When I first heard of the ‘UK Festival of Zombie Culture’ from the Horror Society, there was the usual glimmer of hope… and as per usual, it proved to be a false hope, crushed under the harsh and well polished boot of reality.

Because, it seems, this festival of Zombie Culture (also known as the ‘Day of the Undead’) actually concerns the ‘culture’ fixated upon hating, fearing, and even destroying the Differently Animated.

Does the UK Festival talk honestly about the challenges facing the Differently Animated? Does it invite prominent Zombies to discuss their lives and methods of coping with a Living world? No. Instead you get this:

THE EVENT FEATURES
13 hours of Zombie Feature and Short Films…
Make Up Artists to turn you into the living dead, so come dressed to impress.
Two Zombie authors chatting and signing
Horror traders – FAB Press, Forbidden Planet, ‘Shock Horror’ magazine and Terror4fun
All day bar serving food…
Lucky bags for the first 200 guests
Loads of prizes including the coveted ‘Best Dressed Zombie Award.’
The ‘3 Minute Zombie Challenge’, Competition Zombie killing for a truly spectacular prize

Competition Zombie killing? Excuse me? At a supposed festival of Zombie Culture?

This goes so far beyond appalling it staggers the imagination. Not only do they glorify violence against the Undead, they mock attempts to organize within the Zombie Community!

Outrageous. Truly outrageous.

At least, fortunately, they don’t plan to kill *actual* Zombies; clicking around the web, we found some additional materials on this, ahem, event:

This years ‘Day of the Undead’ is going to be even bigger, better and bloodier than last years, with a celebration of Zombie Films, Book and Games from around the World. The organisers of this apocalyptic gathering, Terror4fun, are proud to announce the return of the ‘3 Minute Zombie Challenge’, where digital undead can be slain on a cinema screen and truly spectacular prizes can be won…

As you can see, violent Anti-Zombie videogame products are unfortunately being utilized as gateway drugs of a sort, fed to a population primed and eager to hate the Differently Animated and then trained on these Zombie Murder Simulators to operate, eventually, as vigilante groups oppressing the Undead.

Disturbing news indeed from across the Atlantic.

Update: It figures; this event is being sponsored, apparently by Dead Rising 2.

Capcom truly will stop at nothing.

Tags: Euro-zom, Social Justice

This entry was posted by John Sears on Tuesday, November 9th, 2010 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Zombie Media, ZRC News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.