Which you all know that I can’t resist commenting on. TAP’s Paul Waldman piece is here; Ace of Spades HQ’s Open Blog (Mætenloch) piece is here. Let’s get this out of the way: I agree with AoSHQ that Waldman’s done his homework, but I have to take major exception with his statement:
There are no highbrow zombie movies or novels, and admitting you love them amounts to a declaration that your tastes are unrefined.
It will all depend on how you define ‘highbrow’ – but I think that The Serpent And The Rainbow
would qualify, as would 28 Days Later
. Admittedly, the first is more Afro-Caribbean than the standard zombie flick, and the second breaks a lot of the conventions, so I may be on thinner ice than I like – but if Waldman can include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
in his list, then I can use these two*. As to whether zombie films default liberal or conservative: well. They default to satirical, in my opinion; and you don’t want to end up getting too overtly partisan there. If you do, you end up making movies like Homecoming
, which I cruelly mocked at the time (without even seeing**) as an inept attempt to use dead soldiers as mouthpieces for the antiwar movement (given that the living ones loudly declined the ‘honor’). There’s a lesson there, really.
That being said: I may pick up Revenge of the Zombies
at some point.
Moe Lane
*And, of course, there’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!
… which pushes the definition of ‘highbrow’ almost but not quite to the breaking point. And then there’s World War Z
, which was in my opinion very sophisticated. It’s not all that easy to do an authentic-sounding oral history book.
**Still haven’t, in fact.