The other day I was following various research threads on the Internet and discovered the Turner Classic Movies blog titled Movie Morlochs, which classic science fiction fans will recognize as a takeoff from George Pal’s The Time Machine. Unfortunately, despite the clever name, the blog is not solely devoted to science fiction films, but it does include interactions with a variety of film genres, including science fiction and horror films. One of the contributors to the blog is Richard Harland Smith, who also writes for Video Watchdog, a publication that has won several Rondo Awards. A little more Internet research revealed an article by Smith in CINEASTE: America’s Leading Magazine on the Art and Politics of the Cinema, titled “The Battle Inside: Infection and the Modern Horror Film.” In the article Smith discusses several horror films that touch on infection and contagion in a variety of monstrous forms. He provides the following conclusion, directed specifically at Romero’s Night of the Living Dead but also in general to the films of infection that he has discussed throughout the article. It is a conclusion that dovetails with the interests of TheoFantastique:

And precisely who is infecting whom? The implication is that the sins of the living, their pettiness, and their bitterness, their rejection of spontaneity in favor of habit, have driven the deceased to an eternal, shambling unrest.

Whatever the catalyst, infection films, whether concerned with vampires or zombies, continue to fascinate both filmmakers and the civilians who flock to them. In their corruption of the Christian belief of life everlasting, these narratives offer moviegoers a choice of worse-case scenarios: to rise redefined as a malevolent night-feeder — betraying friendships, sacrificing blood ties to bloodlust, and robbing the breathing world of its precious fund of innocence — or to shuffle about mindlessly as a ghoul, feasting upon warm flesh and pulsing gizzards, dead-eyed, beyond hope, beyond caring, footloose in the embodiment of mankind’s abiding attraction to a consumption devoutly to be wish’d.

The article can be read here.