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Zombie (The Undead) arranged and performed by Lizzie Pyxx parodying The Cranberries song “Zombie”
Edited by Alex Gamble
Clips from ‘Night of the Living Dead’, ‘Vengeance of the Zombies’, ‘Oasis of the Zombies’ were used as projecting material.
The video itself, as noted, is laden with Anti-Zombie propaganda from several Zombie bashing films. But what about the song itself?
Turns out, it’s also very offensive. Sample lyrics:
Arms out and feet dragged slowly
Brains is all they’ve eaten
And at first you think they’re dead
But soon they will awaken.
When they see
You and me
Their infectious disease
Wants you dead
Wants your head
They are biting!
(Quote as accurate as my hearing but definitely correct in spirit)
As you can see, this is not a Zombie Friendly interpretation by any stretch of the imagination.
Now, the ZRC has issues with the original ‘Zombie’ song too; it’s another case where the word ‘Zombie’ is misapplied to describe anything the author doesn’t care for, in that case, the violence that plagued Northern Ireland for decades, and those who perpetrated it.
This ‘Zombie’ cover by Lizzie Pyxx, however, is a much more conventionally offensive piece. Splicing in video from Living Supremacist (and conveniently Public Domain) film ‘Night of the Living Dead’ should have been a giveaway, but lyrics about how the Undead are all flesh-devouring automatons out to spread disease are fairly extreme. This sort of stereotyping of a minority population is of course sadly typical of American history; the Other, the Foreign Horde, the Yellow Menace, the Drunken Irish, take your pick, Zombies are far from the first.
Yet who today would make a video defaming the Irish as a bunch of drunken, sinful Papists? Probably not Lyzzie Pixx. She has no issue defaming the Undead though.
Having watched the video and listened to the song itself, the ZRC has no problem giving it our lowest rating, that of Living Supremacist.
For many, playing Doublesix’s arena shooter Burn Zombie Burn was as satisfying as watching your old high school go up in flames (screw that place). And if you loved the game like so many others, then hot dog do we have good news for you: Game Set Watch has announced that Doublesix will be developing a sequel to its original, rightfully titled All Zombies Must Die (that’s true, all zombies must die, or it’s the end of the human race).
First, the game titles are clearly hateful; second, wow, I guess the folks at MMOMFG are Anti-Zombie bigots! Good to know.
Said Anti-Zombie bigots continue:
Mark this down on your calendar, and look for the game to hit the PS3 and PC near you at the end of the year, because, “ it’s ‘bout to be zombie killin’ time boooys, whoo whoo!”
Yeah, we’re dealing with a really high-brow crowd, aren’t we?
Good grief.
Just take a look at the first game and its awful, gratuitous and offensive Anti-Zombie violence:
Somehow I don’t think that game, or its odious sounding sequel, will be up our alley.
We’ve joked about how Capcom is determined to squeeze every last possible dollar out of their many Anti-Zombie games and franchises before here at the ZRC, but there’s more than a bit of seriousness behind the jest. The fact is, some Resident Evil games have seen a half-dozen releases to date – and the trend is only strengthening over time.
Witness Resident Evil series favorites Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield in action with the debut gameplay videos and screenshots from the upcoming digital HD releases of Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil CODE: Veronica X for Xbox LIVE Games on Demand and PSN. Both games in the storied franchise will be available for the first time in HD, remastered and better than ever. In addition to the upgraded visuals, the games will also include support for Achievements and Trophies.
Resident Evil 4 will be available to download starting September 20
Also on slate for HD conversion is ‘CODE Veronica’, or to be more precise, ‘CODE Veronica X’, a slightly upgrade port of the original Code Veronica (which originally appeared on the PS2 as I recall):
In the survival horror based Resident Evil CODE: Veronica X, the year is 1998, three months since the total destruction of Raccoon City and Claire Redfield is still in search of her missing brother Chris. While investigating an Umbrella facility in Paris, Claire is captured and transported to the remote Rockfort Island, where an accident releases t-virus samples and B.O.W.s, thrusting Claire back into a twisted, frightening survival horror journey once again.
Resident Evil CODE: Veronica X will be available beginning September 27.
In the part of the post where I reveal my age, I played CODE Veronica back when it WAS just ‘CODE Veronica’, on the Dreamcast. Yes, I owned a Dreamcast, still do; it was a great system, pity the support wasn’t there, but that’s a conversation for another day.
Needless to say this was back before I was enlightened about Zombies. Now I only buy and play those games ironically, as the hipsters would say.
There’s video of the HD version of ‘CODE Veronica’ which certainly takes me back:
Both games, as mentioned, come out in September… I guess Capcom needs a bit of extra cash in the fall, huh?
