monsters | the m0vie blog

What is a Zombie?

Posted on October 26, 2010 by Darren

Welcome to the m0vie blog’s zombie week! It’s a week of zombie-related movie discussions and reviews as we come up to Halloween, to celebrate the launch of Frank Darbont’s The Walking Dead on AMC on Halloween night. So be sure to check back all week, as we’ll be running posts on the living dead.

It seems like a fairly straightforward question, right? A zombie is one of those rotting, decaying corpses shuffling around looking for brains, isn’t it? I’m not so sure that even that simplistic explanation is enough. I mean we classify a wide variety of films as “zombie” films, even if the creatures prowling the land don’t resemble the type of monsters I have described. I mean, if the simplest description of a vampire is that it sucks blood and the most direct synopsis of a werewolf is that it changes form into a beast, what is the most essential element of being a zombie?

Will I stumble across the answer?

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: 28 days later, AMC, Christopher Lee, creature features, creatures, george romero, horror, Ken Foree, Living Dead, monsters, Simon Pegg, zombie, zombie films, zombie week!, zombies | 6 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Monsters Inc.

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Darren

If you don’t love Pixar, you should see a doctor immediately. Because you clearly have no heart, which can lead to all manner of unpleasant complications. Okay, maybe Monsters Inc. is one of the more conventional entries in Pixar’s animated canon, but it’s an example of how – even when being as close to conventional as they can – Pixar are still absolutely incredible, blowing all the other major American animation studios out of the water.

Scarily good...

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: animated, billy crystal, films, john goodman, monsters, monsters inc., Movies, non-review review, pixar, pixar films, review, steve buscemi | 4 Comments »

Are Zombies the Monster of the 21st Century?

Posted on October 27, 2009 by Darren

They say that horror movies and (before that) ghost stories reflect the unconscious fears of the time. So, for example, vampires allayed the fear of burying members of the community alive – if there were scratch marks on the inside of their coffins, it was because they were monsters, not because your doctor made a mistake. Or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was a cautionary tale for a society just on the cusp of the age of reason – a warning not to dive too far into that pool labelled ‘scientific progress’. Monster stories and ghost stories allow us to put aside our fears even for a moment by expressing them in their most ridiculous forms – I don’t think that facet of human nature has disappeared over the past century or so. If we accept this line of reasoning, are zombies the current expression of our deeply buried fears? And, if so, of what?