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zombies

Some Personal Nightmares and Dark Landscapes

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In my younger years, it was an odd thing, but in times of stress I dreamed about zombies. Not the pleasant “hey, let’s dress up like zombies and stagger around the mall” on Saturday kind, but night-sweat, run like hell, sorts of dream zombies. Perhaps it is not so odd, being a horror fan and all that, but it was still disturbing all the same.

Usually, the zombies were lying in wait in some dark place I knew I should not enter. Either a basement or hallway or a road I was driving lost on. The bad situation was like a movie cliche that repeats itself with a bit of new set dressing and characters each time, except for the zombies and the overwhelming fear that eventually forces me awake. What causes this fear is still a mystery to me. A clear case for psychoanalysis for sure.

It all started in my teens, intermittently at first, occurring more often until a sort of closure dream ended it for a long time. That recurring dream was either a door to a weird-looking house, or the opening to a dark cave, or a door to a room down a long hall. There were no zombies then, only an omnipresent fear that where I found myself I should not be, and what lay behind the door or in the dark cave should not be seen.

This went on for a long time too. I did not sleep then nearly as much as I do now, but still it made sleep an often nerve-tingling experience. Each time I seemed to be a little closer to reaching the doorknob or entering the cave, but each time the fear took control, forcing me awake to avoid it; unreasoning fear, visceral fear, a fear only the chaotic subconscious or dark Thanatos could wield so potently.

And then one night it stopped in this way. The closed door, this time, led into a large dark house with many windows. I stood outside, looking up at the windows, then looking down at the door. It opened! I froze. From one of the windows a man dressed all in black, and wearing a top-hat, suddenly leaned out and shouted to me “it’s showtime!” He disappeared for a moment, then reappeared, holding a skinned torso in his arms. He began to toss it down to me. Instead of the fear that had so often forced me awake, this time it forced me to run through the open door. Now here is where it gets really weird.

Entering the house suddenly placed me on a sloping, mountainside path. It was dusk, and snow started to fall, dusting the path. I was alone at first, but a man, dressed in a gray robe and holding a staff, from which a yellow lantern glowed, started walking up the path toward me. I could hear bells as he came closer.  When  he passed me without a word, I felt the need to follow him. I did. We continued walking in silence. The snow grew heavier, and his lantern glowed more brightly with each step we took up the mountain path. Suddenly, his lantern glowed a very bright white light, filling my vision until there was this–the best way I can describe it–pop. It was a feeling more than a noise, and I woke up with a feeling of complete peace. The fear, fostered by whatever lay behind those doors for so long, was gone, and did not return; until my later years.

Now, I dream of being on a strange train or bus going in the wrong direction or trying to make a connection but I keep getting on the wrong train or bus, suddenly stranding me in an unknown place: a weird seaside part of a city or a street with lots of cars but no taxis and no public transportation, where everything is closing and night is coming, and I have this urgent need to find safety.

Of course, there’s the other nightmare I have now and then, where I’m in some public place like a mall and need a bathroom, but there aren’t any, so I keep searching and searching. But being older, I think those dreams have more to do with my prostate than my pysche.

So, what nightmares are you having? Sleep much?

 

The Lost World of Sinbad
and War of the Zombies
Double Bill Pressbook

/ Pressbooks (Horror, Sci Fi, Fantasy) / Leave a Comment

What more could you ask for in a double bill? Not only do you get some salty action with The Lost World of Sinbad, you get to witness the undead crossing swords with the living in Rome Against Rome (aka War of the Zombies)! Of course, it would be more exciting to see Sinbad fighting zombies, but you can't have everything.

(See more pressbooks and heralds From Zombos' Closet)

Comic reader version:  Download DB Sinbad and Zombies (and more pressbooks to see over here)

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The Lost World of Sinbad
and War of the Zombies
Double Bill PressbookRead More »

Halloween 2014: Home Depot
Spooky Phone, Witch Way Flight School
and Chia Zombies

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Found these entertaining Halloween treats at Home Depot today. The Spooky Phone is killer. Scary sayings when you pick up the handset (or set the sensor), and the eyes on the skull light up. The Witch Way Flight School lights up as the witches fly around overhead. The Chia Zombies are wild and cool looking enough to keep out all year long. Nicely made items and fun additions to your decorative endeavors. 

