Evil Apocalypse

Watching a scary movie tends to heighten our emotions, allowing fear, excitement, and anticipation to course through our veins. Many experience an adrenaline rush, due to their intensified emotions, causing a pull towards watching horror movies. This thrill is an unexplainable sensation, that has the ability to captivate the viewer. Furthermore, the suspense posses us to continue to watch the movie, keeping us at edge of our seats. We become driven to know what will happen next. Moreover, the dramatic irony in horror movies has a tendency to keep the viewer engaged. For example, the viewer knows who the murderer is, however the characters on screen perceive him to be a trusted confidant. Although, many people are scared to face their fears,

Although the zombies are not as complex of monsters, they are still representative of fears in the

Throughout time, many cultures around the world formed different monstrous images to illustrate the fears and horrors in the society, such as Godzilla represents the horror of radiation that caused by atomic bombs. The zombie, the werewolf, and the vampire are the three typical monstrous figures that represent many kinds of deadly disease that people suffered in the past. They stand for the downfall of humanity, and even today we use them as the image for an apocalypse. They embodied the fear of contagion throughout centuries because of the infection that they give upon biting their victims. In other words, the zombie, the werewolf, and the vampire are monstrous figures that represent the fear of disease because they are being used to illustrate the horror of a plague scenario.

Zombies, as we know them today, have mortified movie viewers for the last forty six years. Modern zombies first appeared in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968. These zombies were the slow moving, staggering ghouls that one has seen in countless films, but in 1985, Return of the Living Dead featured a new kind of zombie, the first fast moving and talking ghoul. Both Night of the Living dead 1968 and Return of the Living Dead 1985 feature the zombie as its villain, but Return of the living dead’s fast moving, talking zombies are a more modern take on the movie monster.

In the modern movie genre, horror movies accounts for very great proportion of the number of followers. Relevantly, the zombie film genre has been developed into a dominant part of mainstream horror, replacing the previous monster such as vampires and werewolves. In Max Brooks’s essay “The Movies That Rose From the Grave”, he offers his opinion that throughout the process of zombie film transformation, it increasingly captivates viewers while gradually generates the modern horror. Brooks’s essay should be an appropriate inclusion of a college textbook which explains the phenomenon of the “undead explosion” in various kinds of media, proving to the audiences with enthusiasm, interest, credibility and specific examples that zombie culture is resurrecting a formerly obsolete genre.

Continuing on, zombies have had a huge pop culture impact on the world. The peak popularity time of zombies every year is undoubtedly the month of October as Halloween approaches. During the Halloween season many zombie movies, books, video games, etc. are released and a lot of them have a major “hype” factor around them. For example, the popular video game series “Call of Duty” tends to

The foundation of horror genre was set by monsters that not only haunted your dreams but also conveyed rich themes found deep beneath the surface. Vampires are considered a symbol of seduction and sophistication while Frankenstein monsters represent misunderstanding, oppression, and rebellion. Some of the strongest symbolism is found in standard films of the horror genre does not come from the frequently updated relics. Utilizing fear and horror as mechanisms for subtext, social commentary, and symbolism, George Romero created a new horror genre, one that scares and shines just as much as great horror classics. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead revolutionized the once stagnant zombie film and made into something unstoppable, still to this day zombie movies rake in millions of ticket sales at the box office while remaining culturally relevant.

Dating back to hundreds of years ago, we feared humans coming back to life. Why do we dig a hole six feet deep, why do we nail the box close, why do we have wakes and funerals for the dead? Because we fear them coming back to get us, either as zombies or ghosts. We tender to fear zombies more because, if we turn into a zombie, we lost ourselves, unlike vampires or werewolves you can still place as human. One can state, Jeffrey Cohen is right, zombies are taboo ad also not individualities. They only have one goal that is to eat. Then looking within us, are we the monsters, are we zombies? We kill zombies because they are not like us anymore, they are robots. Cohen talks about movies like Alien, and how taboo it is. What would the alien done if it killed Ripley, what if The Terminator completed its mission? The Terminator says in the second film that they cannot self-terminate. Would it have live with us? We are looking from the outside because Aliens, The Terminator and even King Kong were never human, they are not

