Two posts in three days?
It may well be the apocalypse coming…or the fabulous publicity initiative by the Queensland Police Service and their tweets about World Zombie Day (which was a move that very cleverly and effectively promoted their disaster alert system, QLDAlert). Props on a catchy stunt that had a good purpose!
Readers of this blog and my twitter stream will know too well my family’s obsession with horror movies. We’re not fussy.
Creature features? Cheesy franchises? Movies starring Billy Zane (including Demon Knight - right)? We’ll watch them all and enjoy them.
I loved these movies so much that I even engineered my Honours thesis around them. I researched gender and contemporary sci-fi/fantasy films, comparing the representations of women in these genres. The full title is: “The Position of Woman in Recent American Science Fiction Film: The Representation of Women and the ‘Feminine’”. Yes, I’m cringing, too.
The films I managed to shoehorn into the dissertation included:
- ‘Hard’ scifi: Alien, Aliens, Leviathan, and Inseminoid (!).
- ‘Fantasy’: Legend, Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Conqueror, Red Sonja, and Flesh and Blood.
Don’t judge me too harshly about the divvying up of genres, or for the films themselves. I was young. It was 1991. I was constantly listening to the Hoodoo Gurus.
The nice thing is that our love of science fiction and fantasy material in general has already started rubbing off on the kids. The entire family is dead keen (hah) on Plants vs Zombies. Most of us have played the game through a couple of times, and E. regularly plays a screen or two. G. is a bit young to play properly, but he likes collecting suns.
My brother loved it so much that S. made a PvZ cake for him in 2009:
PLANTS vs ZOMBIES CAKE under the cut