Spooky-phone

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Halloween 2014: Home Depot
Spooky Phone, Witch Way Flight School
and Chia ZombiesRead More »

Documentary Review:
Birth of the Living Dead (2013)

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Birthofthelivingdead_posterZombos Says: Very Good

It's something you would be hard pressed to write in fiction: small Pittsburgh-based production company gets bored with making television spots that include Mr. Rogers' Gets a Tonsillectomy, beer commercials, and a Calgon commercial knocking off Fantastic Voyage and decides to produce THE MOVIE that would change the face of horror.

Of course George A. Romero, John Russo, and Russ Streiner never realized the THE MOVIE part at the time; and we can forgive them for first wanting to do Romero's screenplay Whine of the Fawn, a Bergmanesque snoozer. But thank god for us reality reared up and kicked sense into them that a horror movie was an easier sell to their prospective investors. The rest is history. And a rich and inspiring history it is. 

Bob Kuhns captures this inspiring history to a worthwhile degree in his lively documentary Birth of the Living Dead, giving us the skinny on how a small production company moved from small fries ad spots to buying a 35mm camera in hopes of baking a hot potato money-making movie. So what if it didn't make much money for Romero or his investors? It sure as hell made tons of money for everyone else, and the nightmare it started is still going gangbusters across the zombie-stomping globe, from commercials (ironic, right, given Romero's start?), to television series, to an endless stream of mall crawls, village invasions, movies, and merchandising.

That movie, Night of the Living Dead, originally written as a comedy, created the tropes, themes, styles, and scares that are constantly revisisted and expanded on today. But you already know that. Its cheapo black and white starkness, its non-actors who could actually act and ad-lib their lines, and Romero's simple screenplay delivered through sharp editing, still chills us with its flesh-eating zombies (or as Romero originally called them, "Ghouls") and their unending aim to eat anything not moving fast enough away from them. Toss in that eerie, nerve-tingling, music score and the all-hell-breaks-loose-everybody-for-themselves dynamic with its marked deviation from the usual supernatural, psycho, and scientific horrors playing theaters and drive-ins up to 1968, and it's no wonder the wise-ass matinee kids–waiting to goof around and chuck their popcorn at the screen the minute the credits rolled–didn't know what hit them between the eyes. Neither did the critics whose ire was boundless. Romero and company set out to make Night of the Living Dead "as balsy a horror film as we could make." Their gorilla filmmaking did just that.

Night of the Living Dead premiered on October 1, 1968 at the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh. Nationally, it was shown as a Saturday afternoon matinée – as was typical for horror films at the time – and attracted an audience consisting of pre-teens and adolescents. The MPAA film rating system was not in place until November 1968, so even young children were not prohibited from purchasing tickets. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times chided theater owners and parents who allowed children access to the film with such potent content for a horror film they were entirely unprepared for. "I don't think the younger kids really knew what hit them," he said. "They were used to going to movies, sure, and they'd seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else." According to Ebert, the film affected the audience immediately. (Wikipedia)

Although Kuhn invokes enough authoritative talking heads to establish this fact (among them are Gale Ann Hurd, Larry Fessenden, Jason Zinoman, Elvis Mitchell, and Chiz Schultz), it's Romero's ingenuous reminiscenses and witty insight we salivate over. The way he explains it, it sounded like the whole undertaking was a lark. A lot of hard, crazy work, but a lark.

Splicing in Vietnam War footage, scene clips, animated segments, 1968 race riots footage, and a side trip as teacher Christopher Cruz shows Night of the Living Dead to his young students in his Literacy Through Film Program class (yes, the times have indeed changed),  we always come back to Romero as he describes the shooting's trials and tribulations at the abandoned farmhouse they rented, and the final nerve-racking search for a distributor. Everyone involved wore muliple hats to pitch in: Bill "Chilly Billy" Cardile joined the cast as a news reporter and gave free publicity for the movie through his Chiller Theatre horror hosted show; aerial shots of zombies stumbling in the fields were provided courtesy of hitching a ride with the local news chopper; local sheriffs with their police dogs joined in the zombie hunting with gusto; Chuck Craig, a real newsroom reporter played a fictional newsroom reporter, writing his own news copy for the movie, making it play uncomfortably too real.

With the movie in the can and ready to sell, distributors presented more challenges because they wanted a happier ending. No way was Night of the Living Dead in any way a movie that could end happily. Walter Reade eventually took the chance, with depressing ending and all gore scenes intact, but screwed up big time when they inadvertantly dropped the copyright notice off the new prints when changing the original title of Night of the Fleash Eaters to Night of the Living Dead.  How many millions of dollars did Romero and his investors never see because of this simple oversight? As Night went public domain,  their profits went out the door. Sure, Romero can laugh it off now, but it must still hurt. A lot.

