I was alerted to this ‘Dead of the Class’ project by our friends at the Horror Society when a plugin went berserk and dumped a ton of older posts onto their twitter feed, so there’s a certain serendipity to the whole affair. At the first, it sounded somewhat promising:

Brian Cummings latest series Dead of the Class takes on high school stereotypes via yearbook photos.

He transforms everyone from the lunch lady to the school nurse, cheerleaders, a school mascot plus other memorable characters into zombies. I think high school might have been more enjoyable with a few of these zombies roaming the halls.

The ZRC also thinks that high school would be better with Zombies, but we tend to think that about a lot of things (and on a personal note my high school was so bad radioactive flesh devouring bacteria would have been an improvement so it’s not a high standard to meet)

However, once we got to the actual site and browsed the first series it quickly became clear that this was not a Zombie friendly project at all:

In my new series, Dead of the Class, high school stereotypes are explored through yearbook photos, before and after a zombie infestation. Can you tell which are the real zombies???

Firstly, as Terry Pratchett has noted, multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind. So right off the bat it’s trouble. But just look at the terminology here: ‘zombie infestation’? ‘which are the real zombies’?

Aha, I see. Zombies are just an *infestation* to you, Mr. Cummings, and the only people you could adequately compare them to are social drones sleepwalking their way through high school life?

Repulsive, arrogant, and downright rude!

Regarding the actual ‘Dead of the Class’ photos themselves, there were several series (which you can view here if you really feel you must) and they all revolve around the same visual theme: vapid, vacuous high school stereotypes are turned into even more vacuous individuals, now also ravenous flesh-eating Undead. Har-har har.

Mr. Cummings is obviously a very unenlightened individual, and we feel sorry for him, here at the ZRC. A talent for photography should be used to illuminate the world and find the truth, even and especially about unconventional individuals (like Zombies). To see that noble goal perverted in this manner is just sad.

Thus, the Dead of the Class photography series is rated a solid Anti-Zombie by The Zombie Rights Campaign.

Tags: Journamalism, ZRC Reviews

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, December 6th, 2010 at 7:06 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. 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.