Oct. 15: Is it sick to watch the Walking Dead?
When I was 10 years old, I became fascinated with a movie called
Creepshow. I saw the tape box in the video store and its cover art,
depicting a leering ghoul sitting in a cinema box office, intrigued me.
My dad rented it for me even though it was against his better judgment. I
just wouldn't shut up about it.
Plugging that movie into the Betamax player that evening, I felt this cold creepy sensation inside me, like I was about to cast a spell from the Necronomicon.
Creepshow had five stories (or "jolting tales of fear") but my two favourites were the ones that dealt with zombies. The best was the first one - Father's Day- where a patriarch's corpse claws its way out of its grave to exact revenge on a number of people, including Ed Harris.
Wow. I have hair.
There was another story where Leslie Nielsen kidnaps the bartender from Cheers and then buries him up to his neck on the beach so that he'll drown once the tide comes in. Later, the bartender from Cheers and Leslie Nielsen's wife (who got killed in a similar manner) come back from the dead and kill Leslie in the same way.
Roger Ebert actually liked Creepshow. In his three-star review, he noted that Creepshow, along with its inspiration – the 50s era EC comics – functioned as morality tales. Yes we had to see people get killed by zombies and cockroaches and rabid beasts, but those people all deserved it. They were greedy. Or they were cheaters.
But 10 years old is now three decades in the rear view. I am now a 41-year-old man and I live in a world where one of the most popular television shows is The Walking Dead. I have never seen one episode of it but in my research I have learned that it's about a group of people who are doing their best to survive in a world that is increasingly being ruled by zombies. I have a friend in Utah who says that one of the show's stars, one Norman Reedus, is the second most sexiest man alive. Her first choice? Bill Cosby.
The ladies get moist when I pull out the Jello Pudding Pops
Recently, the Walking Dead launched its fifth season and it broke some kind of viewership record on opening night. Is this sick? I'm sure I'm not qualified to say.
Zombies have been a popular antagonist since George A Romero made Night of the Living Dead way back in 1968. It was successful enough to spawn several sequences and remakes. Why do we remember that movie so fondly and why would America's congress deem to preserve it in the National Film Registry?
The undead terrify us more than aliens because the undead are us - or, more accurately - were us. There's a scene in the movie where a dead little girl is reanimated as a zombie and then goes about eating her father's corpse. How terrifying. In real life, that girl probably idolized her daddy. In this unholy version of death, she feels no remorse about cannibalizing him.
Night of the Living Dead was also rife with social commentary. It's easy to look at the zombies as the bad guys and the living as the good guys, but if you really analyze the film - you can see that the narratives goes a little deeper. It's subtle, sure, but there are hints that the filmmakers are comparing the zombies to rampant consumerism and other sins that haunted us in the 20th century and still haunt us today.
Is it sick to watch the Walking Dead?
Probably not.
Sex and the City is another story altogether.
Plugging that movie into the Betamax player that evening, I felt this cold creepy sensation inside me, like I was about to cast a spell from the Necronomicon.
Creepshow had five stories (or "jolting tales of fear") but my two favourites were the ones that dealt with zombies. The best was the first one - Father's Day- where a patriarch's corpse claws its way out of its grave to exact revenge on a number of people, including Ed Harris.
Wow. I have hair.There was another story where Leslie Nielsen kidnaps the bartender from Cheers and then buries him up to his neck on the beach so that he'll drown once the tide comes in. Later, the bartender from Cheers and Leslie Nielsen's wife (who got killed in a similar manner) come back from the dead and kill Leslie in the same way.
Roger Ebert actually liked Creepshow. In his three-star review, he noted that Creepshow, along with its inspiration – the 50s era EC comics – functioned as morality tales. Yes we had to see people get killed by zombies and cockroaches and rabid beasts, but those people all deserved it. They were greedy. Or they were cheaters.
But 10 years old is now three decades in the rear view. I am now a 41-year-old man and I live in a world where one of the most popular television shows is The Walking Dead. I have never seen one episode of it but in my research I have learned that it's about a group of people who are doing their best to survive in a world that is increasingly being ruled by zombies. I have a friend in Utah who says that one of the show's stars, one Norman Reedus, is the second most sexiest man alive. Her first choice? Bill Cosby.
The ladies get moist when I pull out the Jello Pudding PopsRecently, the Walking Dead launched its fifth season and it broke some kind of viewership record on opening night. Is this sick? I'm sure I'm not qualified to say.
Zombies have been a popular antagonist since George A Romero made Night of the Living Dead way back in 1968. It was successful enough to spawn several sequences and remakes. Why do we remember that movie so fondly and why would America's congress deem to preserve it in the National Film Registry?
The undead terrify us more than aliens because the undead are us - or, more accurately - were us. There's a scene in the movie where a dead little girl is reanimated as a zombie and then goes about eating her father's corpse. How terrifying. In real life, that girl probably idolized her daddy. In this unholy version of death, she feels no remorse about cannibalizing him.
Night of the Living Dead was also rife with social commentary. It's easy to look at the zombies as the bad guys and the living as the good guys, but if you really analyze the film - you can see that the narratives goes a little deeper. It's subtle, sure, but there are hints that the filmmakers are comparing the zombies to rampant consumerism and other sins that haunted us in the 20th century and still haunt us today.
Is it sick to watch the Walking Dead?
Probably not.
Sex and the City is another story altogether.
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