catchinghorrors

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Boyle's insistence that the Infected aren't zombies wasn't pedantry or elitism. They're violent and dangerous, sure, but still human beings. Now that the "living but rabid human" has been absorbed into the zombie archetype in popular culture, Boyle made these new infected into contagious Wild Men of the Woods.

Spoilers for 28 years later

Something I really was not expecting from 28 years later was the commentary on zombies and how we have come to perceive them (culturally speaking) as completely deshumanized bodies that we can kill gleefully.

28 years later is constantly reminding you that its zombies are infected people, not mythical creatures completly removed from us. That doesn't make them less dangerous, or killing them in self defense (or even mercy-killing them) wrong. But it does give a sinister spin on the "zombies killer" warrior figure that a lot of zombie media come to present as a given.

The movie does that through two main narative devices. Humanizing the infected and deconstructing the ideology behind the zombies killer figure.

It humanizes the infected notably by:

Introducing the Alphas. They are an extra threats sure, but they are also capable of reasons.

The entire plot with the pregnant infected woman.

The fact the everyone in Great-Britain is treated the same by the outisde world, infected or not.

Isla's disease. Isla is sick from a mystery illness that impairs her mental capacities. Isla is not infected, but she is often confused and sometimes even physically lashes out in way that are violent (when she wakes up and break everything on her nightstand, in the same scene she also turns against Jamie). I don't think it is a coincidence that Isla is the only character in the entire movie that kills an infected with her bare hands, and then has trouble remembering it. It is also not a coincidence that she is the first one showing compassion on screen to an infected.

The fact that Dr Kelson treats infected and non-infected in the exact same way in death and does not immediately turns to killing the infected to defend himself from them.

It deconstructs the figure of the zombie killer by:

Having Jamie being a troubling figure and an even more troubling father figure. He insists on taking his son on his first killing trip three years before it is common to do so (something the movie points out explicitly twice). He says he likes the smell of rotting carcasses. He lies to make his son appear more heroic (I am not saying that Spike was cowardly or anything, but still Jamie does embelish how this first hunt went).

The community that sanctions this kind of attitude is very much coded as conservative in an uncomfortable way. It is for example, routinely visually compared with English history (through the display of medieval battles and images of the boers war). However everytime it is compared to the medieval era (the mythical chivalric) the images shown are very clearly extracted from movies and artistic depictions rather than rigourous reconstruction. The only real images shown are from most recent colonial wars in which England commited war crimes.

It is nice to see a zombie film not taking the zombies as acceptable killable meatsack as a given.

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we’re all sinners

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Happy Pride Month, everybody!

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Sinners: The Unforgivable Art of Rebellion

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It seems to me that the residents of Clarksdale, Mississippi, will have a completely different idea of what happened at the juke joint than the truth. All they know is that Sammie Moore went out to his cousins' new juke joint to play on Saturday night and then showed up in the middle of Sunday service covered in blood and clutching the neck of his broken Dobro guitar, and that Smoke was found dead at the busted-up juke joint, surrounded by a bunch of dead white men, probably Klansmen, with Annie stabbed with a wooden stake and Delta Slim looking like he was torn up by wild animals inside.

All the others, being vampires, burned to ash in the sunlight. Even Grace burned up, though she did so as a human, so she might have left remains (though that shot of her and Bo burning together showed bones, so that fire was supernaturally hot).

What would folks think? What kind of story comes out of that? What does Jedidiah, Sammie's father, say to his congregation, aside from that his son has fallen to the Devil? What does Mary's (white) husband think when his wife doesn't return after her mother's funeral (assuming he knows any of the truth about her trip)? What does Lisa do when her parents don't come home?

Would Stack tell anyone in Clarksdale what happened, or would he and Mary run as fast as Sammie did? I can't think he would; before that night, Stack's ties to Clarksdale were Smoke, Sammie, and Mary (who was supposed to be elsewhere). After, he had no reason to stay and no loyalty to the people there. Had the situation been reversed, Smoke might have; it was clear, because of Annie and their relationship, that he was more tied to the town. In fact, I bet the idea to return was Smoke's, and Stack - hustler that he was - had the original idea for the juke joint.

But what sort of stories would grow after that night, when some 50 folks went out to the opening night of the Smokestack Twins' juke joint, and then disappeared?

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#also Sammie wrote his own original song while Remmick just recited a song by someone else

#he can’t create he’s not human it’s like the True Demonic or Diabolic

#‘the evil one would look fairer—feel fouler’

im thinking abt sinners and The Scene: how Sammie played so beautifully that the house caught fire and showed the people inside, but he wasn't the center of it - there was so much movement in that scene!!! so much to SEE - no two people danced the same way - you're focusing on the spirits of the old and the new and how Together everyone looked even without four walls around them.

