Bantam Spectra editor David Pomerico has pulled some thoughts on the future of genre lit, responding to feedback from readers. Pomerico is largely correct in his conclusions (especially the fact that Farrago founder Darin Bradley’s upcoming novel Noise is going to be a big book in the coming year). And also in identifying the zombie trend and predicting what’s coming next now that it has reached maturity.
But the readers who fed Pomerico his responses show a lack of vision. From the article:
One of the key comments I’ve heard about zombies is that, unlike vampires and werewolves, witches and sorcerers, zombies just aren’t sexy. More importantly, there’s really no way to make them sexy.
In the parlance of teh Intarwebs: ORLY?
Now let’s be clear — I’m not speaking of personal preference. I’m normal. Really. But there are many, many filmmakers who are not. There are, after all, films about necrophilia, so the leap to sexy zombies isn’t that big.
And since the modern zombie is more or less a filmic creation, it’s not surprising that film has explored the sexualized undead more than prose fiction has. Here, then, is a quick rundown of the sex zombies I can list off the top of my head (with a couple suggestions from others). Included here are only those films in which the zombies are an object of desire … films in which there is a sexual aspect to their predation don’t count:
- Return of the Living Dead 1-3: With Linnea Quigley’s airbrushed ‘80s punk version of a very naked and lithe zombie, Dan O’Bannon’s first installment of the series offered what may be the first zombie pin up girl.The second film, in one of its more hilariously disturbing scenes, offers the lovely (and also very ‘80s) Suzanne Snyder consenting to have her brains (which, we are told, smell “spicy”) eaten after much coaxing and cajoling by her boyfriend. The sex analog here is clear. Melinda Clarke, of the next generation of scream queens, gives us the ultimate body-modifying goth in the third film, which is largely a love story between her and an otherwise bland leading man. She is, of course, dead, and can only control her lust for brains by piercing her own body in increasingly painful and visible ways.
- Stacy: After RotLD, we need to get more obscure. Jumping to Japan, we find Stacy, rife with Western horror references and featuring Japanese schoolgirls, always the subject of uncomfortable sexualization, zombified and being used as breeding stock for superhumans. No, it didn’t really make sense in context, either, but it did feature a more advanced zombie fetish than Junk, which merely had another sexy zombie girl.
- Shatter Dead: This is the most advanced bit of polymorphous perversity on this list, and it’s also notable as the first film I could think of in which a male zombie is the object of lust. When a woman is reunited with her long lost and long zombiefied boyfriend, an explicit sex scene involving a firearm strap on (he has no blood flow, after all) ensues. This follows intense romantic dialogue, relationship building and the reestablishing of deep, meaningful love. This is as close to Twilight as I’ve seen zombie stories get.
- Zombie Honeymoon has a bit of this. I’m told Fido and Boy Eats Girl do, too. These all feature male zombies, so there may be a shift toward zombies for the ladies.
There must be more in the post-Romero zombie world. There almost certainly are in the pre-Romero world, in which zombies weren’t necessarily dead. Post ‘em if you got ‘em.
