating a blog that is mostly about zombie movies on a semi-regular basis, after about 20 months you can start to feel like you’ve had your fill.

Zombie movies, after all, all follow very similar structures. Hell, that’s part of the reason why I chose zombie movies in the first place, because by seeing the same story done over and over again in dozens of different ways, you can hopefully reveal some interesting things about storytelling.

But still, even then you can sometimes feel like you’ve seen every twist, every variation, ever meta-post-ironic-reconstructed-deconstruction. Then something like Play Dead comes along and shows there are still fresh, new and exciting things to be done with the genre.

Play Dead (2012) FULL MOVIE from Andres and Diego Meza-Valdes on Vimeo.

It’s a zombie movie, but dogs! Look at the cute little doggie woggies! With their little noses and their wagging tails!

Okay, full disclosure. In the same period during which I have been testing the very limits of my zombie-movie-watching capacity I have also reluctantly been drawn over to the side of the dog lovers. A client whose house I work at regularly has a couple of really stupid dogs, and they keep looking at me with their big wet eyes and wagging their tales and jumping up to say hello and I’M NOT MADE OF STONE!

I mean look at him!

I haven’t even asked the client for permission to nick this photo from his Facebook account, on the grounds that he loves looking at pictures of his dogs so much he’ll see it as a pleasant surprise that one has suddenly turned up on a website he’s reading.

But enough looking at that dog’s stupid cute face. We’re here to review a zombie movie and review a zombie movie we shall. Minor spoilers from here on in (although really, the entire movie is right up there and takes slightly less time to watch than an episode of The Simpsons, so I don’t know why you don’t watch that first).

Play Dead is a short film funded through a Kickstarter page last year and made on a budget of less than £6,000, which even George Romero would probably have a good giggle over. The Kickstarter page describes the movie as “Homeward Bound meets a zombie apocalypse” and it doesn’t disappoint, although there’s no talking, weirdly anthropomorphised animals here. These dogs are dogs, pure and simple. The dog’s personalities are communicated partly through introductory freeze frame captions when each dog appears, and partly through... dog... acting... ? Is that a real thing?

The usual tropes you’ll find in a zombie movie are here, with a doggie twist. The disparate characters from different backgrounds forced to work together by circumstance? Check. The human settlement that looks like it’ll provide sanctuary but actually turns out to be more dangerous than the zombies? Check. The long trek through the apocalyptic wasteland to find a destination where safety and supplies are plentiful? Check. The shocking twist at the end where it turns out the sanctuary is taken over by vicious, flesh eating killing machines? Check and check.

However, perhaps the people who’ll find this film most disturbing are dog owners themselves. Not because we see horrible things happen to the dogs (although we do) but because of the other zombie movie trope this movie embraces.

See, as I’ve talked about before, one of the things about the zombie apocalypse is that it’s a fantasy. It’s a fantasy of waking up one day to discover the rules and restrictions that are holding you down the rest of the time have suddenly disappeared, and now you can go running around shopping malls stealing everything you like and hitting people in the face with cricket bats.

It’s something we’ve seen pass into Young Adult fiction as well, with books like Charlie Higson’s The Enemy and Alexander Gordon Smith’s The Fury showing kids scenes of sheer horror back to back with appealing fantasies about what life would be like with all these grown-ups all over the place.

And so with Play Dead “law and order” or “grown-ups” are replaced with, well, you, dog owners. Play Dead is a dog’s wish-fulfilment fantasy about just how great life would be if you were dead. One of the dogs even drags her zombified owner around on a leash.

So, ummm... yeah, there’s that.

Still, look how cute the doggies are!

#47 The Fury: The Drunk Author Interview

Today we’re going to be talking about the new Young Adult zombie novel, The Fury. In The Fury, our heroes discover that, whenever people are within a certain range of them, they’re overwhelmed by the desire to murder them horribly. It’s like a zombie move, but after the zombies kill you they go back to making the tea, washing the car, delivering papers, etc.

I arranged to meet up with Alexander Gordon Smith to discuss how he wrote the book, where he got his inspiration from, and what he thought about exposing children to such horrible and violent stories. Because I know Gordon from a while back (his middle name is actually his “first” name, because he likes to be awkward like that) we ended up having quite a few drinks first. Surprisingly the recording came out as pretty listenable.

