Monday, November 21, 2011

Zombie for President '12

Did you get the memo that zombies are die hard conservatives.  This inciteful article came to my attention a few months ago, incidentally while I was finishing up a vampire movie script.  You can read it here, complete with all manner of humorous observations pertaining to the correlation between vampires and zombies and American partisan divisions.  In a nutshell, vampire movies are generally more popular when democrats are in power, while zombie movies tick upward when republicans are.  The following graph shows it visually:

Via mrscienceshow
And apparently all our apocalypses started with Eisenhower.

The graph shows the percentage of horror movies featuring the respective monsters as a function of the party of the president in power during its release.
 
I might take this one step further and say that whenever people are sore and/or upset about the state of politics, they're slightly more likely to consume the media who share their opinions.  Vampires are elitist individualists who will bleed you of all that you hold sacred, and smile in your face while doing it.  So the democrats come to office and we see Twilight, True Blood and Vampire Diaries rise to the top.
 
Today, while we are months off from seeing a real picture of how the '12 election will play out, there is definitely underground furvor that is screaming "bad republican."  The national popularity of this relatively small and nebulous movement called Occupy Wall Street was the best example.  Why not be proactive and bring zombies back in a big way?

Now, Legion is in a sense a zombie novel, though not in the sense of  Romeroic walking corpses, so it was interesting, when I read this, to look at my writing in a new way.  Zombies are thoughtless consumers.  They take the machine that is already in place, i.e. the circle of life, and run it into the ground.  They don't adjust for inflation.  They don't write sustainability reports.  And they don't ever, EVER compromise.

The Legion is coming...

Thanks for stopping by-

2 comments:

  1. Any correlation between presidents and fast zombies vs. slow zombies?

    (I know there's a correlation between sparkly zombies and sucky movies!)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, this is just conjecture but it seems that slow zombies may represent authoritative inactivity, while the faster ones were about downright wrong doing.

    You take the Romero Zombie. How was it made? No one really knows. Some say a satellite falling out of the sky with special radiation mumbo jumbo. Who's responsible for that? The satellite maker? The maintenance guy? The nation or private company that owned it? Who's gonna take responsibility for it? No one, that's who.

    Now fast forward a few years to Dan O'Bannon's masterpiece, Return of the Living Dead, where the fast zombies almost certainly originated. It's easy to point the finger now. Two bumbling morticians and the army. Wrong, wrong wrong doing. You can also point the finger in 28 days later, and Quarantine and its ilk. weaponized zombism gone out of control.

    The fast ones were repopularized during the Bush Era during a war that was unpopular from the begining. Romero's walking dead started during the Vietnam and Korean conflicts. Wars that grew unpopular after the government's perceived inability to finish the conflicts.

    Hope that helps out-

    ReplyDelete

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