And of course a movie is being planned.

Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.

Comics Code Authority, 1954

Recently my friend Laurie was complaining about being cursed by her own success at work. She's currently booking fitness training sessions at about twice her quota, and has been forced to request that her overtime limit be raised so that she can do all of her administrative tasks as well.

The impressive part is that she's not even trying to sell her services. As she commented, "It's like I can't escape these people, they seem to come out of nowhere!"

My reply was that I could easily imagine what it must be like: closing time at the gym, and she's just turned out the lights (as demanded by dramatic tradition in this area). Then, out of the shadows come the shambling, decaying figures of gym zombies, draped in tattered Lululemon outfits, with the moaning cry of "Traaaainnnnnn.....traaaaaainnn...."*

How is it that zombies have become part of the cultural landscape?

Zombies would seem to be a particularly 20th century conceit. The concept of the revenant, someone who has returned from the dead, exists as far back as the Middle Ages, but unlike the vampire or the werewolf, the current version of the zombie seems to owe very little to its historical antecedents.

EC Comics planted the seed for the modern zombie in its 1950's titles such as Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt, which featured the vengeful return from the grave by murder victims as a staple of its content. The whys and hows of such a return were secondary: the important part was the visual impact of these rotting horrors from the graveyard as they lurched into the homes of their killers to exact a grisly revenge.

Sadly, it was exactly this sort of over-the-top approach to storytelling which led to the downfall of EC Comics and their brethren. A psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham undertook a crusade against the adverse effects of EC's horrific tales and their negative impact on the children who read them, publishing his results in his infamous book The Seduction of the Innocent. In 1954, Congress undertook an investigation of juvenile delinquency, with Wertham as a prominent witness. The congressional committee concluded that comics were not directly responsible for delinquency among youth, but strongly recommended that some sort of control be instituted over the content of comics.

In response, the comics industry created the Comics Code Authority and its list of forbidden content. Since the list was more or less derived directly from the EC Comics material, EC soon found itself out of business.

However, EC left its mark by inserting the whole idea of zombies into the psyche of a generation of comic readers - and eventual movie makers. (The principals of EC also went on to develop MAD Magazine, which left a completely different mark, but I digress.)

The real front man for zombie promotion is of course George Romero, whose 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead might be considered the crop from the seeds planted by EC. In the years since Romero's black and white magnum opus, there have been innumerable zombie movies that have firmly established walking cannibal corpses as part of the horror canon. Interestingly, there's a common thread in these films that blames government experiments gone wrong for the rise of zombies, rather than any sort of supernatural process.

And now, the shelves of bookstores are graced by another attempt by zombies to earn acceptance in the mainstream: Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is actually credited to Jane Austen and Mr. Grahame-Smith. This dual credit strikes me as a marketing ploy - obviously the publishers are hoping that Ms. Austen will rise from the grave to avenge herself. (Perhaps some cameras should be set up near her gravesite in preparation.)

But really, when you think about it, Wertham and the Comics Code Authority people should have known better. After all, everyone knows that zombies eventually find a way in, no matter what.

- Sid

* Sadly, Laurie didn't get the "braaains" reference, but I thought it was funny.

The Demon Child

"She was to be the demon child forever."
Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire.

I'm primarily a science fiction and fantasy fan, but there's always some overlap with the horror genre, and so I'm familiar with Stephen King, H. P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, et al. When staying in New Orleans a couple of years ago, I visited the grave of Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen, wandered through the empty, evocative lanes of the St. Louis Cemetery with its crumbling crypts and memorials to the dead, and in London I followed the path of Jack the Ripper, walking on Whitechapel cobblestones unchanged since his reign of terror in 1888.

However, I recognize my status as a dilettante. In preparation for Hallowe'en, here's someone who's serious about all of this - I'd like to present my niece, Jody: vampire AND zombie.

- Sid

Tradition requires some kind of reference to "Braaaains".

Saturdays tend to be sort of a quiet day for me: usually I do the laundry first thing, catch up on e-mail, and maybe head downtown for a little shopping. Today, as I was walking around in the downtown core, I thought to myself, "Boy, there's a lot more zombies than usual lurching around down here." (And really, there aren't usually that many in the first place, in spite of what my friend Laurie would say about the general population.) Upon returning home, a little investigation on the internet revealed that today was the 2008 Vancouver Zombie Walk. "Oh, well then," I thought, "that explains everything."

The 2008 what?

The first Zombie Walk took place in Sacramento in 2001 as a promotional stunt for a B-movie film festival, and somehow the idea has gone internationally viral since then. For no good reason that I can imagine, Canada appears to score quite highly in terms of zombie walks, and somehow I can't quite bring myself to add that to my list of reasons for Canada being the best country in the world.* Nonetheless, should anyone wish to seek out an exciting part-time career with the walking dead, further information can be found at http://www.zombiewalk.com/ and http://www.crawlofthedead.com/

-Sid

*Although, to our credit, people were pretty calm about it. I think that in a lot of countries someone would have been tempted to add realism by shooting the participants in the head with a shotgun.