John Sears | April 15, 2011
From the 14th to 19th centuries, Bubonic plague, aka the Black Death, repeatedly struck and utterly devastated Europe, each time causing untold devastation and the deaths of millions, only to largely disappear for decades, even centuries, before returning with a vengeance to any particular locale. I mention this only to illustrate that some pestilences upon [...]
John Sears | April 2, 2011
No, that title isn’t some sort of mad-lib, and no, I haven’t had a stroke. It is, in fact, the actual title of an upcoming short film that looks like it may just be another Atomic Age Cinema-esque brilliant satire of the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ genre: I really wish I could give you more information on [...]
John Sears | February 11, 2011
What is it with reunion tours, anyway? Is it just me or are they nearly constant now. With some bands I’d almost say they just break up to boost enthusiasm for the inevitable reunion tour. At any rate, ‘Goblin’, most infamous amongst Zombie Rights advocates for their work on the ‘Dawn of the Dead’ soundtrack, [...]
John Sears | February 8, 2011
In the process of writing the belated birthday greeting the ZRC gave Creepshow maestro and, err, Father of the Modern Anti-Zombie Film George Romero, google yielded an interview from last year with Vanity Fair that I missed, and there’s some fascinating, and disturbing, stuff in there: Eric Spitznagel: To paraphrase Freud, sometimes things have symbolism [...]
John Sears | February 5, 2011
In the midst of all this constant arguing and occasional banhammering, I missed out on an important milestone yesterday: it was George Romero’s birthday! Unfortunately, this annual event is typically celebrated with a healthy dose of Anti-Zombie rhetoric: Today the man who launched a thousand zombie films with his 1968 classic Night of the Living [...]
John Sears | February 5, 2011
I was really saddened to hear about this story featuring an Anti-Zombie professor from my undergrad school, Indiana University: There is something keeping Stephen Watt up at night, and it’s not vampires, demons or malignant pudding, but rather a simple question: why is it that Americans love killing zombies? Watt, an English professor from Indiana [...]
John Sears | January 16, 2011
It just wouldn’t be a week monitoring the pop-culture/journalism feeds without another piece that combines ivory tower cloud-talking with dubious historical analysis to frame a piece expressing befuddlement with, and general distaste for, the presence and popularity of the Differently Animated in media: What are we to make of AMC’s The Walking Dead? The question [...]
John Sears | January 15, 2011
This is an oldie but a fascinating case study in how an attempt at Zombie Friendliness can go off the rails and become… well, something very different. It’s also necessarily pretty heavy on spoilers, so if you wish to avoid that, just skip to the last paragraph for our rating. Some background: “My Zombie Lover” [...]
John Sears | January 13, 2011
I was recently linked via Zombie Universe to this talk from 2009 by one Dr. Steven Schlozman, who teaches psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, as well as practicing childhood and adolescent psychology and lecturing at Harvard’s School of Education. A prestigious individual talking about an important and widely neglected, when not actively maligned, community, here [...]
John Sears | December 17, 2010
Popular webcomic and apparently Zombophobe site Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal recently posted a comic (or series of charts, depending on your definition of ‘comic’) simplifying the ‘Zombie Movie’ genre into chart form while glibly passing on the usual stereotypes about the Differently Animated. You know the ones I mean. “Zombies eat brains. Zombies are a [...]