12th Composition --11°
16 December, 2009
What started the zombie craze and what kept them “alive”?
AHHHHhhhhhh........! Imagine being awakened by a soft, distance scream. Wide awake, the world returns to being silent except for a racing heartbeat. Suddenly, a soft resonating moan starts to fill the empty air of the bedroom. Looking out the window, the world is an eerie grey with nothing moving but the occasional garbage blowing in the wind. Suddenly the horizon begins to change as a crowd of people begin to emerge. Watching nervously, the figures get closer and turn into something much more menacing. They are all disease-invested, flesh-rotted, brain-hungry zombies! Where did these undead monsters come from? How do they survive? What helped them crawl into the popular culture and continue through the changing fads of past decades? The zombie craze was “born” for the hardcore horror fans but has been kept “alive” by fear and publicity that is focused towards everyone.
Before the zombies arrived, the hardcore horror fan needed something gruesome and zombies really gave it to them. A zombie is the living undead that has been awakened by some phenomenon such as the heat of the moon. The zombie then roams the earth in constant hunger for human flesh and brains. Every victim is then infected with the “zombie disease” and turns into a zombie themselves. The birth of the first zombie is attributed to the low-budget, locally made film “Night of the Living Dead”. This film helped “reanimate the horror genre, bringing a much more realistic vision of terror to the screen” (Machosky). Gary Streiner, the sound engineer for Night of the Living Dead said, “Bottom line, it was the first horror film to do what it did, which was devour flesh...
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...ombies aren’t leaving modern culture quietly!
Works Cited
Bateman, Daniel. “Dead Easy to Fight Zombies.” Townsville Bulletin 29 Mar. 2008: 041. Student Resource Center Gold. Web. 9 Nov. 2009. .
Greene, David. “Zombies: Still Undead, and Suddenly Everywhere.” Morning Edition 1 July 2009: n. pag. EBSCO. Web. 25 Oct. 2009.
Lauer-Williams, Kathy. “I Was a Teenage Zombie Writer: David Lubar Starts a New Zombie Series for Middle Schoolers.” Morning Call 27 Aug. 2009: n. pag. EBSCO. Web. 9 Oct. 2009.
Machosky, Michael. “Zombies Keep Shuffling along in Popular Culture.” Pittsburg Tribune Review 5 Oct. 2009: n. pag. Student Resource Center Gold. Web. 16 Dec. 2009.
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