David’s Comments (group member since Oct 06, 2011)

David’s comments from the The Zombie Group! group.

Ahh... good old Night of the Comet. An online friend of mine maintains an incredible NOTC fan site:

http://www.nightofthecomet.info/

Well worth a look.

My first exposure to zombies was Romero's original Night of the Living Dead. I grew up in the UK in the 1980's, when crazy censorship laws meant it was impossible to get hold of any horror movies here (they were banned and labelled as 'video nasties'). A friend of mine's dad ran a comic store, and he brought back a laser disc player (remember those?!) and a stack of movies from a shopping trip in the US. We sat and watched Night one dark afternoon in the middle of winter, while a huge thunderstorm battered the house. Priceless!

Why do zombies eat at all? It's something I've never been able to understand... they don't drink, sleep, go to the toilet or do anything else, so why eat? Their bodies are decaying so they don't need nutrition (not that they'd be able to swallow and digest anyway).

I think it might just be an instinctive desire to help spread the infection. Love the "Warm Bodies" idea though!

I've just finished writing the final Autumn book - Aftermath. Set several months after the initial outbreak of infection, the surviving characters have come up with a wide range of places to hide from the undead hordes including a castle, an island and a prison. I wondered: what are other people's ultimate zombie-secure locations?

It's great to be in like-minded company here...!

I agree with everything that's been said since Ruby's initial post. Zombies are incredibly adaptable, and I think that's one of the main reasons I'm fascinated by them. They're a blank canvas - an alternative version of 'us' - and they can be used an infinite range of scenarios.

They are relentless, driven, unstoppable... in many ways they are the Terminators of horror. They won't give up until they've got you.

I think the less specific you can be about the cause of the plague/infection/whatever, the better. I've always loved Romero's original Night of the Living Dead explanation... the reanimation of the dead might be due to radiation from a crashed satellite, and that's as much as we're told. That said, I also love the follow-on cause from Return of the Living Dead - some fools just happen to open sealed barrels containing the remains of the dead from the original movie.

Tainted meat is a great idea. Imagine that... we're all too busy chowing down to realise we're being contaminated. By the time the connection's made between the food and the living dead, we've all (literally) had a gut-ful!

Sometimes, though, I think it's better not to think about the cause at all, just to concentrate on the people left dealing with the effects. I have a couple of characters talking about that in the first of my Autumn books. They're talking in circles for a while about what might have caused the dead to rise, before someone gets wound up with the pointlessness of the conversation. We just have to deal with it, he says. If you get hit by a car, does it matter what colour it is?

Why the dead have risen isn't the focus of the story - it's what the survivors do about it that counts!