Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Hollywood AD

MULDER: How come when people come back from the dead they always want to hurt the living?

SCULLY: Well, that's because people can't really come back from the dead, Mulder. I mean, ghosts and zombies are just projections of our own repressed cannibalistic and sexual fears and desires. They are who we fear that we are at heart-- just mindless automatons who can only kill and eat.

MULDER: Party pooper. Well, I got a new theory. I say that when zombies try to eat people, that's just the first stage. You see, they've just come back from being dead so they're going to do all the things they miss from when they were alive. So, first, they're going to eat, then they're going to drink, then they're going to dance and make love.

SCULLY: Oh, I see. So it's just that we never get to stay with them long enough to see the gentler side of the undead.

MULDER: Exactly.


Excerpt from "The X-Files" episode Hollywood AD (7x18), courtesy of Inside the X

A lot of people will tell a lie when asked what their greatest fears are. After all, why share your greatest fear? You never know who's going to use it against you. Well, I'm pretty honest about my greatest fear. It's zombies. I hate zombies.

I know it's irrational. Zombies probably don't exist... right? It's like Freddy Krueger and other imaginary terrors -- we're still afraid, though there's nothing there. But I'm not afraid of anything else -- not vampires, werewolves, Bigfoot, or any other manufactured creature. What is it about these freaking zombies?

I guess Scully's theory is one possibility. Do I fear that that's all I'm good for? Or is it an amalgamation of my own dislikes? I was not a child who ever bit other people, and I found it abhorrent when another child was a biter. I can be okay with blood in films, but not gore. And, of course, I'm a vegetarian. which began with a childhood "grossout" factor when it came to tendons and veins and all that stuff you relate between the animal and humans... which is the typical fare of zombies, of course.

I guess the best I can do is to hope that if zombies really *did* exist, it'd be more like Mulder says: they're just revived versions of ourselves, reveling in what they had lost. Regardless, I think I'll sleep with a blunt object next to my bed tonight.

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