The usual social and political instigations and social backdrops for how and why Night of the Living Dead eventually hits every nerve just right is touched on but glossed over by Kuhn and never fleshed out. He doesn't plumb those connections, just their intimations. Sure, maybe it was luck and timing; maybe Romero was too lazy to change the role of Ben, written for a white actor but played by a black one instead; or maybe, subconsciously, Romero and company weren't really taking shortcuts but tapping into some Jungian primalcy without realizing it, fueled by their annoyance at how much the 1960s promised to change the world's social order, but failed to. 

So damned if they didn't just go ahead and change the world on their own instead.

Comic Book Review: The Colonized 1
A Tale of Zombies vs. Aliens

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Idw_the_colonizedZombos Says: Good

In the never ending wishing well creators keep dipping into to keep zombies fresh, IDW's Chris Ryall and Drew Moss manage to get aliens mixed up with animated corpses in The Colonized. The aliens bring one up to their ship but never get the chance to go through their carefully rehearsed formal "greetings earthling" introduction because the dead guy wants to eat them instead of greet them. So much for superior technology in the face of adversity: the aliens have stun rods, but no cool disintegration rayguns. Bummer.

Ryall and Moss are going for a 1950s kind of alien sensibility, even if the local town being visited is going green, which seems to be annoying the local Cabela's shoppers, and the dead are rising faster than the aliens can say "take me to your leader."

The artwork is a perfect match for both the tone and mood of the storyline in issue 1: the zombies are decayed enough, but not too gooey serious, and the aliens act more like chimps dressed in spacesuits rather than predator warriors. The fishbowl helmets they wear aren't very good protection for them, especially when they trip over their own feet. Or whatever they call the things they have stuffed in their boots that work like feet.

No reason–yet–is given for the dead rising, and it appears the aliens didn't have a plan 9 for visiting earth. They're just a bunch of shlubs, like some of the locals, caught up in the moment.  I'm not sure where it will go from here, but I hope the IDW team can keep the momentum going, or this could wind up being another Cowboys and Aliens.

(Note to Ryall and Moss: Come on guys, let's see some rayguns!)

Book Review: Portlandtown
A Tale of the Oregon Wyldes

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Zombos Says: Good

The gifted Wylde Family runs a bookstore in Portland, Oregon, a soggy place most of the time, both inside the bookstore (I’ll get to that) and outside the town. The mayor wants the rain festival to be very wet, which complicates matters as zombies invade the flooded town (I’ll get to that also). I won’t get to why the mayor and the town celebrates rain, but you’ll be able to figure that one out on your own.

Joseph Wylde is legally blind, but he still see’s more than most other people, and his wife Kate has the uncanny ninja ability to make herself unseen. Author Robert DeBorde doesn’t explain these abilities much, but they come in handy when Portland’s mayor comes calling with an odd matter or mystery for them to work on, knowing they are a unique pair of sleuths who can handle the unusual. They’re like a Wild West version of John Steed and Emma Peel in The Avengers television series, without their eccentricities.

While the mayor is preparing for the rain festival he asks the Wyldes to investigate the mysterious storm totem statue he’s acquired, hoping it will unleash a steady flow of droplets for the festivities and make him look like a demi-god as he calls forth the rain with it. He does, it does, and he ends up looking less a demi-god and more a horse’s behind, but the torrential result provides the rapid climax to Portlandtown: A Tale of the Oregon Wyldes. Unfortunately for the Wyldes, early experiments with the storm totem while in the bookstore prove successful.

Kick and Maddie, the Wylde kids, are Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew-ish spunky, and lend a hand as needed when not helping to run the bookstore. Their family business becomes very lively when the walking dead come to town. The zombies are courtesy of one formerly dead gunman who comes back to settle an old score and rack up a few new ones. He’s the Hanged Man, and aside from the spellbook he uses to come back to life, he also brandishes a handgun that doesn’t need to be reloaded and doesn’t miss its target. The gun’s handle is also colored red–some say it was stained red from the blood of its victims. Kick and Maddie wind up playing bobbing apples to the zombies dunking for them in the flooded streets of Portland, providing much of the energy of the novel’s showdown between the marshall who put him six feet under, and the Wylde family member who helped (and barely survived the ordeal).

The marshall is Jim Kleberg, Kate’s dad, and his memory of past events, and how he wound up keeping the deadly handgun, come to light slowly, through flashbacks and remembrances. As he remembers piecemeal, more graves are dug up, more dead rise, and various characters who aren’t overly fleshed out in this first entry in the series come into play.

