The question about whether zombies can be made sexy seems to be more or less settled, and apparently was even at the time of our initial discussion.
My movie site of choice, CHUD.com, has a snarkier-than-thou update on an upcoming movie adaptation of another in what is apparently a mini-trend of zombie romance novels. Not of the Shaun of the Dead style, but in which the undead are objects of love and lust.
So … there’s that.
If Dark Star had been his only produced film, I’d still be a fan of Dan O’Bannon. I used BombNumber20 as my online handle for awhile.
But he also has Return of the Living Dead and Dead & Buried on his resume. He also wrote the first draft of Alien (which CHUD tells me was originally called Star Beast), the screen adaptation of Total Recall, and some of Heavy Metal.
RotLD is, in a lot of ways, more my kind of film than the original Night of the Living Dead. In Dan O’Bannon’s universe, things go wrong. They don’t just collapse or snowball. They go completely sideways and then explode. And they do it without heavy moralizing and without any particular human failing to blame … except perhaps old-fashioned, commonplace stupidity.
Dan O’Bannon died yesterday at the age of 63. Hopefully someone is feeding him brains so he doesn’t feel the pain of being dead.
Update: The Guardian has a good write up of the man.
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?
You can’t go wrong with zombies in sunglasses.
Actually, you could—you could go very, very wrong with it. When I hiked down the Harry Potter-esque alley to The Boiler Room in Asheville’s historic Grove House, I didn’t know what to expect. I was there to hear Zombie Bazooka Patrol. Great name, but would this be some ’80s Goblin rip-off? A bunch of “musicians” with unhealthy appreciations for Argento’s soundtracks?
