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drochfholla idir a chéile ‘there is bad blood between them’, m eaning a grudge, ill-feeling, a poisoned relationship. Drochfholla – Dracula – is a condensed metaphor for Anglo-Irish relations in the nineteenth century; bad blood that courses through the veins and capillaries of a corrupt and corrupting Irish body politic. In this interminable stasis the collective Irish social body is preyed on by new generations of bloodsucking parasites in a never-ending repetition of the past. The Count, the embodiment of this morbid condition, is the un-dead vestige of a remote
-punk soundtrack (that includes numbers from The Cramps and The Damned), the flesh-eating undead infest the town, forcing a cluster of wastrel punks to hole-up in a mortuary with the blundering warehousemen. Full of dark humour, Return of the Living Dead is a cartoon-like, splattery gore-fest. But lurking beneath the visceral slapstick are pronounced elements of political satire. As Barber observes, the film’s zombies stand (or shamble along) as a neat metaphor ‘for the “old”, “parental”, reactionary conservative citizens – the establishment of the Nixon era coming back from the
. Laing, ‘Interpreting Punk Rock’, Marxism Today (April 1978), pp. 123–8; Laing, One Chord Wonders, pp. 104–5; Savage, England’s Dreaming, pp. 277–9 and pp. 396–9. See also G. Bushell, ‘Night of the Punk Undead’, Sounds (11 July 1981), pp. 26–7, which placed Oi! in the populist tradition of the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Sham 69 and UK Subs, as opposed to the ‘arty school’ of bands such as Magazine, Television and Public Image Ltd. 29 For example, 1977–82 saw mod, skinhead and rockabilly revivals, futurism and new romantics, 2-tone, new pop and the varied permutations