Ever since the first zombie movie was created in 1932, there has been a constant rise of zombie appearances in popular media. Like with all monsters, the majority of zombie media aimed to represent a certain aspect throughout the society in question. Whereas vampires represented romanticism and Dracula represented how a certain social group was viewed during a certain time period, zombies in Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” aimed to create a situation whereby a group of people had to survive a night together, despite their racial tensions between one another. Being the founder of all subsequent zombie films, “Night of the Living Dead” provided a guideline for zombie behavior. As time passed, more and more versions of the zombie came out, whereby zombies stopped being a plot device and turned into the focus of the film itself. The Walking Dead, currently standing as the fourth most popular TV series, took a turn from this progression and decided to imitate Romero’s take on zombies. By including zombies which simply aimed to sustain themselves by consuming the flesh of the “live,” the creators of The Walking Dead caused the remaining survivors to gather together and rely on primitive human instinct to survive. Even though the zombies in this series run rampant, they play a very minimalistic metaphoric role. Instead, by presenting the zombies as a plot device, the characters in this series were able to demonstrate their true prejudiced view on society, ultimately revealing

As humans, it is in our nature to feel fear. Fear is an emotion caused by the belief that something or someone is dangerous, or a threat. We feel fear to protect ourselves from possible dangers, so if we didn’t feel it, we couldn’t protect ourselves. Different time periods have different kind of fears, based on the culture and what is going on during the time period. The fears of the 2000s would be different than from the fears of the 1930s, because they knew and experienced different things. In the 1930s, humans feared the death of the economy. The Great Depression was a defining factor of the ’30s. Millions of Americans lost their jobs, and the Stock Market Crash of 1929 was the worst stock market crash the world had ever faced. The movie White Zombie was produced in 1932, the year when the Depression hit the hardest. This movie represents the fears America felt at that time period, because this movie came directly from the time period. White Zombie is used to reflect the cultural fears of the 1930s through metaphor by comparing cultural fears to zombies. Most of the main characters can be considered a monster in this movie. The director of White Zombie, Victor Halperin, uses metaphor to compare how his characters are representative of fears in the 1930s. Now we can go into depth on how this is true.

A major contributing factor to this great change is the fear and uncertainty that is instilled by the zombies. I believe that Brooks defined fear through people’s reactions to the outbreak. He explains how fear is the most basic emotion and how fear is the reasoning to perform an act. In one of his stories, he writes, “fear is the most valuable commodity in the universe” (Brooks). This is true because we buy products and services based on the fear of not having those products and the results of not having that commodity.

Stephen King’s fore note to Danse Macabre, he suggested that zombies act as fast-moving terrorists. “By 2004, only three years downriver from 9/11, rampant consumerism was the last thing on our minds. What haunted our nightmares was the idea of suicide bombers driven by an unforgiving (and unthinking, most of us believed) ideology and religious fervor. You could beat ’em , burn ’em , but they’d just keep coming, the news reports assured us.” (King 40) Here Stephen King says that terrorists are relentless killers. What Stephen King is not mentioning, is that terrorists are not necessarily fast moving and neither are all zombies. Stephen King is generalizing zombies and terrorists which, makes his argument weaker than it appears. There are many myths about zombies in literature and movies that do not fit the characteristics in which King is discusses. Some other examples of zombies, such as the Resident Evil films, portray zombies in a different way. In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart he describes a man with a disfigurement that gives us insight to the true nature of the fear created by zombies.

The dead are walking. They lumber and limp, feet scraping against the asphalt. Suddenly, they lunge and tear down into soft, warm, vulnerable flesh with startling speed. Not far behind, oozing inside-out hellhounds growl around razor fangs, stalking with murderous intent. All because of an innocent little airborne chemical weapon…This can’t be happening, this would never happen, right? It may sound far fetched, and it is. These horrifying creatures grace the screen of current blockbuster hit, Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse. So you’re safe. For now. But why are these images on screen so terrifying to us? Why do we cringe and gasp and sigh with giddy relief when it’s all over? Because

Francis Ford Coppola's magnum opus Apocalypse Now was ladened with problems and difficulties before and after filming. These problems ranged from those having to do with the cast and crew, to those having to do with the circumstances surrounding the filming, to those having to do with the script, to those dealing in direct regard to the very sanity of all of those involved with Apocalypse Now. Despite the myriad of problems that contributed to this acclaimed film's failure, Apocalypse Now still became a success in its own right, and a true classic by any director's standards.

Zombies are becoming an increasingly popular part of movie culture and are one of the most commonly spoken and written about fictional creatures. Zombies are often portrayed as mindless, violent creatures with a need for human flesh. In each text their distinct features can differ but there are many common ways their origins are depicted. Some of these are: