From the jaw-dropping to the terrifying: Your all-in-one climate change reader.- In case you were curious: This is how the Marines plan for the zombie apocalypse.
- Why did this pregnant woman die in Ireland? You don’t want to know.
- Photos from America’s last North African adventure.
- Straight dudes and Magic Mike.
- The Affordable Care Act and how it could supposedly affect the price of your medium pepperoni from Papa John’s.
- The 30-acre compound in Missouri where geeks are building machines for the endtimes; and living without air conditioning.
- Print and read: How does anarchism (in all its chaotic forms) fit into modern liberalism?
- Here are five voting systems that are actually more lousy than the Electoral College.
- But how do you get orc blood out, really?
Tag Archives: zombie
Weekend Reading: November 23, 2012
Filed under Omnicultural, Omnium Gatherum
Trailer Park, Halloween Edition: ‘The Bay’
Being that it’s Halloween time, movie theaters should be packed with scary movies. But this year, the fright-fest seems a little light, with the fourth Paranormal Activity and Sinister being about all there is. It’s a positive development, with studios having finally moved away from the endless slasher sequels, 1970s remakes, and torture-porn trash that typified horror films for so many years. The trend now, and it’s a good one, seems to be towards found-footage frights of the post-Blair Witch variety and amped-up variations on the old haunted house stories. Then you’ve got your zombie movies.
Now there’s The Bay, something of a genre-stew that comes courtesy of Paranormal Activity producer Jason Blum and, oddly enough, director Barry Levinson. Better known for Baltimore-set character studies and Homicide, Levinson this time helms a conspiracy- and ecological horror-tinged story (supposedly told via found footage confiscated by the federal government and then leaked) about mysterious events in an idyllic Maryland oceanside town. Flesh-eating somethings, zombies, and plague quarantines look to be just part of the queasy, blood-spattered mayhem.
You can see the trailer below; just wait for the scene with the man holding a fish by the mouth:
Filed under Film - New
Dept. of Endgames
Good enough that Colson Whitehead is covering the Olympics (somewhat post-facto) for Grantland. (His conversations with the W.G. Sebald app beat most of what NBC had to say.)
But even better that once his first piece actually takes him to London itself, Whitehead’s thoughts immediately turn towards the apocalypse:
…I started scoring events in terms of what they’d offer in a human-annihilation-type scenario. Offensewise, archery skills seemed like an obvious asset at first. But the archers’ high-tech bows wouldn’t survive a day of jumping off roofs, tromping through sewers, and escaping cannibal hordes. The bows were items of cruel but fragile beauty, with their carbon limbs and polyethylene strings, their V-bar extenders and side-rod stabilizer doohickeys. Great for the marksman’s art, but no good in a volume-kill scenario. You’d be better off with a simple machete. The qualifying heats made it clear that swimming is a good life skill or whatever, but only marathon-distance swimming was going to help you make it to the island after a squabble over rations or sex resulted in your tiny escape vessel overturning. Triathlon, I decided, with its endurance super-combo of swimming, biking, and running, solved multiple problem areas. I made a note to see it in person.
Whitehead published his own take on the zombie apocalypse last year, Zone One. Not so much archery in it, sadly enough—he left that to Suzanne Collins.