Download Part One of the Interview Here: In the first part of our interview (which you can also read below) we talked about where Gordon steals his ideas from, and why he decided upon the premise of The Fury, as well as writing horror for children, and the really quite terrifying real life genesis of the idea behind The Fury.

Then I bought another round.

Download Part Two of the Interview Here: In the second part of our interview I ask Gordon about his Fury survival strategy (I once again make an impassioned argument for the shovel), we talk about our favourite zombie movies and paranormal versus scientific zombies and the importance of rules in horror, all while we become steadily more inebriated.

If listening to drunk people talk about horror fiction doesn't sound like your idea of fun, I've transcribed the first part of the interview below:

Gordon, you’re a massive plagiarist. Who’ve you been stealing from?

Everybody I can. I think as we were chatting about earlier being a writer you tend to plagiarise pretty much as many people as you can. Everything I like you try and recycle in some fashion. But as The Fury is a zombie book I’ve taken every single zombie think that I loved which is pretty much every single zombie thing ever, and used it somewhere in the story.

I’ve tried to put my own spin on it but I feel like when you’re writing in a genre you love you’re standing on the shoulders of the people who came before you. I’d like to think one of these days someone will stand on my shoulders or my face and write something else.

I noticed that through the course of the book a lot of children die. Why do you hate children?

Oh well, that’s an interesting point. A lot of children do die. And a lot die in my previous series as well. I don’t know, maybe this is some weird subconscious thing? I was bullied a lot as a child... maybe I should see someone about this? I’m not sure...

It is worrying...

I think, I’m a big fan of death in literature and when you’re writing young adult books the percentage of younger characters to older characters is higher than in an adult series so I guess proportionally you’re going to end up killing more kids and teenagers, I guess maybe that’s why!

One of the great things about zombie stories is that you can kill a load of people without it having any consequences legally or morally because they’re zombies.

That’s very true.

In The Fury when you kill the zombies, if you hadn’t killed them and left them alone they would have gone back to being normal people.

Yes.

Why do you want to take the fun out of murdering zombies?

Well I wanted to throw a new twist on it. I spent ages and ages and ages trying to think of a new way of telling the zombie story because obviously the zombie story has been told so well by so many people and I guess this is why it took me such a long time to write a zombie book because I wanted that twist, I wanted something unique and I don’t know whether this is completely unique, probably not completely unique but the idea that people.... I was thinking about how there’s so many zombie triggers out there, there’s the chemical trigger, the possession trigger, an infinite number of zombie triggers and I just suddenly thought “What if the trigger, the thing that made people zombies was you? And only you. Every time you went near someone they became feral, they became a zombie. That was the thing that drove the book. When you go near people they become zombies but as soon as you go away or they kill you they go back to normal.

This is why I loved writing the book so much because usually in a zombie story it’s the apocalypse, the world is over, but with this one nobody is experiencing it apart from the characters in the book. Everyone else is going about their life as normal. So these characters don’t have anything to fall back on, they can’t say “It’s the apocalypse, let’s just roll with it.” As far as they can see everyone in the world is going about their business, but soon as they go near them, they are the ones who are in effect ruining everything. They’re the spanner in the works. They’re the ones who turn everyone around them into zombies.

I don’t know if I took the fun out of it... well hopefully I didn’t take the fun out of it! But I think it’s quite fun where... everyone’s seen that thing where your mum is a zombie, y’know, Shaun of the Dead kind of thing and this is really interesting because when you kill your mum when she’s a zombie you’re not really killing your mum. But if you kill your mum in The Fury you’re actually killing your mum! People will go to her funeral! It’s a weird... I wanted to add something else to it, but it was horrible. I did particularly enjoy writing those bits because it felt more real than, I guess, a zombie story. I felt the whole of The Fury felt more real than a typical zombie book because of this kind of background that people are people, they’re not zombies.

It was a really weird story to write.

GP Taylor has said that young adult books should have some sort age certification on them because they’re getting too scary. Do you agree with him wholeheartedly because your books are so horrible?

Thank you I’ll take that as a complement! The only thing age certificates will do in books is make younger readers want to read the books for older readers. If my books had a 15 certificate I’d get more 12, 13, 14 year old readers, so yes I think it’s a great idea!

