Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
::Today's soundtrack: The Aquabats "Fashion Zombies" ::
So... what was it? What turned zombies into one of the "latest things"? We've always had a plethora of ghost stories and vampire adaptations (they'll keep on making Dracula six ways from Sunday until the endtimes), but it seems to me that it is only recently that zombies have started to pop up everywhere. Sure, zombies have been around for decades (centuries if you want to include the flesh eating ghouls of folklore, but I don't), what with the written works of Lovecraft and Romero' s film Night of the Living Dead was written way back in 1964. But zombies are poking their undead heads out at us from every media outlet available these days, and as a fellow who is a fan of the horror genre in general, I think I've spotted the pattern: these trends happen in waves and/or cycles. Observe:
Night of the Living Dead, the movie that would define the portrayal of the modern zombie debuted in 1968. But, zombies as an aspect of horror did not just all of a sudden explode onto the scene of popularity immediately following. No, in the 1960s and 1970s, the horror of choice was vampires. Yes, vampires had been around as a source of scariness for quite some time, but back then it seemed you couldn't turn around without seeing Christopher Lee in a cape. And what was one of the most popular television shows at the time? Dark Shadows. Do you know what made Dark Shadows so great? Barnabus Collins. Ask anyone who grew up in that time and they'll tell you about how they ran home from school to watch. In the 60s and 70s, Marvel Comics published Blade and Tomb of Dracula The insanely popular Anne Rice vampire novel Interview With the Vampire came out around 1974. Yep, this was the time of the vampire.
Vampires continued to be used in stories, but the 1980s brought a change of heart to the horror world. Suddenly, werewolves are all the rage. An American Werewolf in London AND The Howling came out in 1981 and took everyone by storm. The werewolf popularity was only further catapulted after Teen Wolf, its sequel and spin-off cartoon television series. In the mid 1980s Stephen King wrote a popular story call the "Cycle of the Werewolf" which was adapted to a film (starring Corey Haim!) shortly after publication and he cowrote a book with Peter Straub called The Talisman which prominently features werewolf characters. The true strength of the werewolf in 1980s popular culture proved to be a constant struggle with the slasher/killer flicks of the time like Prom Night, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, House, April Fool's Day, Silent Night Deadly Night and so on.
The 1990s was the sad era of sequels and "reinvention." Child's Play 2, The Exorcist 3, House 5, Psycho 4: the Beginning, Prom Night 3, Alien 3, Puppetmaster 2, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, Hellraiser: Bloodline.... it goes on and on. It is also the time of Scream, the "new" brand of horror movie and Night of the Living Dead is remade.
However, during all of this time, zombies were painstakingly laying the groundwork for a hostile take over of horror. After Night in 1968, Romero put forth Dawn of the Dead in 1978, which was practically universally positively received. In 1985 the horror-comedy Return of the Living Dead debuted and spawned the universe of the brain eating zombie. 1992 saw the introduction of the Sumatran Rat-Monkey causing a plague in Peter Jackson's Dead Alive (or Braindead to everywhere except the U S of A) and is widely regarded to be one of the most gory and disgusting films many people will ever see. In 1993 the videogame Zombies Ate My Neighbors! was released and in 1996 came Resident Evil, whose impact on advancing the popularity of zombie horror was humungous, and also the House of the Dead arcade series. In 2001, the tabletop tile game Zombies!!! is released and won an Origin Award for presentation. Resident Evil was then adapted into a major motion picture in 2002 to commercial success. The book The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks was published in 2003, and in 2004 Dawn of the Dead was remade and Shaun of the Dead was in theaters shortly after. In 2006 Max Brooks followed up the guide with World War Z and Marvel Comics soon printed Marvel Zombies where many of its flagship characters are turned into zombies by an alien virus, the 2007 collected edition of which is considered one of the best graphic novels of the year.
Which practically brings us up to today, where Zombieland is one of the best films I've seen this year, Walking Dead is one of the monthly comics I look forward to reading the most, and the novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sits on the New York Times and Amazon best seller lists. Zombies, as a major aspect in horror fiction, have snuck up and taken over the genre just like, well, a zombie. However dominance of the genre is teetering, as vampires are struggling to reclaim the top spot with television shows like True Blood and the inescapable Twilight series, as the cycle for horror dominance continues.
Where was I going with this? What was my point? Why to show you all how smart I am, of course. Man, I could write a dissertation on this stuff...
William the Bloody (can you get hip to what I'm sayin'?)
