GENERATION ZOMBIE: ESSAYS ON THE LIVING DEAD IN MODERN CULTURE
CULTURE OF DEATH x UNITED STATES OF OCCULT x ART OF THE SHILL The academic tone can become a tad over-
Books about zombies just keep on coming.
Some of these tomes (like the rotters that inspire them) are dry, dusty and devoid of anything fresh, while others are vibrant enough to give off some definite signs of life. Luckily, Generation Zombie falls into the latter
category, with eighteen essays examining every- thing from the subgenre’s roots in Haiti, to recent video games such as Left 4 Dead, and the 9-11 attacks and their similarities to Romero’s original Dead trilogy. While there are some extremely ob- vious inclusions – do we really need to be told what the zombies in Dawn of the Dead represent for the 100th time? – readers typically won’t find themselves bogged down with the same old ideas and arguments. For instance, there’s Karen Ran- dell’s examination of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Bob Clark’s Deathdream as narratives on the Vietnam war (something previously rele- gated to film studies textbooks), and Phillip Ma- honey’s piece on mass psychology, which examines zombies and crowd mentality. It’s hard to discuss the undead without dissect-
ing Romero’s films, and while Uncle George is cer- tainly represented throughout, there are also essays that delve into environmentalism and the walking dead, zombies in the technological age and even one that links the undead with John Wyn- dham’s groundbreaking sci-fi novel The Day of the Triffids.
whelming and a few of the entries, such as An- drea Austin’s attempt to connect flesh-eaters with William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuro- mancer, and Shaka McGlotten’s comparison be- tween gay men who frequent homosexual websites and zombies (!), certainly feel like they’ve been shoehorned in to pad out the book to its 259 pages. But regardless of the occa- sional rotten bit, Generation Zombie still offers a mouthful of fresh meat. Readers who think that there are no longer any graves to exhume in the zombie canon would do well to grab a shovel and unearth Generation Zombie. W. BRICE MCVICAR
TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA THE HAUNTING OF The Haunting of Twentieth-Century America is a
misleading title. This book is not so much about Grey Ladies and Headless Horsemen as how the paranormal has influenced and shaped both the culture and history of the United States. It covers everything from the rise of astrology in America, to “sleeping psychic” and faith healer Edgar Cayce, reincarnation, the links between the subconscious mind and the paranormal, and the dawn of “New Age” philosophy. It’s also chock full of intriguing anecdotes of the bizarre and inexplicable. If you can get through the lunatic first chapter
on Nazi occult practices during World War II, which reads like a bad history lesson inspired by a movie Rob Zombie hasn’t made yet (confidential to Rob: please don’t), it proves somewhat thought-provok-
ing. But both this section and the rest of the book would have been so much better if the authors had made up their minds about whether they were ex- ploring the paranormal scientifically or examining the psychological comfort the possibility of magic and the afterlife provides to humans. The problem is that, like many volumes on the
paranormal, it wants to be a serious tome, but it can’t decide if post-Enlightenment insistence on the quantifiable is what’s going to prove its main points or just offer material for “skeptics and de- bunkers,” a scurrilous band of rogues harried throughout the pages for their cynicism and re- liance on, you know, hard evidence. It doesn’t seem to occur to the authors that the repeated use of vague terms such as “many reports show...” and “one study found evidence...” ultimately un- dermine their cases, rather than support them. There’s a study that proves your point? Awe-
some. Tell me where I can find it. Citations and ev- idence are not a concession to those mean ol’ doubters; they’re a hallmark of, like, actual science and stuff, and there are a lot of us out here who want to believe, but are going to need a bit more convincing than a well-phrased “because we said so” in order to do it.
JUSTINE WARWICK SELL YOUR OWN DAMN MOVIE! Troma head honcho Lloyd Kaufman has proba-
bly forgotten more about making independent films than most filmmakers remember. His first book, the regrettably out-of-print All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned From the Toxic
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