Are you arguing that 1968 is equivalent to “almost as long as movies have existed”?
And pretty much stayed in 1968 until 2002 saw the release of both Resident Evil and 28 Days Later, and the kickoff of the first serious public interest in the zombie genre. You posted a list earlier to zombie films, but take another look at it, sorted by year. How many of those films had widespread theatrical releases? How many were direct to video? How many of them were made by Hollywood? How many of them were even made in the US? The current interest in zombies is significantly higher right now than it has been at any time since the release of the original Night of the Living Dead, by an order of magnitude.
As well you should. A new “desensitization” study is done every few months by some group and the results are never consistent. It’s almost as if the personalities of the kids involved has something to do with how they react to violent imagery.
Truly, this is something NO ONE could have foreseen.
Insert zombie Flanders joke here.
Interesting note: I was in a wal mart here in kentucky a few weeks ago and I heard some kid talking about the Day of the Dead DVD they sold there. I opined that the movie sucks (at least compared to the first two), and then his mom who’s from Pennsylvania told me she was there in the graveyard when Romero filmed the opening scene of NOTLD. Cool.
No, jus that if you only count “post-Romero” it still goes back over 40 years. There were zombie films clear back to the 30s.
There was little, if any, direct to video before 1980. Not all the films on the list were successful, but the fact that so many were made shows that directors (and more importantly studio execs) thought the public wanted to see them.
There’s been at least two or three fairly well known films in every decade that I’ve been old enough to want to watch scary movies. Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, Rabid, and Dawn of the Dead in the 70s, The Evil Dead (and sequels), Day of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead(and sequels) in the 80s. The remake of Night of the Living Dead, Army of Darkness, Bride of Reanimator in the 90s.
Surprisingly not on the list is 1955’s Creature with the Atom Brain, which I’ve always thought of as the first “modern” zombie film.
And can you name one movie from that time frame that starred someone as famous as Brad Pitt? None of the movies you named are particularly well known, outside of a small demographic of horror movie fans. They are, without exception, low budget, small release (or no release, once VHS came around), cult films. Army of Darkness has the closest thing to an actual budget out of the whole lot, and that one’s not even a zombie movie.
What about Bad Ash? The Evil Dead series regularly blurs the lines between “possession” and “zombie.”
From a writing perspective, they make for easy villains - no concerns about the political climate or insulting some eithnic group. We’re currently trending towards China and North Korea for action movie bad guys, but the public is not going to sit for evil having Asian faces very long.
Bad Ash? Doppelganger. He even comes out of a mirror.
Also, hard to sell that sort of movie to the Chinese.
Perhaps I should have said more correctly,
I wasnt paying attention until the zombie outbreak … and was distracted during the rise of computer gaming, especially Doom-style shooters.
Mainstreaming of zombies into entertainment is pretty recent, and it may be, as some have suggested, that we’ve run out of real people to dehumanise and turn into threats.
As for effects on the brain, fresh brain - I found the research cited hereworrying.
The Columbine killers were huge Doom fanatics.
The night before the shooting, one of them wrote “Tomorrow the zombies will be dead! Ha ha!”
Cite for either of these claims? Plus one for relevance?
That the Columbine shooters were Doom fanatics has never been in doubt. But the “zombies” quote appears to be fiction. Harris and Klebold claimed the massacre would resemble Doom, but never used the word “zombie.”
Dylan Klebold wrote In 26.4 hours ill be dead, & in happiness. The little zombie human fags will know their errors, & be forever suffering & mournful, HAHAHA.
Apparently someone even made a short film called Columbine Zombies.
The other killer, Eric Harris, invented the Harris Levels that Doomers still play to this day.
Still waiting for a cite for relevance.
The relevance should be obvious considering the (side) debate going on here about whether zombie films and zombie shooter games lead to dehumanization and violence. You can’t talk about that subject without bringing up Columbine, dude.
Good zombie fiction just uses the zombies as a plot device, the real story is about the people and how they deal with each other.
Not really. For one thing: no actual zombies in Doom. For another, “That guy played a video game, and he’s a murderer!” isn’t evidence. It’s barely even an argument.
I’m pretty sure you can. In fact, I’d say that a rational discussion on the topic practically requires ignoring Columbine.
You can quibble about the definition of zombie all you want, every description of doom I’ve ever seen (including wikipedia) calls the undead marines zombies.
Second, the fact that the columbine killers were obsessed with doom and even called their victims zombies surely warrants an (admittedly anecdotal) reference.