Graveyard Week: Denali's Dead

Denali's Dead just didn't make the cut for Zombie Week, but (appropriately) it lives again! There's a bunch of stories that fit multiple categories. We might just be anal enough to go back and retroactively add things like Cold Comfort of a Coffin and Tintinnabulation into Graveyard Week. - Sean

Zombie Week: Zombie Makeup

Sean's story Zombie Makeup finishes up the week of the revenant. Next week is in real life and on this site Back to School Week, featuring terrible things happening in the hallways of academia. Like Freaks and Geeks getting cancelled, over and over again! And just when you think it can't get any worse, they cancel Undeclared!

I watched Hot Fuzz this evening, which has a zombie relevance since its makers previously filmed Shaun of the Dead. (There'd be even more relevance if Sean himself was writing this, but he's away for the weekend.) It's a sendup of action movies, in that it's an outstanding action movie AND an outstanding comedy. If you watch a lot of BBC and have a drinking contest for each regular in the cast, I'm told you will die of cirrhosis before the midway point. I recognized my fair share of folks, but not Cate Blanchett. Not my fault: she was in a mask.

I'm gravitating firmly to the Hot Fuzz side of feelings about things I like. If you like it, celebrate it. If you don't like it, leave it alone for someone else to like. Maybe it should be called the anti-camp camp. No more superhero stories about how superhero stories are stupid. No more romances where no character has a fart in a wind's chance of happiness. No more horror films which are just people getting tortured. Everything does not suck. Saying so just means there's a lot of great stuff in the world you don't get happiness from.

Zombie Week: Undying Passion

In light of the seemingly-weekly political/sex scandals here in the US of A, Sean's story Undying Passion seems to fit right in. I think it can be explained by stepping into the wayback machine for 400 years, and seeing who the first European settlers of America were.

The Puritans were religious fundamentalists, plain and simple. It's a miracle they ventured close enough to the reproductive line in the sand to actually reproduce, goes one opinion. But repressing something inside you turns it into the boiler in The Shining: red-hot with packed-in energy, ready to combust and incinerate if not dealt with.

One problem is, if you define the existence of a feeling as a problem, then anything you do to address it other than smacking it with a broom under the rug is "making the problem worse." Another problem is that not every repressed feeling is actually one you should try to be free-and-easy about. In Sean's story, repression would have made a few people's lives--and undead second lives--much less horrific.

Next week's theme will coincide nicely with the goings-on of the calendar. It rhymes with ghoul, and it invovles pencils and protractors, possibly used as defensive weapons.

Zombie Week: The Piecemeal Soldier

My original idea for these teeny stories was that they would be microcosm stories. Like how you see someone turn away in disgust from a homeless person, then stop to pet a dog. That character could go on for another 400 pages of activity, bolstering and fleshing out the core duality. Or it could end right there: we don’t know if he’s an animal rights activist, or formerly homeless himself, or more likely just a plain old guy.

But the germ of the idea is there, a seed ready to plant into soil and expand. The idea seed comes first, though.

The Piecemeal Soldier started out a bit different. An anthology was looking for WWII horror stories, and I pitched them Piecemeal Soldier, which in the pitch took place during the Battle of the Bulge. Turns out they already had a Bulge story. It worked out well for me, because I described the idea but didn’t write the story. I pitched them something else, and started working on Piecemeal Soldier as a Daily Scare.

It reads more like the beginning of a story than most of the others I’ve written. That’s probably because I have the rest of it in my head. I don’t think I’ll ever write it down, since it works well in this format. If I start running out of ideas, maybe I’ll resurrect it. Which, heh, is appropriate to do with this story, given the theme week we’re talking about.

Zombie Week: Back from the Dead Tour

Today's story, Back from the Dead Tour, does not name the band in question. I was thinking about an ideal band to use, but so many bands are not completely but only partially dead. Turn on the classic rock station. There. That band you just heard. One or two dead guys in the mix, right? But the rest of them are still around, with a few graying hairs still clinging to their heads, popping up on VH-1 once a year to praise Bob Dylan or some long-dead blues singer.

I was going to make a back-pattingly clever allusion to the dead band,but instead I made reference to a bunch. At least three, as far as I can remember. Maybe there's a fourth in there. I think I cut out the stutters, but if I left one in, then that was just a clever allusion to The The. Or Mr. Mister. Or Sean Sean, the, uh, Irish Mr. Mister cover band.