BuyZombie has lots of pics at the links above if you need to see more evidence of the heinousness.
The Good: Greg Nicotero Will Give Us Webisodes!
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The Bad: Frank Darabont Has Left The Walking Dead
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The Neutral: Glen Mazzara To Be The Walking Dead Showrunner
Basically there seems to be a huge shakeup in the behind the scenes staff for unknown reasons. Frank Darabont, who once commanded respect from the ZRC staff for his non-Zombie cinematic endeavors, is out. Why? Nobody knows.
Meanwhile, longtime Zombie hater Nicotero will be making some mini web episodes of the show because, what, they hadn’t done enough damage? I dunno.
At any rate, this very popular (tragically) Anti-Zombie show is still full speed ahead in production for a second season at the moment, so we’ll continue with our protest and monitoring efforts here at the ZRC.
You know, I’ve seen movies where the Undead intersect with the martial arts before, and they’re usually terrible, not just for Zombie Rights, but just, you know, as films.
So when I see a blurb about a film called ‘Ninja Zombies’ I start to groan a bit before I even click on the link:
“Ninja Zombies,” according to a press release, is the story of Dameon, an irresponsible slacker geek who begins having nightmares — flashes from the life of a samurai on the run and a sword that can raise the dead. When he finds a chest containing clues about his family’s mysterious past, he realizes that the evil sword is real and the samurai was his ancestor. Now Dameon and his roommates — the geeky Luke, the frat boys G and Lar-Dawg, the morbid goth girl Kara and the suburban princess Trish — must band together to survive as ninja zombies hunt them down.
See, the framing here brings up all sorts of questions. The sword’s evil, and it raises the dead, but it has an association with his samurai ancestry? Maybe the ninja Zombies are the good guys? If so it’s really a bit much for the protagonists to act like they’re the villains out to ‘hunt them down’. Sounds to me more like a long-running cultural disagreement and some questionable weapons technology to me.
Still, even if the movie turns out to be Anti-Zombie (and it sounds like it will), there’s a good cause benefitting from this thing:
Storrs now runs a nonprofit to help the orphanage she was adopted from in Nepal, called The Kumari Project. All profits from the screening will go to support The Kumari Project’s initiatives.
The Zombie Community’s all about doing good works, so I guess we as representatives of the Undead Equality Movement at least have to give the screening of this movie the benefit of the doubt if the screening’s for charity.
We just hope the filmmakers try to remember that Zombies are people too, especially in any future endeavors.
Read a really childish and defamatory essay in the New York Times by one Charles Duhigg called ‘Coming Soon: Invasion of the Walking Debt’ today that bears paying attention to for yet another example of the attempt to tie Zombies to something people dislike, this time a bad economy and arguments in Congress over the debt ceiling:
AMERICA has always had an apocalyptic strain. Yet it also seems to believe that if, or when, The End comes, it will still come out on top.
During, say, zombie movies, we Americans identify with that tough guy on horseback — the survivor with the Stetson and the rifle. It’s always the other guy, that poor sap sitting next to us, we think, who would become the half-eaten corpse.
I’m pretty sure you’re talking about ‘The Walking Dead’ there, and that’s a tv show, not a movie.
In “Zone One,” a forthcoming novel by the Pulitzer Prize finalist Colson Whitehead, a virus turns most of humanity into flesh-eating crazies; the narrator hunts stragglers around Wall Street. In “The Walking Dead,” the hit television series set in a zombie-infested America, an image of Atlanta’s abandoned financial district conjured an end-of-world vibe. Nothing says apocalypse, apparently, like a city without functioning A.T.M.’s.
See? You knew that it was a tv show. Also, great, more ‘high-brow’ Anti-Zombie novels, delightful.
Which raises the troubling possibility that what is happening now could stretch on for years. People could remain out of work, businesses could be starved of capital and politics could impede a lasting economic recovery.
At least killing zombies feels like a job.
To you, maybe. To a moral person it should feel terrible.
In a conclusion about how life goes on even after painful defaults on debt, the author talks about New York City and its default in the 1970s, which leads to this passage that he apparently thinks was very witty:
Out of the ashes of default, the yuppies rose — and, eventually, the banking and hedge fund classes that helped give us the late, great bubble.
On second thought, maybe we’re better off with the undead.
Hahahah, see, because Zombies are awful, but Yuppies, I mean, c’mon, right? *snort*
Dear dark gods the stuff I read for this job.
Needless to say, the casual libel against Zombies offends us, as does this attempt in an endless series of slanders and libels to tie Zombies to something the author dislikes.
