The biggest question I
asked myself after class today is: Where did all of "this" start?
"this" being
a the phenomenon of the Zombie World. Well, I discovered that the
word Zombie is only defined by Oxford English Dictionary as:
In the West Indies and
southern states of America, a soulless corpse said to have been revived by
witchcraft; formerly, the name of a snake-deity in voodoo cults of or deriving
from West Africa and Haiti.
I found this out from this video:
Well, I didn't feel
like that is what the whole Zombie world existed around. So I did a little
digging and discovered:
“It would seem that
zombies are the bastard-children of vampire literature and a copyright
mistake”
Essentially, the
author of the first Zombie film got the idea from American author Richard
Matheson, he wrote his own vampire novel, I Am Legend. “Matheson, who acknowledged the influence
of Stoker’s Dracula on his own vampires expounded on his new-fangled concept of
an older monster during a video acceptance speech when I Am Legend was named
the Vampire Novel of the Century by the Horror Writers Association” (Akimoff).
So, the first film, a 1968 film called Night of the Living Dead,
directed by George Romero reanimated the creatures as monsters that feasting on
the living flesh.
This movie is available online because it’s not
copyrighted. At first the movie was called Night
of the Flesh Eaters. Before release, the title changed to Night of the
Living Dead “but, when changing the title card, the distributor forgot to put
the copyright notice on the final print”(Akimoff).
I bet he got fired. Just saying. The movie probably
lost a lot of money because somebody forgot he had one job.
Be that as it may, I feel a little different about
this idea of stories and storytelling. The first concept of the modern Zombie
was a movie, a film. Doesn’t that mean that we should also focus on what the
FILM did to become such a large phenomenon that people today constantly are
rewriting it?
The Zombie phenomenon is so huge that there are now:
novels, short stories, film, comics, games, video games, computer games.
I think that there should be a “make your own
adventure zombie novel” (Hey, Professor T, can I do that as my project for the
whole semester?) That would be so cool gruesome!
Oh hey, here you can watch us act and react to the game in
class:
*disclaimer--this
video has no intent of making money or infringing on copyright law
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