Quote of the Day (Music‘s John Oates, on Seeing ‘Night of the Living Dead’ After Dropping Acid)

“Oh boy . . . bloody, slack-jawed, bone-crunching zombies staggering and lurching around a grim Pennsylvania town in a movie shot in grainy 16-millimeter, and the three of us [Oates, friend and musical partner Daryl Hall, and Hall’s sister Kathy] sitting in the old sedan, eyes big as saucers and brains pulsing on what the fuck is happening. The fact that the movie was narrated by a well-known local newscaster named John Facenda (who many football fans will recognize as the longtime NFL films' ‘Voice of God’) made the jacked-up realism even more intense. In fact, we were more than a little freaked out, alternating our attention between the undulating outdoor screen and the car's side windows . . . paranoia washing over us with a growing, genuine terror that the zombies might actually be right outside the car. . . . ‘Wait ...what was that?!’”—Rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter John Oates with Chris Epting, Change of Seasons: A Memoir (2017)

I couldn’t let the old year go out without a bit of a chuckle, and this quote from John Oates’ enjoyable musical memoir fits the bill nicely. 

I never got around to noting the 50^th anniversary this year of George Romero’s legendary low-budget shocker Night of the Living Dead. Scruples have prevented me from commenting on this film that I have never watched except for a scene here or there on TV.

But the little I have seen—plus Mr. Oates’ helpful (not to mention sanguinary) summary—confirms what a close relative told me back in the mid-Seventies about the film. “It’s the scariest movie I’ve ever seen,” the relative said. “The grossest, too. I was shaking when I got out of the theater.”

How can that heart-popping fear be topped? With the mind-altering substances that Hall and Oates took in their wild younger days, of course—days that they can laugh about now when they want to unbend after a show.

As for me, I don’t need to see this (literally) scene-chewing mayhem. Reality has its own various and abundant terrors. Do you think it’s an accident that The Walking Dead has lasted for nearly a decade on cable TV? Why?

"Zombie fiction and movies, when they're good, aren't about zombies. They are stories about people and how they respond," Jonathan Maberry, author of many zombie books (e.g., Rot and Ruin), told Newsweek’s Raina Kelley back in 2010, just as The Walking Dead premiered.  "A zombie is a stand-in for anything we fear: pandemic, racism, societal change, depersonalization of humanity, pervasive threat and how this threat affects people. It's the core of drama and a never-ending blank canvas."

In zombie movies and television, best friends can turn on each other, no longer able to recognize their common humanity. Thank Heaven that didn’t occur in the sedan where Mr. Hall and Mr. Oates sat huddled against the evil they (wrongly and hilariously) believed surrounded them…

Halloween Horror Appreciation: ‘I Am Legend,’ by Richard Matheson

I Am Legend was, of course, not the first vampire novel, nor even the first popular entertainment revolving around those other undead creatures, the zombies.

But the publication of the novel by Richard Matheson in 1954 catalyzed fears of an apocalypse gathering force in that early nuclear period. It told readers they were right to be afraid, because monsters were right outside their door. 

The premise of I Am Legend is fiendishly clever: the last man on Earth holding out against vampiredom. But the source of the horror is not a Dracula-like single powerful figure, but a horde of them, as much victims themselves as victimizers. Bacteria spread in the fallout of a cataclysmic war has led to a plague, and, consequently, a need for blood. 

It’s possible, then, to read this as a dystopian horror tale, as if George Orwell had written a horror tale. Like Orwell’s Winston Smith, Matheson’s Robert Neville becomes a rebel against the established order; and, feeling terribly alone, he latches onto someone who is seemingly like himself, a secret sharer—as Smith did to Julia and O’Brien in 1984. 

Even while it brought apocalyptic themes to vampire fiction, Matheson’s creatures bear more than a little resemblance to the zombies that populate George Romero’s 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead as well as the current TV series The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead. He is, then, a huge part of the American cultural landscape, even if many viewers are unfamiliar with his name.

Though set in the mid-to-late 1970s, roughly 20 to 25 years after its composition, the novel alludes to the by-now-distant American past. One of the avenues named here is “Cimarron Street,” as if Southern California is reverting to its Wild West origins—one that is, literally in this case, survival of the fittest.

Matheson masterfully sets the scene in the first half of the book, revealing Neville’s all-too-necessary self-sufficiency (he makes stakes and boards up his house every night, but must take extra care with his teeth, as there are no more dentists) and loneliness (he not only mourns the death of his wife and daughter, but has taken to drink to blot out the memory of killing his wife to keep her from turning into one of the undead). Likewise, Matheson sympathetically depicts Neville’s attempt to befriend and save a stray dog. 

