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characters have had to get used to their brutal new reality. Equally slowly, this has enabled the show to begin to play with the boundaries between zombie and human, suggesting that interpretations can vary, that appropriate treatment is contentious, and that a spectrum of positions is apparent, rather than a hard binary divide between those who are human and those who are not. This blurring, and the questions it raises, help to mark out The Walking Dead as a great show and one of pedagogical and political value. Gradually, the undead become a background condition: an
the old methods of literary art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine.’ Tolstoy further characterised cinema as a unique and uncanny medium that was, in his words, ‘closer to life’ than literature, yet eerily capable of rendering its living subjects ‘undead’ (Starr, 1972 : 32). Thus was this realistic medium, this ‘cold machine’ born
). What is the essential nature of Camille, perceived by her parents and sister as the girl they knew and nurtured, before the deadly accident? If substance refers to the essential nature of something, what Les Revenants precisely explores is substance: specifically, the substance of being alive (and that of being dead), a recurring trope in gothic and zombie narratives. This is clearly stated in relation to the vastly popular The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–present), in which some zombies retain an ominous similarity to other humans, especially when the undead are
to the Romanian Strigoi (undead) and the Portuguese Bicho-papão (a bogeyman or Krampus-type figure) Europe was full of fertile figures of fear. The ensuing Middle Ages was full of the dread of the lingering terror of what lay in the great beyond, enflamed by biblical warnings, and aggravated by the horrors of ergot poisoning. 36 In the theatre, Shakespeare and his Elizabethan or Jacobean contemporaries created their own darkly imagined vistas. In Doctor Faustus , Christopher Marlowe pre-dated Goethe by warning
traumas engendered by the militaristic authoritarianism that had underscored American life from the accession of Kennedy to the resignation of Nixon, the civil rights violations of the latter’s terms of office, the might of the government–business matrix and the plight of the poorest and most marginalised of the nation’s citizens – particularly within the nation’s run-down and dangerous ‘stagflationary’ cities. Chapter 3 will thus 74 The traumatised 1970s explore the films of the independent director who single-handedly transformed the zombie from undead Caribbean
to plunder we can see the fate of the American people writ large. Pillaging an eclectic selection of nonessential items from the stores, goods that echo the watches and rings, fur and leather coats, luxury foodstuffs and branded liquor previously coveted by our heroes, the bikers effectively re-enact the progressive degeneration of the pioneer ideal in time. Hypnotised by the spectacle of so many goods so readily attainable the group thus comes to share the desires of the undead and, in so doing, to invite their own destruction. Only the African-American Peter and
), 1988; Peter Pitt, ‘A reminiscence of Elstree’, Film and Television Technician, February 1989, pp. 8–9; Pitt, ‘The men who called “Action”‘, The Veteran, 75 ( 1995 ), pp. 13–15; Pitt, ‘Elstree’s Poverty Row’, Films and Filming, September 1984, pp. 16–17; Mike Murphy, ‘The undead: the early years of Hammer films’, Dark Terrors, 9 (1994), pp. 45–50; Brian McFarlane
arises: What happens to the Gothic when the genre enters a different definition of afterdeath where the latter is defined not as an instance of the demonic in us (the figure of the impure, the unsanctified, the satanic ‘undead’) but as a principle of rebirth and reincarnation that informs the Hindu way of life? When, in India’s greatest epic, the Mahābhārata
with any other living (or for that matter undead) creature. For example, the film begins with Neville dictating into a tape recorder, an activity that even he acknowledges is pointless: ‘I know there’s no one left but me but I set this down anyway: my history. Maybe, someday, someone will listen to it. Probably not. It doesn’t matter.’ 13 There are also some lengthy voice-overs which again offer exposition and are also used to compress the lengthy timespan of Neville’s scientific experiments on
Sex Gang Children in 1983, its cover a stylised depiction of the saint pierced by arrows. Anna Powell, ‘God’s Own Medicine: Religion and Parareligion in U.K. Goth Culture’ and Jessica Burnstein, ‘Material Distinctions: A Conversation with Valerie Steele’, in Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby (eds), Goth: Undead Subculture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 361. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Grave of Keats’ (1881), The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 121. Richard A. Kaye, ‘“Determined Raptures”: St. Sebastian and the Victorian