The spellbook belongs to Andre in San Francisco, who, with his mysterious female assistant, fight supernatural monsters like the Hanged Man. Not lost on Andre is his culpability in creating such a monster, so guilt drives him as much as his duty. The sorceror’s cookbook appears to contain enough promising evil spells for future novels, so let’s see what DeBorde can cook up using it. How Andre and the Wyldes mesh is not fully explained here, leaving much room for backstory in a subsequent novel.

A rousing shootout at a traveling carnival sideshow when the Hanged Man reanimates, after reluctantly being sold to the proprietor as an attraction, perks up the middle of the story, and the Hanged Man’s unsavory ability to raise the dead as he passes near them creates a modicum of suspense. I’d expect townsfolk would be more alarmed and more confused when their relatives come back to bite them, but DeBorde keeps it low-key and never capitalizes on the gruesome or kinetic potentials of having so many feisty undead lumbering around.

Keeping his words between young adult in tone and historically informed but not preponderantly so, DeBorde doesn’t pile up events or action quickly, and his fairly straight trail of characters’ bad decisions (like digging up the Hanged Man in the first place) and wicked intentions (what the Hanged Man does directly and indirectly because he’s so darn bad), is easy enough to follow. His paragraphs and interludes can be bland at times, or quaint–take your pick, but DeBorde provides clean starting and ending points with some keystones left unturned in-between.

Writers with a hankering for continuing series tend to do that. The only advice (or hope) I’ll mention is that the second novel in the series, should it come to that, better switch from sarsaparilla to whiskey. Reanimating Readers will need something stronger to mosey down this trail again.

Magazines: The Walking Dead Magazine Issue 1

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WalkingDeadMagazine

Zombos Says: Very Good

The Walking Dead magazine debuts today. Newsy bits on everything you can stuff a Walking Dead survivor or zombie into abound. Both the comic book series and the AMC television series are covered. Toys, games, events (like the 2012 San Diego Comic Con), you name it, it's all here, published quarterly. Here are some highlights of what I enjoyed reading the most in this first issue.

Stuart Barr's The Story So Far…covers the comic book's storylines up to the present. Don't read it if you're skittish on possible spoilers for the television series (or the comic book if you're a spotty reader), but here's your chance to come up to speed on the Walking Dead comicverse. And just when you come up for air the third season preview does tempt you with spoilers; I love spoilers, especially the who-lives-and-who-dies kind. Just keep in mind the television series and the comic series don't always jive, so expect surprises and fresh takes on characters and their travails. Looks like the Governor and Woodbury will be popping up, though, sooner than later.

Tara Bennett takes us to the West Georgia Correctional Facility set (Raleigh Studios, Atlanta) to provide us with some insight on the design, like how the prison cell lighting is toned to create just the right mix of gloom and despair, and there are a horde of interviews covering a wide range with Charlie Adlard talking about drawing the Walking Dead comics and Glen Mazzara, the show's executive producer and showrunner, giving us his daily grind on making the television series. Of course there's an interview with Danai Gurira and her new role as Michonne, the Katana-wielding zombie slayer with her two leashed, and defanged, walking buddies. Gurira talks about her prep work for the role.

A quick read but very informative is the article, Anatomy of a Story. In this first installment, A Larger World (a storyline which played across comic issues 91 through 96) is examined. Storyline insight is not only useful to writers looking at how key elements of character development drive successful plots, but it also can be fun for any Walking Dead fan who's interested in knowing why they are a fan. Sure, the zombies are cool, but it's the walking living that keep us coming back for more.

Speaking of cool, there's a shot of Gentle Giant's The Walker Horde, a scrumptious set of little plastic zombie figurines, due on toy shelves sometime in 2013. Here's my plan: I take these little terrors and pile them up around my Clone army. Yeah, baby, now that's what I'm talking about. Lightsabers, Clones, and zombies! George?

