Skip to main content

The Great Zombie and Vampire Invasion

I hope you all got a chance to read my interview with Jeani Rector at Examiner.com.  It's a two part article where she talks about her career as both horror writer and editor of the online literary publication, The Horror Zine.  If you haven't had a chance to read it, please do so.  She's a really interesting woman with a lot of great insight and tips on writing horror and other areas of the dark fiction genre.

In that interview, Jeani advises aspiring writers to stay away from the zombie and vampire trends Perhaps they are just a little over used in horror. However, they've always played a big role in dark fiction especially in film but vampires have played more of a role in literature than zombies.  But zombies are appearing more in today's literature.  As far as vampires go, the peak in their popularity is due to the Twilight books and films (the books being much too over rated since they are said to be poorly written) having been so successful in sales. Because of that, there is now the series True Blood on television.  Speaking about television, Walking Dead has played a big part in making zombies more of a fad than ever. Walking Dead actually started out as a horror comic book several years ago. But because of the series the comic book industry has been infected by the zombie craze just as much as it has with the vampire one. 

I've never watched Walking Dead nor read any of the comics, but I've gotten started on a newer comic book series by Vertigo called iZombie, written by Chris Roberson and illustrated by Mike Allred. If there's one thing that series does that Walking Dead doesn't, it's bringing back the four color of '60s horror comics as well as drawing style and so is reminiscent of sci fi horror of that era. I'm very vintage and retrospect when it comes to speculative comic books and so for me iZombie is my "Walking Dead".  Yet this series isn't completely innocent. Its gore scenes and its violence gives it its suggestion for mature readers while, of what I've read so far, not going overboard with the two like many of today's fantasy and sci fi comics. The storyline has not been bad either. Its pre-apocalyptic setting (as of issues 1 through 16) and team of secret agent zombie fighters give it a twist.

We'll discuss the zombie/vampire craze more next time. But let me leave you with this: do you think zombies and vampires have recently been used in the horror genre?  Please feel free to leave your answers in the comments box and we can discuss those in the next post as well.

Until then, take scare!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book-To-Movie: Stephen Kingā€™s 'The Raft'

Credit: Pixabay.com It's the third Saturday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie we review a book and its movie adaptation. One of the reasons I as a horror fan donā€™t read a lot of Stephen Kingā€™s work is because most of it consists of novels that go more than 400 pages. I have a short attention span when it comes to reading, ironically since I consider myself an avid reader, and so I normally wonā€™t read a work that is much more than the equivalent to a 350-page mass market paperback. The other reason why I donā€™t read a lot of Kingā€™s work is that, as literary scholars will tell you, a lot of his writing is poor. However, he does have some good writing in his works, especially his earlier stuff, including his short horror tales. So if I read anything by Stephen King itā€™s usually his short stories or novellas. One of his collections Iā€™ve read is Skeleton Crew which includes some of his good, or at least...

Book-To-Movie: ā€˜The Hound of the Baskervillesā€™

Credit: Wikimedia Commons I apologise for posting outside our regular post-day which is late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. However, I got behind on several things last week and so had to postpone the post to today.  Iā€™ve been a reader of Sir Arthur Conan Doyleā€™s Sherlock Holmes books ever since I was 11. What Iā€™ve always liked so much about the series is that, like a good horror story, the stories often take place in dark settings and involve bizarre cases. Conan Doyleā€™s novel, ā€œThe Hound of the Baskervillesā€, definitely contains these elements. Itā€™s a detective story that crosses over into the gothic horror genre. Several movie adaptations of the novel have been made that go as far back as a 1915 German silent film. In 1959 Hammer Studios released a version starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. As much as Iā€™m a fan of the Hammer horror films, I have not seen that one yet. The only one that Iā€™ve seen so far is the 1939 adaptation starring that other big name in classic...

Return to Fiction Writing; Graphic Novel Based on Lost Horror Film

Credit: Wikimedia Commons Some of you may had noticed that I skipped posting back on the 4th of the month, as far as Monday posting goes. I posted for the IWSG blog hop that Wednesday and it didn't make up for that Monday's missed post since I said I had to keep it short. I had to reduce the writing during that week because, as I also said in that IWSG post, my mom passed away back in October and so that was the week of her funeral. I just got back on track earlier last week (Wednesday I think it was) and so that included returning to working on my fiction projects, namely my upcoming short story collection, "Bad Apps". Needless to say, I'm back on track with my weekly blog posts. So, I have some about my latest progress on "Bad Apps" and, in sci fi/fantasy news, about an upcoming graphic novel adaptation of a lost silent horror film that starred Lon Chaney Sr. Back On Track with ā€˜Bad Appsā€™ My short hiatus from my fiction writing wasn't really a ful...