Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Incorporating pop culture into academia is quite the trick - you've got to remain true to source material in two very different areas. This collection of essays written by English or philosophy professors at 4-year colleges (or graduate students working on their Ph.D's) gets the philosophy right yet often stumbles on the pop culture details. It's important to get the pop culture details right because it indicates that you're taking the subject seriously and not just using it as a springboard for something else. Any horror fan worth his favorite Halloween mask can tell you that vampires and zombies have been portrayed in multiple ways in books and novels, and one has to be very careful in making generalizations. Given that horror fans tend to be a bit more obsessive than fans of other stripes, you'd better keep them happy!
The best essays in this book are the most focused. Several chapters are devoted to George Romero's "Dead" series, and these chapters (written by Matthew Walker, Simon Clark, and Leah A. Murray) have an appropriately fixed gaze on a small set of films that have been perhaps overanalyzed - and have surprisingly fresh things to say about them. Kudos! Noel Carroll's essay on the holiday of Halloween and Phillip Cole's exploration of Rousseau's philosophy as it relates to vampirism are two of the better essays I've read about the supernatural in a long, long while. I suspect they will be reprinted and quoted from elsewhere. And the cover is undoubtably one of the best photos I've seen on an occult-themed book in the recent past.
As for the worst? I am skeptical when the authors attempt to broaden the definition of "zombie" to Philip K. Dick-style androids or pod people, or when they ignore that many modern movie zombies really aren't undead at all but infected with bizarre viruses, or when they reference brain-eating as typical of all movie zombies even though it's only closely identified with "Return of the Living Dead." Playing too loosely with the facts suggest you haven't studied them that closely in the first place and are compensating by broadening your spectrum. And the "Treehouse of Horror"-type author biographical notes near the end are too jokey for my tastes and make it seem as if the contributors weren't serious about their work appearing in a pop culture book.
Given that the good-to-bad ratio is 50-50 I've given this book 3 stars. I can see it being immensely inspirational to any thoughtful horror or fantasy author looking for fresh approaches to venerable horrors. This would also be very useful for the Boris Karloffs and Robert Englunds of the future in trying to develop character motivation when portraying monsters. For those reasons and to those readers, I recommend it.
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Since 1968's Night of the Living Dead, zombie culture has steadily limped and clawed its way into the center of popular culture. Today, zombies and vampires have taken over TV shows, comic books, cartoons, video games, and movies. Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy drags the theories of famous philosophers like Socrates and Descartes into the territory of the undead, exploring questions like: Why do vampires and vegetarians share a similar worldview? Why is understanding zombies the key to health care reform?And what does "healthy in mind and body" mean for vampires and zombies? Answers to these questions and more await readers brave enough to make this fun, philosophical foray into the undead.
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