For completists, here are the variant covers:

 

Comickaze Retail Variant Cover

Comickaze Retail Variant Cover

Forbidden Planet & Ultimate Comics Retail Variant Cover

Forbidden Planet & Ultimate Comics Retail Variant Cover

Midtown Comics Retail Variant Cover 1

Midtown Comics Retail Variant Cover 1

Midtown Comics Retail Variant Cover 2

Midtown Comics Retail Variant Cover 2

Redd Skull Comics Retail Variant Cover

Redd Skull Comics Retail Variant Cover

 

Book Review: Zombie Island
A Shakespeare Undead Novel

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Zombie islandThe play's the thing, and in Lori Handeland's Zombie Island: A Shakespeare Undead Novel, that play would be The Tempest, wherein Prospero's  temperate isle becomes the fertile ground for raising zombies, or tibonage as they are known by necro-vampire William Shakespeare and his fair chasseur (zombie hunter) amour, Kate. This is the second book in Handeland's adventures of the vampiric Bard and his beloved Dark Lady of the sonnets, but stands alone well enough to keep you happily marooned, along with them, for its 250 and some odd pages.

The zombies are as balmy as the island's weather, so this is not a tome for hardcore gore fans. With the undead's constant "Brrr!" murmurings, they're the all- the-brains-you-can-eat phenotype of walking dead risen up from the shipwrecked and doomed crews Ariel's tempestuous storms swell onto the shore.

Ariel, the magical spirit Prospero freed from a tree, is bound to his bidding, although she hates killing so many innocent people for Prospero's mad dream of retaking his lost throne. Ariel's feminine gender here–in Shakespeare's play Ariel is a man–plays an important part: she's blue, fetchingly flies around naked, although invisibly, gives off impressive sparks when angry, and yearns for an emotion she doesn't understand. Calaban helps her with that, but he's all paws and razor claws which presents some tactile issues to surmount.

Emotional and tactile interlocutions abound as much as the zombies, providing the true bite and sustenance on Zombie Island. This is a love story: Prospero loves to have more zombies; the zombies love to have more brains (to eat); Shakespeare loves to hold Kate within his arms; and Kate loves for Shakespeare to hold her in his arms.

She also loves to kill zombies, and that's why she finds herself, at Ariel's scheming, on the island. Ariel creates the zombies, she wants Kate to kill the zombies. All works as well as could be given the circular reasoning of one magical sprite desperate to stifle Prospero's plans, but Shakespeare's unexpected arrival on the island, while at first beneficial, becomes problematic. Being a necro-vampire, he can easily raise the dead into zombies at the full moon. If Prospero finds this out it could thwart Ariel's plan.

Handeland intertwines Shakespeare's familiar words with his vampire counterpart's visions, emotions, and speech into breezy reading through the chapters. All players are directed with their needs, tempers, spleen, and desires foremost, and with romance while zombies go about their business. There is no strutting to fret about here; only a simple and enjoyable tale of love and zombies' labors gained and lost. Just add a banana daquiri or coqui, sip it while stretching idly on a tropical beach as you pause between Zombie Island's chapters, and read on. 

A courtesy copy was received for this review.

Comic Book Review: ’68 Hardship One Shot

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Zombos Says: Very Good

Zombie wars are hell, but there are worse ones. Teddy’s still fighting the Viet Cong in Hitchcock County, Nebraska, only it’s not 1968 anymore and zombies, and a twister, are gearing up to stress him out even more. He can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, living or dead, so the potential for messing up his chances at survival is high, and the pressure keeps mounting.

I remember the Vietnam War and how I was a stone’s throw away from being drafted and shipped out. I remember how close I was to peeing in my pants when I sat down in front of a big, noisy typewriter, answering questions asked by a disinterested administrative type who typed the answers onto my draft card.  I remember holding the 4A draft card and thinking I’m so f*cked. Even my dad, who fought in World War II, said we’d move to Canada before he saw me fight Charlie and company. It wasn’t a good time for anyone. The guys I knew who came back from Nam never stopped fighting it in their nightmares or their memories.

Teddy fought that war, got a Section 8, and wound up still fighting the war years after. Not a good thing when you need all your wits to combat the walking dead. Mark Kidwell, Jeff Zornow, and Jay Fotos provide the essential spilled entrails and bloody gore, but it’s not only the zombies messing up the landscape, and that’s where ’68 Hardship moves to higher ground. It’s vivid, it’s sadly realistic, it’s never dull. If you like seeing zombies sliced and diced by a threshing machine, this is for you. If you like zombie stories with more bite beyond the usual us against them, this one’s for you, too. For Teddy, it’s all about us against them, only he can’t pinpoint exactly who “them” should be.

There was a television series in the 1960’s called Combat! starring Vic Morrow. Although it was about soldiers in World War II, Image Comics captures a lot of the show’s grim and gritty and realistic face of war in their ’68 series. The more realism in zombie stories, the better they are for it by bringing the zombies closer to home, even if they, like wars, don’t seem to change much.