Scan barcode
matt32's review against another edition
4.0
"This is the place I told you to expect. Here you shall pass among the fallen people, souls who have lost the good of intellect." - Dante's Inferno 3.16-18
If you're tempted by the notion of deeper sociocultural meaning to the genre of cinematic horror - if you believe there's worthwhile commentary to be found beyond the veneer of smut, thrill, and shock - then zombie movies are as sensible a place as any to start.
In fact, Romero's 1978 Dawn of the Dead has got to be one of the most resoundingly obvious examples of social commentary via cinematic horror. After all, it takes place in a shopping mall. The zombies that swarm the stores are crass and shamelessly impulsive, but don't they remind us a little of ourselves?
Unchecked consumerism can be fairly critiqued as, alternately, violently voracious, or just plain tacky. It's a point that has been made thoroughly about the '78 Dawn of the Dead, an endlessly fascinating and still relevant movie (which no doubt germinated this entire book; it's the longest and probably most passionately written chapter).
But compared to the huge volume of zombie movies, and their tendency to hide from cultural prominence yet re-emerge when needed, that observation merely scratches the surface. Indeed, this book came out in 2006, a prescient time - the dawn of a newfound zombie craze was just upon us.
And so here we have one of the many living testaments to the fact that you can enjoy the potato-chip-indulgence of zombie movies on the one hand, and form a cogent line of inquiry on the other hand, into the question: "Why?" What makes this subgenre so compelling that, from time to time, it just seems to take over wholesale?
When we take haphazard and obsessive collective notice of zombie fiction, as we did in the first decade and a half of the 2000s, to what, exactly, are we drawn? Well, there's the monsters themselves - as Prof. Paffenroth points out, zombies are walking, groaning liminal spaces. Familiar and foreign, human and demon, empathetic and mindless all at once: the sacred, defiled.
On top of that, though: you're probably not watching a zombie movie if it doesn't, at some point, imply: "Are we the baddies?" Zombie fiction almost inevitably features a total breakdown in social mores, and while this flavor of apocalypticism might allow us to live out fantasies of vigilantism, it also channels and portrays things we fear about our shared inner wickedness.
In both cases - the mindlessly ravenous zombies, the bickering distrustful humans - can be seen as offshoots of sin - hence the Christian lens offered by this book.
"Ah, wait, no way, you're kidding! He didn't just say what I think he did, did he?"
Yes, and I'll go a step further, that if you're a horror junkie, you don't need to have a Christian view of religion - or any religion at all - to find enjoyment here. For Gospel of the Dead is a work of scholarly theology, not one of those entreaties to convert-or-suffer. For one thing, it's not in the nature of this author to proselytize. (I can attest to this personally, because he was a college professor of mine!)
For another: even if religion is increasingly unpopular with millennials and we all recall the Moral Majority disfavorably and yadda yadda, line up ten avowed atheists and nine out of ten will be fans of Dante's Inferno, some hardcore. The Inferno, of course, is a mere one-third of [b:The Divine Comedy|6656|The Divine Comedy|Dante Alighieri|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1657540227l/6656._SY75_.jpg|809248], Dante's almost mathematical mapping of the theology of his time onto a poetic journey fashioned after the Greek and Roman epics. It nevertheless endures as the most popular third of La Commedia. It's a tale of reckoning. No matter one's views on theology, a parable about sinners having to pay the piper will always be relevant - especially when the imagery is as gruesome and as neatly structured as in the Inferno.
Despite the name of this book, it's Dante's Inferno, and not the Gospels, that provide the roadmap through which the author performs his Christian dissection of five classic zombie films.
Although the resulting niche is relatively narrow, the harmony this book achieves between zombie fiction and the consequences of unexamined, wanton sin - viewed through that grotesque Dantean lens - is pretty splendid. Paffenroth is not the first to propose pairing the zombie subgenre up with the Inferno, but the way he boils them down to indictments of human wickedness is thorough, well-argued, and - of no small importance - coated in the unashamed passion of an obvious horror film junkie. I've perhaps belabored the point already, but Paffenroth makes a compelling case that a book like this, grounded in one specific religion, can nonetheless offer something for modern readers of all sociopolitical persuasions: within this text, it is not just greed, wrath, and interpersonal betrayal that constitutes sin, but racism, sexism, classism, and even homophobia (bear in mind Gospel of the Living Dead dates back to 2006).
