No-one wants to die. Really. Even those emo’s who are just all mouth and no trousers. It’s not something that many of us look forward to. Understandable.
There are loads of ideas about what happens after the last breath, religiously, spiritually, physically, chemically but none so much prevalent in modern culture as becoming one of the Undead and as its Halloween, everywhere from your local chippy to every shop in town goes apeshit on it.
All Hallow’s Eve descends on us, a night in the social calendar synonymous with all things evil, a night we’re our imagination turns on us. The air grows still, the clouds gather and we are drawn into the darkness…
But there is a battle amidst this dark festival. A blood feud that spans centuries. A reckoning of epic proportions that divides people to this day..2 camps, both alike in dignity…in fair Ver-MOAN-a where we lay our scene…
This is the battle of the underworld, the rivals of the reanimated..but who is deadlier?
ZOMBIE vs VAMPIRE…..Choose your allegiance NOW!
Living dead Zombie Horde with numbers and an insatiable appetite for your guts pitched against Slick-sucker Vamps, who’s pain-in-the-neck tactics are not to shake a stake at..
There’s good reason to be scared.
Horror’s greatest embodiments of evil have continued to plague the human imagination for centuries, even millennia. We’ve been putting on our brown trousers about the possibility of becoming undead since 5th Century BC, with almost every ancient culture having beliefs in the dead rising: India, Malasia, China, Prussia (pretty much most of eastern Europe back in time), Africa, The Aztecs, even the Eskimos.
Each culture brought new ideas about what happens once deceased. Blood is the main game. Go to the Doc’s in the 11th Century for practically anything and you would have been prescribed virgin blood. Mmmm..virginy. Early Christianity took a very literal and Pagan approach. Eating human flesh and drinking blood became ritual, consuming the soul and lifeblood of the victim, giving life to the consumer. Superstition swept 14th Europe, believing the Bubonic plague was caused by the devil, unknowingly burying plague sufferers alive thinking them to be deceased. Cases of the dead rising caused mass panic in Eastern Europe, with blood covered and plague-rotting living relatives clawing themselves out of the grave to give locals the willies…
These days, the horror genre owes most of its rep to two people.
In the Zombie corner, George A. Romero. The king of everything zombie, Romero took the idea of the Voodoo-inspired death-like mind state, still used in Haitian (‘Zombi’ — snake god) and West African belief systems (‘Nzambi’) and turned it into an apocalypse-induced epidemic. The zombie genre was born, and has been carved into societies culture of fear for almost 50 years.
In the Vampire corner, Irish author Abraham ‘Bram’ Stoker. The dude had never been to Transylvania, but built such a character from the legends of ancient cultures that he created a monster for all ages. The legend of the ‘Vampire’ (originally coined in Germany in 1726) brings together ideas of demonic lust-filled, blood-drinkers and the infamous Vlad the Impaler (or Vlad Tepes Dracula, Prince of Wallachia to give him his full title) This nutjob loved nothing more than ramming tonk poles through the torso of his enemies and leaving them hanging, sometimes taking over a week to die..and he’s blood relation to our good Queen. Good to know.
Sadly I don’t have the budget, time, energy or skill to pitch these two corpse-combatants against each other, but luckily the genius’s at Deadliest Warrior, cable TV’s answer to a battle-across-the-sands-of-time Gladiators, does have. These guys love their job SO much, but because they’re not geeks (*cough*), they’ve been dealing with like, real world fights, and not silly fantasy ideas, yeah? Lucky for us, the last in the series is a pretty damn good depiction of ZOMBIE vs VAMPIRE, if the shit really hit the fan and a zombie apocalypse just so happened to coincide with Hell opening. Bloody demon spawn….definitely a Monday….
+HAPPY HALLOWEEN+
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftnD9-QFOWE’]
