All the highlights of the news from yesterday with stories on Neil Patrick Harris tapped to host this year’s Oscars and HBO to launch stand-alone over-the-top service in the US next year.
Zombies are one of the most resonant of pop culture monsters, in large part because they allow for so much thematic possibility. In one sense, zombies represent inevitability, the slow, inexorable decline of each individual due to mortality and of society due to the flaws at the core of those who make it up. Zombies in the traditional sense are sluggish and unhurried because the speed with which they kill you is virtually irrelevant. Your death is inevitable. It will come eventually. You can run, you can hide, you can fight it as long as possible, fight until your last breath, but you will die. You can beat back the hordes, beat back every last undead monster that comes your way, but still, they will win, because eventually, you will lose.
Lets concede one thing: If Night of the Living Dead is about racism and Dawn of the Dead is about consumerism, then Day of the Dead has its contemplative sights set on existential crisis. At first glance, this movie, which deserves many more glances than just one, could seem to be about gender roles, social breakdown, feminism, or perhaps even a healthy dose of anti-militarism. However, at the end of the day, once all has been said and dead, the appropriately eternal question of, “what is the point?” is the most prominent and profound query to drip from the film’s bloody lips.