Bad Blurring of the Lines

On Twitter there is a sprawling community that is rancid, rank, and utterly decadent. This community prides itself on these virtues in mock-physical sense. They are zombie fans. Some of them purposefully obliterate the line between fiction and reality in their communications. They are in essence role-playing on Twitter as zombies. Their antics are as funny sometimes as they must inevitably be disturbing to non-fans of zombie movies and fiction. It is easy to image the horror and indignation of the horror uninitiated in response to the outlandish and gruesome posts. A fan of horror and of zombies can really get into most of what they do. They are awfully witty and comedic for the walking, ravenous dead. They have the most interesting and not for safe work outlook as well.

There is one trend that has developed recently that bears consideration. It also seems to be ill conceived and for once in bad taste regardless of the popularity of it, and the popularity of zombies and horror. Not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon and there is no apparent backlash against it. The trend is to equate the H1N1 virus, otherwise known as human communicable swine flu, with a new and real zombie outbreak and ultimately a start to a zombie apocalypse. Now, it's not the disease factor that is the problem, nor the idea of a zombie apocalypse. There is a great Facebook group called The Hardest Part of a Zombie Apocalypse Will be Pretending I'm Not Excited which expresses the normal sentiment of zombie fans.

It is not even either of these ideas, but at the same time they do lend to the unease of this blurring of the line of reality. The first fear is that some people who are not aware of the fact that this is fictional masquerading as real will get the wrong idea and spread panic like wild-fire. The second is that such a pairing of a real disease, which has resulted in the real deaths of people, with a fictional milieu is insulting to those who have died. A virus that causes the dead to rise is nothing new. Neither is fiction revolving around death by contagion. Something about it just doesn't sit right though and the sooner the trend is over the better. This speaks to what is acceptable, where the line is between the shock and the horror desired, and just being distasteful.

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Anatomy of a Horror Setting #3-6: Extraterrorestrials

Across the vast, nearly unfathomable stretches of space they come to deliver horror on the primitive, disorganised, backwater planet Earth. They are unknown, their intentions incomprehensible, and their arsenal of terror tools vast. As if that were not bad enough, watching the skies for their vessels and looking for little grey men may only leave the unsuspecting to fall prey to less intelligent but much more insidious incursions. This is just a general overview of the forms that science-fiction horror stories involving aliens may take. The first line of horror offence when dealing with extraterrestrials is as before, the unknown. Next comes the intimacy and scale of contact. Then there are the ramifications inherent at several different levels of depth.

Working with the unknown is a point that really deserves some belabouring. The first question to ask when starting the creation process is how apparent will it be that it is a story about aliens? UFOs immediately figure into this question even to the degree that mysterious lights in the sky will be an immediate tip-off unless obfuscation and misdirection are used, requiring that the audience not end up feeling cheated by it. The aliens--greys aside--are much easier to keep out of the spotlight by comparison. As with any inhuman personage aliens should remain unnamed-so until it is well obvious. Furtive figures with unnatural shapes in the shadows, seeing the results of their actions rather than them, and inexplicable events are the way to go when keeping to the strictest level of the unknown.

The big reveal, whenever it occurs in the timeline, begs the question of intimacy. Do one or more members of the main cast come directly into contact with the aliens? Is it at a distance or directly? Is it in a neutral location like a deserted road or something more frightening such as the science lab aboard their ship? Is it even worse than meeting aliens, and be experimented upon, than to be infected with an alien organism or virus? How many aliens are involved, or how many humans are affected or infected determines scale. The scale directly infers what kinds of ramifications will be a part of the author’s considerations. While a handful of people may be directly affected by the alien encounter an even greater number will be party to after effects. What of the bigger picture as well?

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