Week of Review - The Dark Half (1993)

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Let’s talk for a minute about George Romero.  Romero is one of the all-time giants of the horror genre, a skilled and storied director most famed for introducing the world to the streamlined vision of zombies that was the “of the Dead” film series.  However, as excellent as that series is (the first four films and the Romero directed remake anyway) the man did a lot of other high-quality work that’s gone unfairly under-appreciated by the public at large such as Monkey Shines or Knight Riders.  

In 1993, Romero decided to dip his toes into the Stephen King pond and turned in one of the best King adaptations of the decade: The Dark Half.  Starring Timothy Hutton and Michael Rooker, The Dark Half is quintessential King viewing, hitting on a number of his favorite tropes and ideas while still realizing them in their best way.  The film also marks the first entry in this retrospective to tie into the Stephen King shared universe of stories, connecting as it does to the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine.  So, continuity, quality, and a number of name actors and creators who’ve become beloved in their own right- let’s talk about The Dark Half.

Filmland - History of Doppelganger Horror

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By now you’ve probably at least seen an advertisement for Jordan Peele’s sophomore feature Us, though based on the box office a lot of us have seen the film itself as well.  If you haven’t seen it yet don’t worry, no spoilers here, but the film’s focus on evil doppelgangers has definitely got me thinking.  Killer duplicates of oneself is a pretty great horror concept but one rarely explored in the medium as often as ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and various other forms of more widely accepted monsters.  As such, I’ve narrowed down the history of evil doubles in horror movies and TV in order to look back at the premise that’s given us one of the most memorable horror films of the year. 

Movie Monthly - The Crazies

And so we reach the final film in the Month of the Zombie.  So far we’ve seen weird dehydration comet zombies, voodoo zombies, and resurrected mortician corpses so I thought I’d close things off with a much more contemporary film featuring a more modern understanding of the zombie: the infected.  The idea of “infected” rather than zombies is part and parcel to the explosion of zombie popularity that hit during the culturally defining years of 2007-2010. Zombies had been brewing for a come back in the nerd culture sphere since the early days of the 21^st century with popular cult hits like 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, and the Dawn of the Dead remake feeding the flames.  However, from 2007-2010 we had the birth of Left 4 Dead, the Call of Duty zombie mode, Zombieland, Dead Snow, and The Walking Dead, a 5-way punch that cemented zombies as the defining cultural monsters of the 2010s.  However, with this resurgence came change as the idea of zombies as shambling corpses gave way to a more fast paced and destructive flesh machine zombie and the term “the infected” developed to describe them.  Suddenly zombies became infinitely more dangerous and powerful than humans but in only one film did they actually get smarter, 2010’s The Crazies. 

Panel Vision - Top 10 Tales of the Zombie Covers

It’s October, Halloween is happening, I’m talking about zombie movies for literally the whole month, and the Walking Dead is on every Sunday.  Given that, of course I had to dedicate a listicle to the best zombie book covers.  The only thing is that there are as many zombie comics as there are stars in the sky and it’d be nearly impossible for me to cull through all of them so I’m narrowing my list to just one zombie comic.  It was originally meant to be Walking Dead before I remembered Walking Dead’s covers are incredibly bland so instead I fell back on my standard answer to most comic book questions: the ‘70s.  I’ve mentioned before that in the ‘70s an agining audience forced DC and Marvel comics to experiment more with what content they were putting out.  DC started releasing its classic horror anthology comics again and Marvel released a whole ton of horror comics including Tomb of Dracula, Frankenstein, and today’s topic Tales of the Zombie, and the covers by the brilliant artist Boris Vallejo. 

Movie Monthly - Dead & Buried

Edited by Robert Beach

Welcome back to Movie Monthly’s Month of the Zombie where I celebrate zombie movies that only I consider to be zombie movies. There are just so many generic zombie films out there with your standard range of infected rage zombies or slow, shambling Romero zombies that you don’t need another person spotlighting them. In keeping with that trend, the zombies from this week’s movie are less of your standard issue undead and something more like the bizarre hybrid children of Re-Animator, The Fog, and Shutter Island.

It’s also notable as being from the writing team behind Alien…sort of.  Ronald Shusett, who’s credited with creating Alien’s story, while Alien’s actual author Dan O’Bannon has repeatedly distanced himself from the film, wrote the main script.  It’s a bizarre mash-up of zombie flick, seaside terror tale, retro throwback and atmospheric horror. Let’s talk about Dead & Buried.

Movie Monthly - Night of the Comet

Welcome back to Movie Monthly where we spend a whole month talking about movies of a particular theme.  This month is October, the scariest month of the year, so to celebrate the spooky season this is going to be the Month of the Zombie.  Yes every Monday in October I’ll be showcasing a different zombie movie, category which will be left entirely up to my own definitions of the term.  Basically I’m saying I won’t be playing that hard and strong with the definition of the term “zombie” in these flicks, there’ll be talking zombies, voodoo zombies, smart zombies, basic infected, pretty much anything I deem zombies gets to be showcased.  I bring that up because the zombies in our first film probably wouldn’t be considered zombies by most folks in the classical sense in that they talk, use tools and weapons, and don’t come in horde flavor.  However, it’s my blog so we’re gonna talk about it, this is Night of the Comet.