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MONSTERFYING THE CLASSICS
It all started with Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zom- bies, which injected apocalyptic undead action into the Jane Austen clas- sic, becoming an instant best-seller in spring 2009. The bandwagon jumping began almost immediately, with other newly monsterfied works of highbrow literature, including Sense and Sensibility and Sea Mon- sters and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. While it’s unlikely to stick, it does mark one of the most unusual and unexpected horror lit trends to emerge of late.
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ZOMBIES, ZOMBIES AND MORE ZOMBIES As with films, video games and comic books, the undead shuffled
en masse into fiction and non-fiction alike. From kitschy zombie combat manuals and survival guides to varying analyses of George A. Romero’s filmic output (Gospel of the Living Dead, et al.) to best- selling novels, such as Max Brooks’ World War Z and Brian Keene’s The Rising, the shamblers were never more than a stone’s throw away from storylines over the last thirteen years. MONICA S. KUEBLER
When Rue Morgue debuted in 1997, horror comics were at something of a cross-
roads. On the one side you had Vertigo with titles such as Sandman, Hellblazer and Swamp Thing focusing on characterization and truly innovative, epic stories. In the opposing corner were more sensationalistic titles, such as the overrated Spawn and the execrable Lady Death, which placed more emphasis on gore, sex and sudden shocks. And somewhere in the middle was Hellboy, which was starting to garner at- tention but still a ways away from becoming a sensation.
Then a funny thing happened: the comics in-
dustry collapsed in on itself. After years of pan- dering to the collector’s market with silly gimmicks such as variant/3-D/foil/glow-in-the- dark covers, multiple company-wide crossovers and countless first issues, readers began to turn away in droves. Hardest hit were the superhero comics, which were up to that point the bread and butter of the industry. Publishers realized that they would have to offer more than long un- derwear to survive. Suddenly, the playing field was right for new and in-
novative horror titles to emerge and the first decade of the 21st century has seen tremendous growth in the genre. One of the most celebrated – and horrifying – ti- tles of the past decade has been the unforgiving zom- bie apocalypse saga The Walking Dead, which debuted in October of 2003 and has been going strong ever since. More than perhaps any other current title, it’s a product of its time. “I can’t say for certain that the series would have
happened at all if 9/11 hadn’t put the end of the world on everyone’s mind, including mine,” allows creator Robert Kirkman. “That time of uncertainty and para- noia really did put me in the mindset of creating a se- ries like this.” Zombie-themed titles exploded in the wake of The
Walking Dead, reaching their apex with the wildly pop- ular Marvel Zombies (the first few MZ miniseries were written by Kirkman), in which the costumed super- heroes themselves became rotting cannibals. Kirkman points out that the trend was also spurred
on by the boom in zombie movies: “Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later didn’t hurt, I'm sure. Aside from being good – and I do think that The Walking Dead is a good comic – I think it benefitted from being in the right place at the right time.”
AUTUMN 2005 French Minister Nicolas Sarkozy incites civil unrest, in- spires a new wave of bloody French horror films.
Although there remain titles which purposely
hearken back to the simpler days of Tales from the Crypt, modern horror comics owe more to the tough, character-driven sagas established by the likes of Ver- tigo than the shocking twist-ending templates of pre- vious decades. “People don’t just want stories, they want stories
with characters they can become invested in,” says Kirkman. “People want to get invested in something – and I suppose that’s carrying over into horror comics as well. You could read some kind of done-in-one zombie tale – or you could read The Walking Dead, which is, hopefully, a roller-coaster ride of emotions that does- n’t let up. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but it seems the current audiences like things they can come back to.” In addition, comics such as the The Walking Dead, the Hellboy family and 30 Days of Night (which Kirk-
man credits as kicking off the most recent comic book horror boom in 2002) are not only telling compelling ongoing horror stories, they’re also managing to take older concepts – whether they be Lovecraft, vampires or zombies – and give them a new spin. All of sudden vampirism and zombism are the results of a virus and not a product of the supernatural. Whereas older horror comics tended to stay within the estab- lished conventions of horror lore, these are deliberately creat- ing new mythologies in order to entice readers who have become jaded by the rules of the genre. It’s a gamble that’s been paying off for both the industry
and the fans. Horror comics are growing tremendously in popularity, as evidenced by the number of new publishers that have entered the field. Even as recently as 1997, the in- dustry was still dominated by DC and Marvel, although companies such as Dark Horse and Image had managed to gain a solid foothold. A quick glimpse at the racks now, however, will reveal many new players such as IDW, Wild- Storm (a subsidiary of DC), Radical, Zenescope, Devil’s Due, Boom! and Bluewater. Not coincidentally, a large percentage of these companies’ output is horror or horror-related. “I think that as time goes on more and more horror
comics will succeed in finding an audience,” adds Kirk- man. “Which is something I’m really happy about. Any genre that can thrive in comics that isn’t super- heroes is a good thing for the in- dustry as a whole. We’ve been rely- ing on capes far too much for far too long.”
The advancement of technology has affected no medium
more than video games, which have grown into a multi-mil- lion-dollar industry that now competes with the Hollywood machine for our entertainment dollars. Horror titles, including Bioshock, Dead Rising and Left 4 Dead, have not only become best-sellers, but have won critical accolades and awards. We asked Richard Dansky, a writer at Ubisoft Entertainment, and Daniel Ramirez, staff writer for
horror-video-games.com, to weigh in on the ever-shifting landscape of horror gaming.
OCTOBER 5, 2005 Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novel is released, doing for vampires what Harry Potter did for wizards.
OCTOBER 28, 2005 Mick Garris launches Showtime’s Masters of Horror TV anthology series.
DECEMBER 2005 Just in time for Christmas, Marvel Comics launches the soon-to-be blockbuster five-issue Marvel Zombies.
Why do you think that horror games have grown so popular over the last thirteen years? RD: It’s largely been due to the fact that the technology is now good enough to support more types of horror games. “Survival horror” has been around since at least the original Alone in the Dark, but it wasn’t really until re- cently that we got to a point as an industry where we could make other genres of games where the focus was on horror, not on core mechanics. Doom’s a shooter, but Doom 3 is defi- nitely a horror game because the
JANUARY 28, 2006 Critic David Edelstein coins the term “torture porn” in a New York Magazine article.
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