♦Welcome to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop!♦
Topic #35
Zombies – Love them or hate them?
If there is anything you should know about me, then it is my love of horror. I’m not the usual fangirl, overly obsessing to prove my love for the genre. I have read only a few horror novels, all of them classics. I prefer film horror and I go nuts for Halloween (the holiday). This is definitely my thing. You wouldn’t guess it to look at me, I know.
I inherited this love of the macabre from my mother. She and her cousins used to go to the movies to watch horror and she introduced me to Hammer Films. I used to be terrified of scary movies when I was a girl. I remember hiding behind my babysitter as they watched Aliens. The dark hallway to my bedroom was always a gauntlet filled with ghouls (all 8 feet of it). But, when we are children we tend to be completely unrealistic. As of right now, I cannot comprehend why my good friend won’t go to films like Insidious with me (it’s my favorite, and I did sit through a reshowing of Singing in the Rain for her–okay, she did go with me for the double feature of Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, so I guess that made us even).
In a way, Frankenstein is the first beloved Zombie of classic horror. A reanimated corpse (by human intervention) does fit the definition, although in his case, he wasn’t keen on eating brains and wasn’t reanimated by some super virus. Zombie evolved post Shelley. They became less Voodoo and more science, because it was less believable that some magic trick reanimated bodies than a virus made them tick again. And, now, it’s getting even harder to make these kinds of zombies believable.
The focus of films like The Evil Dead and the television series The Walking Dead is actually a lot less on the Zombies and more on the human condition. The Evil Dead does it with humor, and I could go on for days about how it symbolizes man’s struggle with himself. The zombies in The Walking Dead are simply the catalyst by which we are able to experience human behavior at it’s lowest and most desperate—a return to the wild. The loss of civilization is something that haunts the mind of man, as our brains are still very much full of archaic fears (fear of the dark, the invisible, etc). In this way, the zombies become the archetype for that de-evolution. Only the strong willed, both intelligent and strong, can survive.
I rather enjoy such movies, because it proves the idea that man is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Man is, for the most part, a result of man’s environment. So much outside stuff goes into the forming of a human being. Sociopaths, it is known, are made within the first few years of their lives–the lack of empathy occurs when the lesson fails to click in. They have not yet determined a physical correlation, but the brain is a piece of machinery that we’re still struggling to understand. Sociopathic brains function different than other brains, and the hallmark of it is the lack of empathy (they cannot relate to others with emotion). You will never know if someone is a sociopath, because in most cases they’re capable of imitating emotions and getting along just fine. The behaviors that should clue you in are quite subtle.
But, anyway, these films really reveal a lot of psychology about humanity, human behavior, and that is fascinating to me. So, I definitely love the Zombie thing. It is of no wonder to me why it’s become so popular.
Let’s hop on over to see what other authors had to say about Zombies. Before you go, check out Rebecca Lovell an up and coming author you’ll want to get to know…
Rebecca LovellRebecca Lovell started out writing fan fiction when she was in middle school, and all of it had original characters and romantic entanglements. Over the years she has gotten much better at writing and moved on to her own work but the romance has always stayed the same.
Rebecca enjoys reading all kinds of books (her favorite writers include JK Rowling, Suzanne Collins, Carolyn McSparren and Lynn Graeme), and loves swimming and interesting beer (current favorite is Revolver Brewing’s Blood and Honey). She lives in Texas with her cats and is uncertain about the weather.
