Babel Clash

Yesterday Mira Grant welcomed you into the First Church of Romero. You know, the one where the primary tenant is “kill it before it kills you”? Yeah, I’m also a member, so you know it’s where all the cool people hang out. Come on in, grab a shotgun and stay a while.

However, unlike Mira I was baptized into the church in a slightly different way. I was not allowed to watch horror movies as a kid. I once cried until I nearly threw up at a preview before another movie for a Freddie movie, so that pretty much ended my mother’s flexibility on things that went bump in the night for me. Add to that that my little brother sharpened a piece of wood into a stake and kept it behind his door “just in case” and the two of us were pretty much cut off from all things terrifying from the jump. It may have been just self-preservation for our parents.

But, the one thing that was utterly supported in our family was comedy.
 
My mother says the first joke I ever “got” was when my brother was still a baby. She was putting him down to bed and she heard a huge crash from the living room. She ran in to find me, all of about three and a half, laying on the floor under the couch. I had fallen off the couch laughing at “Young Frankenstein”. The part I thought was so funny? When Gene Hackman’s blind man sets the Monster’s thumb on fire, thinking it’s a cigar. By the way, that scene still gets me.

So let me reiterate… a movie where teens set the bad guy on fire in order to save the world from his monster squad… BAD in our family. A movie where Gene Hackman sets someone’s thumb on fire (who is also pretty much a zombie BTW)… GOOD in our family.

So, since I got old enough to take myself to horror movies, I’ve always been drawn to horror that was funny. “Scream”… funny. “Shaun of the Dead”… funny. “Fido”… funny. And then there was “Zombieland” and suddenly I had an idea for a zombie story that combined divorce, death, mayhem, cults and was… funny. Suddenly a whole world opened up for me.
 
Like Mira said yesterday, make your survival plan be about escaping the zombies and suddenly the whole world has an opinion. And making a story about all those sort of NOT funny things (you know the aforementioned divorce, death, mayhem, cults, etc) funny meant it was okay to talk about them. I started wondering out loud to my husband about strange ways to kill people (my favorite in Married With Zombies is still a creative use of a toilet seat) and he never even looked at me cross-eyed (but when I watch True Crime shows on A&E he gets nervous, go figure). When I called my brother asking if he’d like to be in a cult, his immediate answer of “yes” was perfect, not troubling.

So maybe that’s what appeals to me most about zombies. They make the unspeakable speakable and the totally terrifying funny.  And if you like jokes about exploding heads and jumping out of two-story windows, I might just have the one for you.

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