Each of the five aforementioned flicks gets a treatment that is never less than stimulating and consistent. The first chapter, on the original Night of the Living Dead, might offer the roughest sketch of a theological treatment. But as time goes on and the glut of Romero films continue, the increasing focus on the inability of humans to cooperate - indeed, their readiness to fall back on petty, violent differences and exploit each other wholesale - seems to vindicate quite squarely the author's overall theological thesis.
I mentioned earlier that the 1978 Dawn of the Living Dead chapter is the meat and potatoes of this book. From its many witty observations of the image of a zombie-saturated shopping mall, to its step-by-step accounting of the wickedness (and yet silliness) of the biker gang, it's a true MVP here. It cites Dante and doctrine alike, elucidating on the '78 film's warning about the hollowness of materialism - quite possibly the most crucial contribution that traditional religion can make in the screen-addicted 21st century.
I was, however, delighted to find, augmenting the chapters of the four Romero films, the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead - a wickedly wild ride of a movie itself. Throughout the other chapters on the Romero films, Paffenroth connects the moral vacuum of the zombies and the wicked humans to sin and hell. Here, instead, the shopping mall is a form of purgatory - a holding pen where life and even love can continue, but the soul aches for foregone hope. While this chapter's arguments lack some of the immediacy that bolstered its predecessors, it does offer some phenomenal and possibly underrated insight into the film's unique utilization of the redemption arc.
You know what's the only thing this book is really missing? More time. It was, as I said, prescient that it came out in 2006, but also an unlucky draw. Besides the four Romero films and the remakes, brief references are made to Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and even the Resident Evil franchise. But Gospel of the Living Dead had the bad luck of missing out entirely on Zombieland, World War Z, Train to Busan, and The Walking Dead - not just, for its time, a massive cultural institution of a television show, but a video game franchise that offered, through the characters of Clementine and Lee, some of the best-wrought relationships and dilemmas faced in post-apocalyptic survival horror.
If you dig the idea of a deep dive into zombie-flick-as-social-commentary, you have no shortage of books to potentially try. This author's own glossary lists what must be at least half of all the ones that had yet been written. For those in the exceedingly rare and weird Venn diagram overlap of Christian scholarship and horror movie fanaticism, Gospel of the Living Dead is an obvious choice for starting point. But even for those situated a foot or two outside, I'd reckon it's a fine a pick as any - it's a well-flowing, well-composed tome with a witty, relaxed, and thoroughly genuine author's voice.
If you're tempted by the notion of deeper sociocultural meaning to the genre of cinematic horror - if you believe there's worthwhile commentary to be found beyond the veneer of smut, thrill, and shock - then zombie movies are as sensible a place as any to start.
In fact, Romero's 1978 Dawn of the Dead has got to be one of the most resoundingly obvious examples of social commentary via cinematic horror. After all, it takes place in a shopping mall. The zombies that swarm the stores are crass and shamelessly impulsive, but don't they remind us a little of ourselves?
Unchecked consumerism can be fairly critiqued as, alternately, violently voracious, or just plain tacky. It's a point that has been made thoroughly about the '78 Dawn of the Dead, an endlessly fascinating and still relevant movie (which no doubt germinated this entire book; it's the longest and probably most passionately written chapter).
But compared to the huge volume of zombie movies, and their tendency to hide from cultural prominence yet re-emerge when needed, that observation merely scratches the surface. Indeed, this book came out in 2006, a prescient time - the dawn of a newfound zombie craze was just upon us.
And so here we have one of the many living testaments to the fact that you can enjoy the potato-chip-indulgence of zombie movies on the one hand, and form a cogent line of inquiry on the other hand, into the question: "Why?" What makes this subgenre so compelling that, from time to time, it just seems to take over wholesale?
When we take haphazard and obsessive collective notice of zombie fiction, as we did in the first decade and a half of the 2000s, to what, exactly, are we drawn? Well, there's the monsters themselves - as Prof. Paffenroth points out, zombies are walking, groaning liminal spaces. Familiar and foreign, human and demon, empathetic and mindless all at once: the sacred, defiled.
