Zombie fiction is, at its core, about the fear of seeing your own body age and decay. Ghost stories are about the impossibility of grappling with the past. Vampires are about what if you got so horny you died
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Zombie fiction is all about the fear of being abandoned and trapped as all those around you fall prey to the herd non-mind. Then, eventually it comes for you.
Mummy movies are at their core, about getting punished for that candy bar you stole when you were eight.
I think zombie fiction is about losing control of your labor power, hollowed out to merely work and eat. The first zombie movie "the white zombie" chillingly shows zombies as slaves in a sugar refinery not even flinching when one of them falls into the machinery and gets ground up
The zombie fiction thing is so accurate though Ive always drawn parallels between dementia and zombies the horror of forgetting your own identity, watching your body and mind degrade but you dont understand why or how, attacking your loved ones, etc Interestingly, it also kind of connects to rabies
Part of the zombie thing, for me at least, is also that those you love or trust could turn on and betray you. And someone told me my zombie nightmares were about being pulled down by all the minutiae of life.
But the age & decay thing works too. Although I would also add chronic illness to that.
I read a while ago that zombies scare the left because it's all consumerism all the time while vampires scare the right because it's what if your daughter moves in with a foreigner
It works in reverse, too. Zombies are used by the right to signify their idea of collectivism and social decay, while a leftist interpretation of Vampires is as elites that literally drain the life force from less fortunates purely for their own benefit.
Definitely more a 'fear of the neighbor' than a 'fear of the outsider'. Anyone could be the bad thing that will slaughter everything you love. Not because they want to, but because that's secretly their nature.
Zombie stories also often have a macho element to them, in that Zombies are a monster that you can have a lot of, that aren't usually *that* scary in small numbers and (most importantly) can be killed with no remorse of any kind. As a result they do very well as the enemy in macho power fantasies.
I know this is a joke about vampires, but it's also really insightful. I would say that vampire stories are (or **can be**) also about the terror of infection and how those you know and trust may be turned against you.
My two favourite werewolf movies are "Company of Wolves" and "Ginger Snaps," and both of them are very explicitly about puberty (interestingly, female puberty in both cases).
Werewolves are about if you got so horny you killed someone else. Creatures from the Black Lagoons are about immigration. Witches are about the sincere fear that women can be people too.
Creatures with a Halloween theme frequently allude to deeper psychological desires and fears. Werewolf stories are about the terror of losing control over your own primal instincts. Witches are a representation of fear of strong, rebellious women who do not follow the rules.
I can be so very horny, and I'm still alive. 😉
But all of it might be, because we can not accept, we'll just go away. No drama, no mystery, we just don't exist anymore. 🤷♀️
and here i thought zombie fiction was just thinly cloaked racism where the hero gets to use guns on rampaging, animalistic "others" crossing community and home borders. tmyk, i guess 😅
In the end he's murdered by white men who assume he's a zombie, literally failing to recognize his humanity. The movie itself is pretty racially charged, though that apparently wasn't Romero's intent.
Still, he was clearly a protagonist and not the "black guy dies first" model, which I think, intended or not gives the movie extra power after all these years.
I do believe that movie can't be understood without the racial subtext.
Oh absolutely it's extremely progressive, really. As I mentioned in another comment, the script was written to have a 'default' (white male) protagonist. And there's a scene where the protagonist slaps the female lead because she's 'hysterical.' Not out of the ordinary for the time...
It's kind of interesting. Apparently the original actor they had lined up was white, but he dropped out and Romero hired Duane Jones instead. He didn't change the script at all, but just changing the race of the protagonist changes a lot about the movie when you consider it was 1968.
It's certainly POSSIBLE to do a more ambitious reading of the trope set, where a mass of people, through no fault of their own are reduced to acting on only the most basic survival motivations, but it sort of requires that a cure for the disease exists in order to have their needs matter.
I'm gonna have to strongly disagree about the zombie point. 1) If its about seeing yourself decay, why is it almost always other people decaying? 2) Zombies aren't defined by decay. 3) That doesn't align with the history of the genre. Whose origins lay in racist depictions of voodoo practices.
Another Aspect of zombie fiction is that humanity got our start as persistence hunters. We weren't stronger, faster, more alert than our prey or predators. We could just run for longer.
Zombies don't tire or care about wounds. They are to us as we were to prey.
Odd how the dead coming back to help against Imperialists stealing your land shows up in the history of South Africa (Xosa people), USAmerican Plains Indians (Ghost Dance), and China (Boxer Rebellion).
Zombie fiction to me is about the fear that people you love could harm you in ways they might not have control over. That those around you could change and become something unrecognizable and violent. About your community being "invaded".
Technically that's new vampires.
Old vampires are about the fear of greedy old rich dudes using you as nothing but another resource to exploit, with the power to convince people that it's somehow beneficial to brown nose em.
Has this already been said here, I'm prolly unoriginal as shit lol
Frankenstein's monster is about: What if you were stuck in a house with Lord Byron and the only way to avoid interacting with him is, write an all-time classic of literature?
Perhaps proof that techbros aren't winning as much as they thought (since closest I could think of are body modders and the guy that uses his kid's blood)
IIRC zombie fiction was about the horrors of a slaves corpse being reanimated after death so that they could never be free. (Haitian origin I think) there was an elective in college that was a study of how zombies reflected fears in modern media. Would have been a cool course
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i watched true blood i know the score
they started as priests posting “investigation” stories from lands that scared the readers
and then, as a new visitor coming to town and seducing people away from “proper” life
Mummy movies are at their core, about getting punished for that candy bar you stole when you were eight.
Vampires kind of work equally well for both ends of the spectrum.
You might need to answer me when I'm not during this time of this month
This was just a few posts down on my timeline.
But the age & decay thing works too. Although I would also add chronic illness to that.
He's right!
Alright, nighty night!
Either way, werewolves ever remain the stand-in scary monsters for the racists of either political stripe.
...Werewolves are a stand in for ALL -isms! "That normie could be an Autist! That woman a man! That man a gay! That child a radicalized communist!"
Love how you led up to the vampire
🤣🤣🤣
But all of it might be, because we can not accept, we'll just go away. No drama, no mystery, we just don't exist anymore. 🤷♀️
And then there's Nosferatu who's a skrunkly little goblin who is also horny.
*"Wrapped in bandages" mummy, not "put a bandage on it and kiss it and make it better" mummy.
Still, he was clearly a protagonist and not the "black guy dies first" model, which I think, intended or not gives the movie extra power after all these years.
I do believe that movie can't be understood without the racial subtext.
Another Aspect of zombie fiction is that humanity got our start as persistence hunters. We weren't stronger, faster, more alert than our prey or predators. We could just run for longer.
Zombies don't tire or care about wounds. They are to us as we were to prey.
Guess I *am* a vampire
Old vampires are about the fear of greedy old rich dudes using you as nothing but another resource to exploit, with the power to convince people that it's somehow beneficial to brown nose em.
Has this already been said here, I'm prolly unoriginal as shit lol
We're looking at u #writers. Don't let the side down here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKhOtZ3F3_k