Dakota County library sessions on zombie survival expands kids’ braaaaaains!
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Zombies are the flesh-eating walking dead of movies and games. Should they ever actually roam the earth, Dakota County libraries are making sure kids will be ready.
Two local authors are giving patrons a tongue-in-cheek look at surviving a zombie apocalypse. And audiences are eating it up, instead of being eaten.
John Olson and Bud Hanzel, authors of “The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse” and self-described “zombologists,” held a training session Thursday at the Robert Trail Library in Rosemount. An enthusiastic group of more than 50 teenagers and adults attended.
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The Robert Trail event was the second of four planned. The first was at Pleasant Hill Library, where organizers received so many calls from parents asking about the presentation that they are planning another session for adults in February.
“It was great: The kids that were here, they just loved it,” said Gladys Kim, teen and adult librarian at Pleasant Hill in Hastings.
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The authors are planning to publish two more do-it-yourself guides, one centered on surviving an alien invasion, to go along with “Bud and Johnny’s Zombified Song Book.”
“We’re still on the upward swing,” Olson noted about the zombie genre’s popularity. “Is it silly that we thought of all this?”
I really wish you *hadn’t* spent all this time on it, Mr. Olson. It actually makes our job here at the ZRC a lot harder.
I also wish the librarians at these facilities would have given some thought, even a brief and passing one, to whether their educational and public service mandate really necessitates spreading Anti-Zombie prejudice and disgust. We’ve seen the nexus of Zombie hating and Libraries before, and then as now, the ZRC believes it’s unnecessary and insulting to the Zombie citizens of this great nation, who, it should be remembered, pay the taxes that support the facilities too.
Not that they’re welcome in Dakota County, it seems.
The so-called ‘Zombie Research Society’, who seem to have never conducted any actual research on Zombies beyond skimming previous works of Anti-Zombie prejudice and extrapolating from hate fiction, had a panel at Comic-Con this year, and they shot video.
Naturally we feel the need to respond to their allegations and slanders.
1) While George Romero’s ‘Night of the Living Dead’ is obviously a seminal work in the creation of the ‘modern Zombie’ concept, it’s worth noting how few modern ‘fans’ of Anti-Zombie media have actually seen and paid attention to the film, something that even Mr. Romero frequently laments. It would be more accurate to say that the ‘Modern Zombie’ is a cultural grab-bag that is picked up from the zeitgeist and frequently misattributed to ‘Night of the Living Dead’.
2) Max Brooks’ take that Romero (and of course Russo who often gets forgotten in discussions of ‘Night’) invented the concept of a Zombie ‘horde’ is… well, questionable. I’ll be generous and assume he means to use the word ‘virus’ here metaphorically, since the cause of Zombification is never explicitly stated in the Romero films. In actuality, since the recently dead reanimate whether or not they have been ‘infected’, in most cases, the ‘virus’ model is inaccurate. The only cause that is strongly hinted at in the original film is actually radiation accompanying a space probe returning to Earth.
3) Re: Dr. Schlozman’s discussion. Yes, ‘Night of the Living Dead’ is *public* domain (not eminent, that’s something else entirely), and you can easily download it. The Internet Archive has multiple versions, here’s one. Schlozman’s misanthropic take on humanity neatly mirrors Romero, but is fairly depressing from a medical man. Zombies need medical treatment too you know! Ignoring them is just callous.
4) As for Zombies as something ‘to laugh at’, and this being an innovation starting in/around ‘Return of the Living Dead’, I think that was less of a distinction for that film series than the ZRS believes. George Romero has slapstick in ‘Dawn of the Dead’, which came out 7 years before ‘Return of the Living Dead’, but it’s generally ignored and seen as a drama, not a black comedy. It’s hard to miss Romero’s stabs at humor if you’re looking closely, however, and the wacky polka ending sequence for ‘Dawn’ gives the game away at any rate.
5) ‘If Zombies were a race that movie would be racist’. Really? ‘Return of the Living Dead’ is where Max Brooks draws the line? Also, Zombies aren’t a race, but much like race, the status of being a Zombie is a complicated and subjective social construction, and unfortunately, also like race, carries with it the sting of prejudice and discrimination.
6) ‘Song of the South’ of Zombie movies. Ok, Brooks is funny, I’ll give him that. Not sure what his particular beef is with ‘Return’, other than the fact that his own prejudices are clearly more Romero and less Russo.
7) Scott Kenemore’s favorite Zombie movie is ‘Return of the Living Dead’. Interesting.