And then you have Remmick and his song. There's uniformity in the dancing!!! in the singing!!!! in the movements!!!!!!! Those same people who were dancing so freely and expressively!!!!! Now following remmick step after step!!!!!

Whiteness as vampirism!!! Leeching away individuality!!!! culture!!! freedom!!! ughhgghh this movie !!!!!¡!!! so good !!!!!¡!!!!!!!

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i know i shouldnt be suprised but sinners being out for less than a week and already tumblr is fandomifying and 'poor wet pathetic cat'-ifying the main white man villain of the movie is so... disapointing??? like did the fucking point of the movie really go over your heads that badly or are you just willingly ignorant and stupid?

AND BEFORE ANYONE STARTS; im not saying you cant like remmick, he's a very interesting character, a great villain, and jack o'connell gave a great performance playing him, nor do i care if you think hes sexy, I think hes sexy

but i think to come out of a movie where vampires serve as a metaphor for how black american communities have the life sucked out of them by white people via cultural appropriation (remmick wanting to use sammie's gift to summon his own ancestors) and forced assimilation (all the turned vampires singing and dancing along with remmick's irish folk song and dance juxtaposed with the blend of cultures during sammie's song in the juke joint) and for your main take away to be 'aww the main villain is just a misunderstood sadboy' or 'idc abt the atrocities he looked sexy doing them (when the atrocities in question were racism)' then youre just being so disengenuous and antithetical to the whole point of the film?

and dont come at me with the 'let people enjoy things' bullshit, sinners is a movie FUNDAMENTALLY about racism and racial dynamics in the united states, and i do think focusing on your little y/n x [whiteboy of the month] fics and 'hes so babygirl' posts do actually stunt your own critical engagement with the message this movie was trying to convey to its audience

i think its also a disservice to remmick's character; the moral nuance that comes to light when you consider his position as an irish immigrant to the US, a victim of the colonialist british empire just like the black main cast (although in a very different way) and how, whilst his desire to reclaim his ancestry and heritage is understandable and even relatable, his pursuit of sammie and willingness to kill literally everyone else at the juke joint is allegorical for how, regardless of their own marginalisation, white people will prey upon and steal from black culture(s) and destroy/disenfranchise black communities to serve their own interests, and the movie is NOT subtle about this either, delta slim literally lays it out for us "white folks like the blues just fine, they just don't like the people who make them"

idk im yelling into the void here, the ppl im complaining about are never going to give a shit about racism or even just critically engaging with art when theres a new cute whiteboy to write fluff and angst about, but its just soooo annoying to see, yet again, how fandom spaces, which SHOULD be about uplifing and celebrating art in all its diversity and complexity, once again is nothing more than people ignoring anything that actually makes them have to confront reality and filing off the serial numbers to slot characters into pre-determined fanon molds so they can pump out incorrect quotes and coffee shop AUs en masse until the media iliterate heat death of the universe

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people who hate brood parasites and call them cruel and evil I am feeding your socks to the goats. you're weak and you don't deserve the cuckoos or the cowbirds or the whydahs or the dirt beneath my crocs. learn to not assign moral value to animals or their evolutionary strategies and appreciate the sight of a small parent and their much bigger different-species child like God fucking intended

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vampires have been drinking human blood for centuries they don’t give a fuck about guys on eight different antidepressants. they were sucking on asbestos factory workers

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#and at that moment i knew this movie was gonna be FIRE

Annie: There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death; conjuring spirits from the past...and the future. In ancient Ireland, they were called Filí. In Choctaw land, they called them Fire Keepers. And in West Africa, they were called Griots. This gift can bring healing to their communities. But it also...attracts evil....

Sinners (2025)

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There’s two ends of the horror spectrum

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Horrorween Day 16 / 31: Messiah of Evil (1974) dir. Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz "I'm as old as the hills. Mama delivered me herself. She took me from between her legs, bloody little mess. She's about to feed me to the chickens. And daddy said, "Maybe we could use a boy lottie." That's how I came into the world."

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who sent him this

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Rec 2 (2009) was divisive for anglophone audiences due to its wholesale embrace of the supernatural. Love it or hate it, you gotta admit it’s something different. As a virus and a demon and a parasite and a hive mind, it’s the turkducken of zombie plagues!

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The contagious dog-cancer Big-D mentions is real, by the way. And to make the vampiric connection even stronger, one of the ways it can spread is through bites.

AAHHHH, An Audiolog? Feature KITTEN and Big-D AGAIN? THIS TIME with a specific TOPIC?

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everybody in the whole wide world needs to watch hunter the parenting. NOW!

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final destination bloodlines’ promotional is wild as fuck. are you telling me they’re driving around fake log trucks with final destination posters on it