On top of that, though: you're probably not watching a zombie movie if it doesn't, at some point, imply: "Are we the baddies?" Zombie fiction almost inevitably features a total breakdown in social mores, and while this flavor of apocalypticism might allow us to live out fantasies of vigilantism, it also channels and portrays things we fear about our shared inner wickedness.
In both cases - the mindlessly ravenous zombies, the bickering distrustful humans - can be seen as offshoots of sin - hence the Christian lens offered by this book.
"Ah, wait, no way, you're kidding! He didn't just say what I think he did, did he?"
Yes, and I'll go a step further, that if you're a horror junkie, you don't need to have a Christian view of religion - or any religion at all - to find enjoyment here. For Gospel of the Dead is a work of scholarly theology, not one of those entreaties to convert-or-suffer. For one thing, it's not in the nature of this author to proselytize. (I can attest to this personally, because he was a college professor of mine!)
For another: even if religion is increasingly unpopular with millennials and we all recall the Moral Majority disfavorably and yadda yadda, line up ten avowed atheists and nine out of ten will be fans of Dante's Inferno, some hardcore. The Inferno, of course, is a mere one-third of [b:The Divine Comedy|6656|The Divine Comedy|Dante Alighieri|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1657540227l/6656._SY75_.jpg|809248], Dante's almost mathematical mapping of the theology of his time onto a poetic journey fashioned after the Greek and Roman epics. It nevertheless endures as the most popular third of La Commedia. It's a tale of reckoning. No matter one's views on theology, a parable about sinners having to pay the piper will always be relevant - especially when the imagery is as gruesome and as neatly structured as in the Inferno.
Despite the name of this book, it's Dante's Inferno, and not the Gospels, that provide the roadmap through which the author performs his Christian dissection of five classic zombie films.
Although the resulting niche is relatively narrow, the harmony this book achieves between zombie fiction and the consequences of unexamined, wanton sin - viewed through that grotesque Dantean lens - is pretty splendid. Paffenroth is not the first to propose pairing the zombie subgenre up with the Inferno, but the way he boils them down to indictments of human wickedness is thorough, well-argued, and - of no small importance - coated in the unashamed passion of an obvious horror film junkie. I've perhaps belabored the point already, but Paffenroth makes a compelling case that a book like this, grounded in one specific religion, can nonetheless offer something for modern readers of all sociopolitical persuasions: within this text, it is not just greed, wrath, and interpersonal betrayal that constitutes sin, but racism, sexism, classism, and even homophobia (bear in mind Gospel of the Living Dead dates back to 2006).
Each of the five aforementioned flicks gets a treatment that is never less than stimulating and consistent. The first chapter, on the original Night of the Living Dead, might offer the roughest sketch of a theological treatment. But as time goes on and the glut of Romero films continue, the increasing focus on the inability of humans to cooperate - indeed, their readiness to fall back on petty, violent differences and exploit each other wholesale - seems to vindicate quite squarely the author's overall theological thesis.
I mentioned earlier that the 1978 Dawn of the Living Dead chapter is the meat and potatoes of this book. From its many witty observations of the image of a zombie-saturated shopping mall, to its step-by-step accounting of the wickedness (and yet silliness) of the biker gang, it's a true MVP here. It cites Dante and doctrine alike, elucidating on the '78 film's warning about the hollowness of materialism - quite possibly the most crucial contribution that traditional religion can make in the screen-addicted 21st century.
I was, however, delighted to find, augmenting the chapters of the four Romero films, the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead - a wickedly wild ride of a movie itself. Throughout the other chapters on the Romero films, Paffenroth connects the moral vacuum of the zombies and the wicked humans to sin and hell. Here, instead, the shopping mall is a form of purgatory - a holding pen where life and even love can continue, but the soul aches for foregone hope. While this chapter's arguments lack some of the immediacy that bolstered its predecessors, it does offer some phenomenal and possibly underrated insight into the film's unique utilization of the redemption arc.
You know what's the only thing this book is really missing? More time. It was, as I said, prescient that it came out in 2006, but also an unlucky draw. Besides the four Romero films and the remakes, brief references are made to Shaun of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and even the Resident Evil franchise. But Gospel of the Living Dead had the bad luck of missing out entirely on Zombieland, World War Z, Train to Busan, and The Walking Dead - not just, for its time, a massive cultural institution of a television show, but a video game franchise that offered, through the characters of Clementine and Lee, some of the best-wrought relationships and dilemmas faced in post-apocalyptic survival horror.