8) On the Zombie culture ‘explosion’: Oh, it’s rich for the ZRS to comment about what we call the ‘Zombie Flavored Creativity Substitute’. These guys try to tie Zombiism to *everything* Drug-resistant bacteria, rabies, you name it, they think it’s Zombies! Pot, calling kettle!
9) Kenemore thinks Zombies haven’t peaked yet because Vampires are not seen as peaking after over a century. Fair enough, I guess, although it’s not like any one cultural phenomenon is guaranteed its time in the sun. (not a Vampire joke I promise)
10) Brooks and the ‘social and economic upheaval’ theory. Oh boy. When are we *not* in a period of social and economic upheaval? Seriously? This is all relative. The 80s were pretty apocalyptic for the poor and middle classes, in England and America, actually. Why didn’t they get their wave of Zombie escapist fiction, by this logic?
11) James Lowder and the publishers as gatekeepers issue. I think this is key. Today, traditional publishers are highly interested in publishing Anti-Zombie fiction, and if that fails, you can self-publish with far greater ease than 10, let alone 20, years ago. We should always remember that previously, finite resources kept genre fiction capped at certain levels. That’s less true today.
On the whole, the panel was… about what I would have expected, judging from this released video. No sympathy for the Undead, mostly shallow coverage of their issues and unique Vitality status, judging the Differently Animated as a pop culture phenomenon and not a population.
Update: More video from the panel is apparently still being released, and we will respond to that in turn later here on the ZRC blog.
I’ve thought that Anti-Zombie media was getting more militaristic for some time, whether it’s the transition from early Survival Horror games like Resident Evil to more martial and ammunition-laden titles like Left 4 Dead and the Call of Duty Zombie levels. Likewise, Army Times recently disgraced itself peddling violent Anti-Zombie imagery to the American military itself.
If you’ve played a gunship level in a Call of Duty game or watched Youtube videos of actual Apache helicopters in action, you’ll recognize the grainy, black and white visuals of Zombie Gunship immediately. The idea is that you’re in control of the weapons on an aircraft that’s circling the base where the humans are holed up. Your goal is to wipe out as many of the invading zombies as you can, while steering clear of the civilians who are also trying to make it to the base. Kill too many civilians or let a zombie into your base, and it’s game over.
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The graphics and sound are simple but effective. The undead appear as the dark figures trying to make it into the base, while the warm-blooded civilians appear white. Depending on which gun you have equipped, you look down on the environment from three different levels of zoom. When you see a zombie you’d like to fire at, you tap the fire button. Some ammo takes longer to reach the ground than others, so you have to aim accordingly.
Unfortunately, as you can see it goes beyond a graphical design mimicking the kind of gun-cameras that have been a staple in American news since the Gulf War. No, here you’re enacting the slaughter, callously removed from your victims who are easily and mechanically sorted into ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ targets based on their body temperature. Segregation by heat signature. Slaughter by infra-red. Disgusting. Disturbing. And apparently, very affordable, hate priced to move at only 99 cents.
Brother. This smartphone era is generating a ton of new and strikingly grim work for the ZRC.
The ZRC has good friends in Australia, and we want them to know we’re not trying to pick on their government specifically. However, the fact remains that the politics surrounding the Differently Animated in Australia are, remarkably, in many ways even *less* congenial than in the United States or Europe.
So Australia has issues with the Undead, and absolutely does not want you to see a pornographic film about them. How do they feel about grotesque Anti-Zombie violence? They certainly have no problem with it on film, illustrating the obvious double standard well with a movie like ‘Undead‘ from 2003, for example.
Now they’re reinforcing that message by seemingly abandoning entirely their censorship of violent videogames, so long as that violence is directed at the Undead:
When a violent videogame actually gets a rating in Australia, it’s newsworthy. That’s pretty sad. What isn’t sad, however, is that Dead Island managed to pull off this feat, allowing Australian gamers to join the rest of the world in some delicious co-op zombie battering.
Dead Island nabbed an MA 15+, the highest age restriction in the country, for its “strong horror violence” and blood. It somehow managed to get the rating in spite of the fact that Left 4 Dead 2 required content editing to get a release.
Yes, a game where you literally hack the Differently Animated to bits is ok by the official censors, but not a movie in which a Zombie has sex.
This does apparently represent something of a change in policy, as recently as 2009 ‘Left 4 Dead 2′ required extreme editing to be sold in the country, based on, surprisingly, violence against the Undead, though what the censors objected to as much as anything seemed to be the notion of corpses lying on the ground, not the actual mayhem. Odd.
At any rate, the official Australian policy now seems to be: violence against the Differently Animated is ok, miscegenation is not.