But you know, I think this is the thing about horror. It is a horrible book, the prologue of the book is one of the most distressing things I’ve ever written, because it was quite shocking when I was writing it, but y’know, I like to think that the core of the books, the same as with the Furnace books, the core of the book is heroism, the core of the book is hope, the core of the book is humanity. That’s what I love about horror, horror brings out those things. You never see heroism like you do in a horror story.

I think the worse things get the more good you see in people. I honestly think that about The Fury, that if a 12, 13 year old boy or girl reads The Fury then yes, horrible things happen but I hope they’ll learn something about themselves, something about their own strengths.

It’s the same as Bettelheim’s argument that fairy tales really do make very young children feel more confident about their abilities. I think horror as the same effect on teenagers, because being a teenager is incredibly difficult. I remember being a teenager and I remember hating it, and I read a lot of horror. Horror made me think- You know what? There are worse things out there. I can do this. I have strength. I’ve seen people defeat greater evils. I’ve totally forgotten what the question was... I’m just ranting now!

Whether children ought to be protected from the horrible things you inflict on them.

I think no. I think booksellers, librarians (especially librarians), teachers, parents will be a guiding force. There are children’s and young adult books that have very adult themes. I don’t put anything rude in my books there’s hardly any swearing, I think there’s different levels of danger in young adult books... I don’t know. I’m not really qualified to answer this question but I think with horror there’s not much of a need to censor books. I think we were talking about this earlier, if a younger reader comes across something in a book that they’re not too sure about I think their default setting is to stop or skip, and that’s a strong impulse in a child. I know I was like that as a kid.

Aside from my general tone of trying to accuse you of being a terrible person, honestly, when you’re writing how much do you think about holding back because of the target audience?

That’s really tricky. I’m not consciously aware of holding back anything. Because with horror the main thing you’re worried about is violence. I don’t really hold back on that at all. Maybe there’s times when you think you’ve gone too far. But the default setting is to leave it in.

There’s been a few times where my editor has said “Let’s get rid of this. Let’s just tone this down a bit” and I’ll always go along with it because you know the editors job is they know the audience better than I do, they know what levels people will expect...

Okay, is there any really disgusting violent gory act that’s been cut out that you can tell us about?

Let me think, with the Fury... No! I think at one point there’s a dead baby in there somewhere, but I think that got left in. I don’t know how that dead baby got in there... she just gate crashed the party...

Any children listening to this, he didn’t write the dead bay, he just crawled in there and it might be under your bed right now...

In the sequel, the Storm, there’s another dead baby...

Spoilers!

With the Furnace, my previous series, the violence was almost Tom and Jerry violence. It was very real in the context of the story but in terms of real life you’d never be in a situation like that. Whereas I think The Fury is a bit more visceral, it felt more real when I was writing it.

In the prologue, and even the first few chapters, the thing that gets through is that is so familiar to anyone who’s been to high school, you make that work to the point where when everyone starts trying to kill you it seems like a fairly natural progression...

I was a bit of a loner in high school, found it very difficult to make friends in high school...

But you’re such a jock now Gordon!

I feel I’m a better person now for not trying to fit in the crowd, but that’s a whole different argument, but I have very vivid memories of things, like cycling down the street with the guy who was my best friend at the time and suddenly a bunch of teenagers who were slightly older than us appeared at the end of the road and he cycled up to join them, and as soon as I cycled up he was taking the mickey, pointing... and I think you never feel so alone as you do at high school.

At that age that’s survival technique at the same time...

That’s true, it really is. You learn how to deal with that kind of emotion.

I think the actual inspiration for this book, although I didn’t consciously remember it while writing it, or maybe I did, I don’t know. It’s weird how the brain works.

But when I was in high school... I’m in amazing shape now, obviously...

He’s a golden Adonis!

It’s hard to believe when I was at school I was a bit overweight, and I was in the bottom set at PE, as were most of my friends, and we had this sadistic P.E. teacher called Mr Wren. So if you’re out there Mr Wren thank you for inspiring this book! And his idea of a laugh was this game called Murder Ball.

There’d be thirty kids in this class and we’d be outside in the driving rain or the sleet or the snow or whatever and he’d give the slowest kid in the class (usually me) a rugby ball and everyone would have a turn at doing this, he’d give you a five second head start, and so you’d start running and five seconds later he’d blow the whistle. Now you were pelting across the field as fast as your legs would go, which for me obviously wasn’t very fast, and you’d throw the ball away because it was just slowing you down. After five seconds he’d blow the whistle and every person in that class would come after you. Now their goal was the get the ball back, they wanted the rugby ball, but they’d ignore it, it was forgotten. They wanted you.

They’d be coming across the field after you, you’d feel the ground shake, and these were your friends, the people you hung out with at lunchtime and you’d look over your shoulder and they would have faces like demons, they wanted to kill you. I could never outrun them so after a few seconds I’d be on the floor, 30 people on top of me punching me, biting me, kicking me, putting grass in your mouth so you couldn’t breathe and mud up your nose. I’ve in my life never felt so much like I was going to die as I did when playing murder ball.

And the really weird thing is, it was horrible, I hated it, but as soon as it was someone else’s turn to run with the ball you were there. You would run after them, as soon as they were on the floor you were punching them, you were kicking them... It was weird.

And this is what I love about zombies. You cannot fail to be pulled into a mob like that. It’s amazing how quickly it happens. It’s like a totally different part of your brain takes over.

And I think that, years and years later, that’s what inspired the book.

#46 The Edinburgh Fringe (For Geeks)

I’ve just got back from my holidays! Last week I ticked off an entry on my bucket list and went to see the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. While I was there I noticed several things about Edinburgh. I saw that it was a sunny, tropical paradise. I saw that Edinburgh is one of the few places in the country whose Police Telephone Boxes are still standing, so everywhere you go you feel like you’re being stalked by the TARDIS. Finally, I learned that the Edinburgh Fringe is basically the Internet made flesh. At one point I was in a pub that was little more than a 3D representation of my Twitter feed.

Now, there’s always been a fairly heavy amount of crossover between the works of comedy and geekery. Comedy, after all, makes heavy use of shared references and cultural touchstones, and geeks love nothing more than sharing references and cultural touchstones (unless you’re a male geek and theperson who wants to share is an attractive women, in which case you apparently get weird and resentful because they wouldn’t talk to you in high school).

Whether we’re talking about Spaced, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or enjoying the science bits from comics such as Tim Minchin or Robin Ince, geekery and comedy just keep running into each other. So if you’re a geek and happen to be in Edinburgh this month, there’s plenty of stuff out there for you.

While I was there I didn’t see many genuinely post-apocalyptic based comedy shows (because, quite frankly, they were mostly about the Mayan 2012 apocalypse and I already made the best joke about that).

Quetzalcoatl love, you've pulled!

But there were a few shows that got my geek heart racing. And by a few, I mean these ones:

The Beta Males: SpaceRace

Full disclosure- while I was in Edinburgh I was sleeping on the Beta Males’ sofa. Of course, I was also paying £10 a night for the privilege, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to give them a shit review if I want to.

However, regardless of my complete journalistic freedom to slag them off, should I choose, Space Race is really very good. Firstly, and I can’t stress this enough, it’s a Quatermass parody. When was the last time you saw a Quatermass parody? Because I honestly can’t think of another (Okay, Wikipedia tells me that both The Goon Show and Hancock’s Half-Hour did Quatermass parodies. Sod off, I never claimed to know everything).

Secondly, the show has some truly great bits of world building going on. The village of Lower Birchley is painted out with all kinds of little details that string the sketches together, and even the publicity fliers fold out to show enough documents, maps and communications to provide the background to a pretty good D&D campaign.

Oh, and also it’s funny. I should probably have mentioned that first, but yes, you will be crying actual tears of laughter.

Incidentally, if that’s not enough for you next weekend the Beta Males will be collaborating with a whole host of other comedians to put on the Midnight Movie Theatre, where a “classic” horror film will be shown interspersed with practical “special” effects, additional scenes and a live “director’s” commentary.

The Dark Room

You can’t get much more geeky than a text-based choose your own adventure game. Unless maybe it’s a text based choose your own adventure game performed live by a person with an X-Box 360 controller strapped to his chest.