However, the novel weakens when Neville encounters a female for the first time in three years. I suppose that loneliness and the physical need for a woman are enough to make him put aside his normal suspicions, but a reader can guess where this is leading in no time. (I found it in interesting that this woman, Ruth, bears the same name as Matheson’s wife!) 

Moreover, Neville’s attempt to explain the scientific sources of the horror besieging him inevitably slow down the narrative, even as it thrusts horror fiction in a new direction.

Still, Matheson’s style is lean and athletic without being schlocky, and he thinks through how the quotidian nature of human life is thoroughly upended by these apocalyptic events. And in Neville, he has created an all-too-human character—not a superhero, nor even a scientist, but an ordinary man afflicted with anguish and remorse even as he comes face to face with the existential nature of the horror that confronts him daily (“How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough”).

One of the novel’s late, indelible scenes finds Neville in a library, alone, reading up on the biological disaster that gave rise to the howling beasts who constantly scream for his blood. Matheson pays tribute here to literature, the ultimate—and precarious—zenith of civilization: 

“He stood there for a moment looking around the silent room, shaking his head slowly. All these books, he thought, the residue of a planet's intellect, the scrapings of futile minds, the leftovers, the potpourri of artifacts that had no power to save men from perishing.”

Few greater tributes to his work were offered than by Stephen King, who cited him as the great influence on his own work. That tip of the hat is especially noteworthy when one considers that Matheson (who died in 2013) was part of a celebrated group of midcentury fiction and screenwriters who made a wide impact on horror and science fiction, including Robert Bloch (Psycho), Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg, and Harlan Ellison.

It was a golden age made possible by two divergent but welcoming media—pulp magazines and network TV—and Matheson made his mark with sharp-eyed observations on the sterility of midcentury American culture and the fragility of human life in the atomic age, through teleplays for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, The Night Stalker, and Steven Spielberg’s 1971 TV movie thriller, Duel, as well as short stories such as “The Creeping Terror,” a biting satire on the spread of the culture of his state, California, around the country. 

Originally, I bought I Am Legend over a decade ago, in anticipation of the Will Smith adaptation about to be released. Partly because of poor reviews, I never got around to seeing the movie, nor the prior version of the novel, The Last Man on Earth, released in 1971. 

Perhaps it’s just as well: for all his own skill in writing for the large and small screen, Matheson allowed readers like me, through the magic of his own words rather than images, to create horror in their own imaginations.

Quote of the Day (Ian Frazier, on Why Mummies Are Better Workers Than Zombies)

 “I often remind personnel directors at competitive companies that mummies work eighty per cent cheaper than zombies. Mummies are also slightly more articulate, and they are easier to deal with if they become enraged. If a mummy starts to chase you, merely pull on a loose end of one of his bandages and spin him like a top, unwinding him until he collapses in a pile of bones. Unlike zombies, ninety-seven per cent of mummies are not unionized, and some have even been known to threaten union organizers with bloody butcher knives.” —Ian Frazier, “Why Mummies?”, The New Yorker, Feb. 27, 2017

The image accompanying this post shows Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932).

Tweet of the Day (‘Gia,’ on Becoming a Zombie)

“Honestly, my biggest fear about becoming a zombie is all the walking.”—Gia (a.k.a., Gashley Madison), tweet of Feb. 4,2017

Quote of the Day (Michael J. Totten, on Zombies in Our Age of Anxiety)

“Most of the world may be richer, healthier, freer and less violent than at any time in history, but the anxiety about social collapse that has made The Walking Dead and other post-apocalyptic stories so popular isn’t absurd. Our unprecedented prosperity is disturbingly vulnerable to systemic shocks. On an increasingly urbanized planet, global pandemics are terrifying. And as my work as a journalist has often shown me, residents of cities like Baghdad and Damascus can relate all too well to the predicaments that characters face in The Walking Dead. Even Beirut, an advanced city where I once enjoyed living, sees spasms of violence during which neighbors wake up one morning and start shooting at one another. Sometimes, in other words, breakdown is more than just a dark fantasy. Learning how one can survive and—just as important—remain a decent human being in such a crisis might be worth thinking about, even if it never happens.”— Michael J. Totten, “The Walking Dead in an Age of Anxiety: Why We’re Obsessed With Zombies,” City Journal, Autumn 2014