I'm a bit emotionally exhausted by all the dead serious stuff going on in the country--and I am 100% behind OWS--but I need a brief break. Since it's Halloween and The Walking Dead is back on, I though I'd leave the deadly serious stuff behind for a few minutes and rant about bad horror movies I dislike.
I really hate the current crop of zombie movies and TV shows.
Because they're not about zombies. Those reanimated corpses may walk, but they are not zombies.
True zombies in folklore, and in films before Romero's Night of the Living Dead in 1968 , were corpses brought back to a semblance of life in a vodoun ceremony by a practitioner called a bokkor, using the darkest of dark magic. They we slaves to the the one who raised them and were used to do hard labor or to work revenge. Traditionally they were fed porridge, and were not allowed to eat soul; once they did, they realized they were zombies and died again.
Zombies weren't an everyday occurrence in vodoun. Raising one is the equivalent of necromantic Satanism in Christianity. Vodoun (more commonly called voodoo) is an authentic religion which is a blend of old African religion and Catholicism, most prevalent in the Caribbean and in some areas of the South, especially Louisiana Despite the way Hollywood has portrayed it, vodoun is not is evil, but a monotheistic belief system. Priests are called houngans, priestesses mambas. While there is only one deity, there are also loas or spirits which interact with believers, often possessing them or riding them. Loas are often identified with Catholic saints. While houngans and mambos work white magic on behalf of followers, there is also a dark side that is the vodoun equivalent of Satanism--and that's where zombies come from.
For more info on vodoun or voodoo, try these sites:
http://altreligion.about.com/...
http://www.religioustolerance.org/...
http://www.erzulies.com/...
George Romero's creatures are certainly reanimated corpses, but they are not zombies. No vodoun, no zombies, in my book.
I also heartily dislike The Walking Dead. Not only are they typical Romero corpses, but the show has lots of problems. It's filmed down here in GA, primarily, I suspect, because it's a right-to-work state, which means it doesn't have to hire SAG members and pay them SAG minimum. I could perhaps forgive it that (though I think unions are important and dislike the current trend of filming in places where they can be circumvented), but it's just not a very good show. I have never made it all the way through an episode, though I've watched bits and pieces of several and kinda laughed myself off the couch.
The three I watched all involved obtaining more guns, usually from other groups of survivors. People this is GEORGIA. I LIVE here. Second Amendment Rights and hunting are scared here. Guns are all over the place. Wal-Mart stopped selling them for a time, but is bringing them back. They're available in sporting goods stores, guns hops and pawn shops. And since almost everyone is green and decaying, why not just break into a few houses and take them? Why fight over them?
And what's with this tent city thing? Again there are plenty of more defensible places to be had. Don't want to stay in the city? There are plenty of gated communities with high walls and iron gates around them, something that should discourage zombies and allow for guards to watch for them. Lots of McMansions out in Gwinnett county and outlying counties--nicely built of solid brick with lots of bedrooms and usually a couple of fireplaces for heating. Great for holing up in during the winter. We do have winter down here, though it seldom snows, and is nothing compared tot he old Bew England winters I'm used to. But you do need heat because the 40s and 30s are cold. Since these communities often have woods around them to shield them from the Common Folk, you'd have a good supply of firewood. McMansions often have several acres of land, great for growing food (those canned goods won't last forever, after all). Living in tents or staying in Atlanta just don't make sense to me, which is why I never made it all the way through an episode.
Changing the topic from zombies, I also dislike slasher films. The only ones I've ever watched that made sense to me were the Elm Street movies. Freddie had a motive for being a demonic presence; his actions made sense, in an intensely evil way. The heroine was intelligent and resourceful, and her reactions were logical. The first Friday the Thirteenth made sense: the killer was Betsy Palmer, the demented mother of Jason. Nothing supernatural there, just a crazy woman seeking revenge for her son's death. The others? Not so much.
The other reason I dislike slasher movies are the notions that having sex makes you bad and that being a busty beauty makes you worthy of death. The first victims are almost always the gorgeous starlet who takes a shower and is stabbed/hacked/decapitated after we get to ogle her body through the streams of water. Cut to bloody suds.Apparently being beautiful or sexy means you deserve to die. The second victims are usually the amorous couple 9he's generally a jock, she a cheerleader type) who sneak off to screw--and are done in in medias res. Sometimes I think these things are scripted by eighty-year-old nuns. Have sex, and God will get you! The sole survivor of the general mayhem, is usually the smart but slightly plain girl, often a virgin. I'd like to think she gets away because she uses her brains (and generally she does) but really the message sometimes seems to be that brains and beauty can only total 16--you can be beautiful and not too bright, or smart and plain--and that girls who don't have sex deserve to live. I know I am over-intellectualizing this, but I do have a visceral dislike for this genre.
I tend to prefer intelligent occult thrillers where the haunting or the murders make sense. Good occult films have their own internal logic. Ghosts behave in a manner that makes sense once you learn the backstory. The original version of The Haunting from 1963, based on a novel by Shirley Jackson, is terrifying and eerie and holds together. Its subtlety is infinitely more scary than buckets of stage blood and bouncing decapitated heads. We watch the characters destroy themselves as the house find their psychological fault lines. Another brilliant old-fashioned film is The Uninvited. It features a young woman and a ghost that seems bent on destroying her at times, yet at other times seems benign. The hero, bent on saving the women he loves, starts looking into the family history and learns quickly that thee are layers of deception that must be peeled away if Stella is going to be safe. Little or no blood, but some very real chills in a well-told story.
The type of occult films I dislike are movies like The Haunting of Molly Hartley. Molly is a teenager who learns the hard way that her parents promised her to Satan at birth. She fights her destiny, even to the point of being willing to die rather than give herself over to the cult. In the end she folds after a betrayal by the person she believes she can trust. Some mildly scar moments, but the problem is the basic premise: you can't sell someone else's soul, just your own. The whole idea on which the movie is based doesn't work for that reason. I can't turn off my mind just to get a few scares, I guess.
What horror movies do you like and dislike and why? Tell us.