- A list of the 20 best zombie movies of all time; while I agree on some counts, I can’t quite support this list. No Cemetery Man? No Dawn of the Dead remake (for the opening sequence ALONE)? (via Ed)
- Bookninja’s take on Rowling’s manuscript mayhem is hilarious.
- Words Margo Lanagan thinks you’d be better off not using, and the writers who love them.
- Stowaway viruses love babies. (via Jenny D)
- Sara Gran has some questions about the invisibility of many midlist and nonfamous black authors.
- Jeff VanderMeer offers a compelling early recommendation for Dan Simmons’ The Terror, out in January. Must read.
1 thought on “Friday Hangovers”
Comments are closed.
A short opinion paper about zombie movies: The reason we don’t generally include titles like Frankenstein and the Mummy in the zombie genre is because they do not play on similar themes. Not all waking dead movies come from the same place. The American slash Italian (and to some later extent British and Hong Kong) zombie movie tradition plays on fears of epidemic, holocaust, sanitation, and seeks to level caste concerns by utilizing caricatures taken from perceived social strata as memento mori (like a Posada woodcut, or other Mexican calavera). In these films, havoc happens because marauding pestilence seeks to harm you by way of turning comfortable stereotypes (identified through typical modes of dress) into cannibals. This plays on a deep tradition of lampooning social norms even while dramatizing existential concerns about mortality. This is quite the opposite of Haitian-type zombie movies, the motifs of which capitalize on abduction and enslavement terrors, magic, religion, and exoticism. These stories hinge on fears of deepening the rubric of class division. Haitian-type zombie movies are about strange natives who will impose the yolk of soulless slavery through exotic means. While this constitutes a loss of lifestyle, it is not overly concerned with death, necessarily. I am not too sure I agree that these two types of zombie movies have enough in common to include them on the same list.