If you live on the Internet there’s a good chance you’ve stumbled across The Dark Room on Youtube. The live show is very similar, except that instead of being shouted at by your laptop screen you’re being shouted at by a very shouty man in the room with you who isn’t afraid to make personal remarks.

To start with John Robertson (the shouty man in the video) will select members of the audience to try and beat the game, until eventually it dissolves into he time-honoured method of decision-making-by-mob-shouting.

The game starts off well, but really comes into its own once you find your way out of the room into the vivid, detailed and magical world that John Robertson has lovingly created.

The show is free, providing you’re able to shuffle past John Robertson at the end ignoring his outstretched money-bucket. However, if you like black-as-pitch story-telling based comedy I’d also recommend going to see his other show The Old Whore for £5, where Robertson tells the true story of how he fucked the queen of England (although if, as he claims, The Old Whore contains clues to beating The Dark Room, I missed them).

A Midsummer Night’sDream

Well we should have something post-apocalyptic in here, and if you like a bit of Shakespeare I’d recommend Drunk Tank Productions’ apocalyptic take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This version is very much set in the Fallout-style apocalypse, where the bomb apparently dropped during the 1950s and the human race survives in the underground “Athens” bunker.

Rather than going into the woods, our characters climb out of the bunker in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, where the “Fairies” are disfigured mutants and Puck is a crazed scientist.

To fit the show into an hour some fairly hefty cuts have been made to Shakespeare’s script, with any action that takes place in Athens being swapped out for black and white newsreel footage. The play manages the job of actually making Shakespeare’s comedy funny, although I’m still a bit miffed they cut Puck’s epilogue.

Hello Guardian Readers

In the Guardian today our good friend Hannah is writing about the high court decision that it was legal to lock her up for dressing like a zombie on the royal wedding day. She was kind enough to give this blog a shout out, mainly because, well, her being there was my fault. She wasn't there for political or activist reasons, she was there because I thought it would make for a funny blog post that would get a few hits, but couldn't make it down there myself. This is something Hannah may never let me live down.

So, in anticipation of a bunch of people clicking through to here from Comment is Free who aren't interested in hearing what I have to say about zombie movies (that's a lot) I'm posting all the relevant Royal Wedding stuff here.

First, our blogs original royal wedding write up, including Hannah's original account of the arrests.
Secondly, a piece by Amy Cutler, a friend I sent along with Hannah who also got arrested. Amy's talking about how zombie films actually have a whole lot to say about situations like this.

And finally, here's a New Year's Eve interview with Hannah following her awarding of Zombie of the Year by the Zombie Rights Campaign.

It's also worth checking out Hannah's own blog as well as the website she set up to collect all the information relating to this case, Pageantry and Precrime.

Have a look around, and be careful what you're seen wearing during the Olympics.

#45 The Divide: The Dark Heart of Man is Dull

If he'd only thought to bring some boardgames down to the shelter, this movie would have been a delightful romp!

The genre this blog chose to focus on is not a cheery place. In every story we cover it is presupposed that you, and everybody you love have died, probably screaming. More than that though, these stories do not bring out the best in human nature. From Night of the Living Dead onwards we have seen time and time again that if you put a bunch of people together in a room and then kill everybody else, it’s only a matter of time before they turn on each other.

So, here we come to The Divide. Oh, and just so you know, I’m going to spoil the shit out of this movie. Also, spoilers, this is one of this blog’s rare negative reviews, so if you dislike ranting, scorn and mockery, why not read what I have to say about Juan of the Dead instead? That was good! Likewise, this film had some rape in, and we talk a little about that, so you may want to avoid this review for that reasons.

The Divide sets itself up as Lord of the Flies, only with a nuclear bunker instead of a desert island, and a group of supposedly competent adults instead of school children. It’s a harsh, bleak look at the darkness that lurks in the hearts of men.

But The Divide makes a crucial, fatal mistake.

Apocalypse fiction, more than perhaps any other part of sci-fi, works by making you ask yourself what you would do in that situation. Sometimes it answers that question with a badass power fantasy ala Shaun of the Dead. Sometimes it makes it clear that you would lead a short, painful existence than die, ala Threads. And sometimes it goes the Lord of the Flies route and suggests that you would become a homicidal arsehole. The Death of Grass is perhaps the best example of this.

But for this to work you’ve got to start off with a character who can identify with. In Lord of the Flies, the progression from school boy to painted savage is a gradual one, made up of a series of logical steps. That’s why it’s scary. In Night of the Living Dead, Ben seems like a level headed guy, and while Harry comes across as a bit of a jerk, he’s the sort of jerk you can imagine running into at work or moving into the house next door.

It was this or charades

In The Divide, within ten minutes of watching the film you’ve established that you are in the presence of a shower of dicks. Not a single one of the characters ever demonstrates a likeable quality or warm feeling towards another human being, with the exception of the mother towards Stock Cute Child no #3, who is thankfully kidnapped by mysterious soldiers in hazard suits within the first act of the film.

Despite this, the brunette who doesn’t have sex with anybody is apparently supposed to be our viewpoint character, because, despite the efforts of countless postmodern, meta-commentary jokes in horror films over the last two decades, this film still insists on killing the black guy first, punishing the woman who enjoys sex (with rape! Classy!) and letting the virginal girl escape.

This is the one time I will ever use a meme on this blog. That's a promise.

I was watching the film with Friend of the Blog, Alina and we quickly decided the film was much more fun (and made just as much sense) if you decided the film was taking place in real time. The character’s decisions make just as much sense. At an arbitrary point in the film two of the characters just decide “Hey? Shall we be rapists now? I feel like maybe my character should be a rapist.” “Me too. But I want to do it wearing this woman’s nighty, and to try to rape that other guy, while you’re attacking his girlfriend. That way this will come across as a sort of gritty reboot of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I think is what we’re going for now.”

Finally, I don’t want this review to be entirely negative, so if you do want to watch a story where people attempting to save themselves in a bomb shelter find their worse natures brought to the surface by crisis, I heartily recommend these two stories that are both better, more emotionally involving, and, perhaps most importantly, 87 minutes shorter.

So, watch either The Shelter, an episode of the Twilight Zone that dwells on the way civilised people can turn to animals when their lives are on the line, or Bart’s Comet, from The Simpsons, which does the same thing. Both are better than this.

#44 Anniversary Dinner: On Caring For Your Pet Zombie

So this week I got a sneak peak at Anniversary Dinner, a new short from gotta/enk productions, the brains behind Werewolf stabbing film The Big Bad. This time the duo have decided to make a zombie movie, with Jessi Gotta taking on both directorial and zombification duties.

The plot is simple. In the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse it’s the wedding anniversary of a man who’s keeping his zombified wife tied up in the spare room. From there what happens is pretty much exactly what always happens when you keep a zombie tied up in the spare room. Kids, don’t keep a zombie tied up in the spare room.

This is ground that’s been covered plenty of times before. The morality of zombie movies says that if you don’t smash your zombified loved one’s brain in with a shovel or a shotgun blast you’re either weak, misguided or dangerous. There’ve been exceptions. In Shaun of the Dead Shaun seems to have trained his dead best friend Ed to concentrate on playing Timesplitters 2 more than trying to chew off Shaun’s goatee, and in Fido it results in a happy, nuclear, possibly kind of necrophilic family.

But usually that’s not how it ends. It ends with Bubba the friend zombie finally mastering how to shoot you in the head, or the chained up infected soldier in 28 Days Later being let out and running round killing everyone. At best, you’re going to be faced with some truly revolting meal times of the type seen in Braindead.

The way the pet chained up zombie is used in this short does something that’s surprisingly rare in zombie movies. For once, this is a film that uses zombies to talk about death. Frederick, the loving husband in this movie, is still clinging onto his relationship with his wife long after she’s dead. There’s no way she can return his feelings, and so her body becomes a huge, toxic presence in Frederick’s life.

And not just Frederick’s life. Leigh, the zombie played by Jessi Gotta, is a threat not just to Frederick, but to everyone else around him, possibly to the point of restarting the pandemic that has only just been brought back under control. And Frederick doesn’t care, because when we feel at our worst it doesn’t often bring out the best in us.

It’s a great little film, simple but nicely done, and definitely one I’d add to my list of lunchtime zombie movies. When it gets released, I’ll let you know. In the mean time, watch the trailer here:

Anniversary Dinner - Official Trailer from gotta/enk on Vimeo.