The one band I was not thinking of at all while writing this? Ironically enough, White Zombie. - Sean Sean

Zombie Week: A Wonderful New Beginning

As a symbol, zombies are surprisingly flexible. The Eisenhower-Republicanconformity they rocked back in Night of the Living Dead has changed over the years to rampant consumerism in Dawn of the Dead, then rage in 28 Days Later, and assorted Iraq war critiques in 28 Weeks Later. Whatever big thing in American society that seems unpleasantly gangrenous, in other words.

Yet one of the first zombie movies, The Last Man on Earth, pulled a threefer by merging apocalypse, zombie, and vampire stories together into a cohesive whole. Vincent Price spends the days Van Helsinging it up by cleaning each home in his town of nests, and marking them on a chillingly precise map. At night the undead -- smarter than zombies, able to talk just a bit, but with all the flaws of vampires -- clunk around, smashing into his door again and again while he tries to sleep, tries to survive.

A twist at the end changes the whole perception of the movie, and makes you reevaluate the idea of casting zombies as the villains. What if the IDEA of the rest of the world being mindless monsters, what if that's the real horror? What if you were shown that YOU were the monster?

I am always trying (and regularly failing) to come up with new monsters. Vampires work an an analogy for sexuality -- rape homosexuality, incest, plain old unquenched desires -- that's vampires. Werewolves are the inner crazies taking over within you. (First-person vampire stories are a kludge between the vamp and werewolf -- the external and the internal evil.)

While it's one thing to take something like zombies and give them a new rationale, it's more original to come up with a new monster for the new societal horror. What are we scared of that we weren't scared of a few years ago? What is the monster equivalent of terrorism? Of Pyrrhic-at-best protectionism against terrorism? Of our children one day dressing like Bratz? Of Lost never regaining its ground? We need new idea, new monsters, to digest a new world.

I have blatantly not done that in A Wonderful New Beginning, though. Sorry. It's fun, though.

Zombie Week: A Man of Action

A Man of Action bears some resemblance to The Last Man on Earth, particularly one plot twist -- you may know it as the one plot twist there's room for in the piece. In LMOE it's about twenty minutes before the end. Wonder if they'll keep it in the Will Smith remake. I'm looking forward to that. But so many of these twisty little print passages are Twilight Zone-y, so I'm genetically inclined to love the work of Richard Matheson, who wrote the novel I Am Legend, as well as reliably good cross-genre entertainment. There's reason he's one of Stephen King's idols.

A note on the performance: I wrote this before I knew that the Icelanadic accent needed to perform it would be supplied by me. Rather than taking the Meryl Streep route and study a accent, or the Peter-MacNicol-in-Ghostbusters II route and study a Meryl Streep performance -- seriously, Janosh is just Streep's Sophie's Choice character done finicky -- I have chosen a different route.

I have chosen to make up my own "European" accent. I may be a bit Latka, a bit Count Floyd, a bit Boratian from time to time. That is, in a one-paragraph story the accent changes multiple times within the same word. I hope that you the listened are able to ignore the accent and substitute in what an actual Icelander sounds like. (I'll wait for you to put on an old Bjork CD and realize that she sounds like Iceland the way Cyndi Lauper sounds like the Connecticut.)

So my accent cannot be incorrect because neither I nor you nor anyone we know knows what an Icelandic accent sounds like. Possibly I nailed it: from the faux-Yiddish consonant rolls to the seconds of time where I appear to be an American who forgot he was doing an accent. Maybe this will be the new way people speak in Iceland, the way Cuban youths speak like Al Pacino's Tony Montana now.

Just be happy it's got real zombies in it, and it's not about refinancing debt.

Zombie Week: Lenin Lives!

We're in trouble with this week from the first word. Yep, we're saying the Z-word. Zombie. Zombie zombie zombie. For whatever reason, most of the premier movies in this genre have decided not to use the Z-word when describing the asteroid strike/voodoo/monkey plague that has caused the dead to walk. So other people have followed, and so you'd think zombie was a swear word in a PG movie.

Undead Week doesn't quite have the ring to it as the Z-word. Plus, Z words are just fun to say. Zamboni! Zygote! Zimbabwe! Zorro! I dare you to find a Z word that's not like huffing on laughing gas.

Let's start this week with reanimating probably the most famous displayed corpse in the world. Hopefully Lenin Lives! isn't marred too much by - something the South Park guys spent a whole episode bellyaching over - an original idea that happened to also be done by the Simpsons. "Grr! Must ... destroy ... capitalism!" I'm counting on the rest of this week's ideas to be really original - a zombie starting a snow plow business, a zombie gaining weight to go on disability, and a zombie marrying Sideshow Bob. - Sideshow Sean