If you dig the idea of a deep dive into zombie-flick-as-social-commentary, you have no shortage of books to potentially try. This author's own glossary lists what must be at least half of all the ones that had yet been written. For those in the exceedingly rare and weird Venn diagram overlap of Christian scholarship and horror movie fanaticism, Gospel of the Living Dead is an obvious choice for starting point. But even for those situated a foot or two outside, I'd reckon it's a fine a pick as any - it's a well-flowing, well-composed tome with a witty, relaxed, and thoroughly genuine author's voice.
xterminal's review
4.0
Kim Paffenroth, Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Vision of Hell on Earth (Baylor University Press, 2006)
I have to say that just about the last book I ever expected to see would be a religious deconstruction of George A. Romero's zombie flicks. And yet that's exactly what we have here; divinity student Paffenroth (who has since graduated into horror-writing himself) offers up a dissection of Romero's films that is quite unlike any other I've ever seen-- he's looking for the religious side of Romero's messages about life, the universe, and everything. And while Paffenroth does make some of the same mistakes a number of other amateur film critics do, especially when discussing Night of the Living Dead (there's this odd belief among amateur film critics that the casting of Ben Jones was some sort of attack on the evil empire, rather than a last-minute casting decision because Jones happened to be the only guy around who could act well enough—the guy originally cast for the part was white, and the racial element of the film is entirely accidental, as has been repeatedly stated in more scholarly discussions of the film), it's hard not to be impressed with Paffenroth's logic. The guy's obviously done his homework. Most of it, anyway.
Paffenroth opens his chapters (each is dedicated to a specific film; he considers Romero's first four zombie films and Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead for comparison purposes) with a summary of the film he's looking at, and then a pretty standard deconstruction of Romero's criticisms of contemporary society. (This is where the whole overrating of Ben Jones' stature comes into play, obviously.) Where Paffenroth differs from most critics is that he's looking at all this through the lens of being a divinity student. I don't mean to suggest that he's tossing in altar calls at random places, but the Christian viewpoint on things is different than the viewpoint one is likely to find in most film criticism. I grant you, sometimes it's a pretty subtle difference, and critics of the book (metacritics?) who have had a tough time seeing the difference between Paffenroth's take on Romero and that of any hundred others who have written articles about the similarities between zombies and mall shoppers are worth reading; you may find yourself having the same difficulty. I don't believe that makes this book one iota less worth reading, but your mileage may vary. ****
I have to say that just about the last book I ever expected to see would be a religious deconstruction of George A. Romero's zombie flicks. And yet that's exactly what we have here; divinity student Paffenroth (who has since graduated into horror-writing himself) offers up a dissection of Romero's films that is quite unlike any other I've ever seen-- he's looking for the religious side of Romero's messages about life, the universe, and everything. And while Paffenroth does make some of the same mistakes a number of other amateur film critics do, especially when discussing Night of the Living Dead (there's this odd belief among amateur film critics that the casting of Ben Jones was some sort of attack on the evil empire, rather than a last-minute casting decision because Jones happened to be the only guy around who could act well enough—the guy originally cast for the part was white, and the racial element of the film is entirely accidental, as has been repeatedly stated in more scholarly discussions of the film), it's hard not to be impressed with Paffenroth's logic. The guy's obviously done his homework. Most of it, anyway.
Paffenroth opens his chapters (each is dedicated to a specific film; he considers Romero's first four zombie films and Zack Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead for comparison purposes) with a summary of the film he's looking at, and then a pretty standard deconstruction of Romero's criticisms of contemporary society. (This is where the whole overrating of Ben Jones' stature comes into play, obviously.) Where Paffenroth differs from most critics is that he's looking at all this through the lens of being a divinity student. I don't mean to suggest that he's tossing in altar calls at random places, but the Christian viewpoint on things is different than the viewpoint one is likely to find in most film criticism. I grant you, sometimes it's a pretty subtle difference, and critics of the book (metacritics?) who have had a tough time seeing the difference between Paffenroth's take on Romero and that of any hundred others who have written articles about the similarities between zombies and mall shoppers are worth reading; you may find yourself having the same difficulty. I don't believe that makes this book one iota less worth reading, but your mileage may vary. ****
More...