Intertextuality and Bloody Walking Corpses.

After trawling through hours and hours of research to try and compile a good essay on intertextuality I realised I had too many words and had to cut large chunks out, chunks which actually I quite like about intertextuality. So without further ado im going to hijack the next 5 mins of your life and indeed, blog about intertextuality (again)..

ZOMBIES.

Zombies are indeed intertextual (I think) Indeed our modern perception of them is, see we all know what zombies are and how they are behave, we know what to expect when we hear the word zombie. A drolling shambling decomposing husk limping around, feeding endlessly on helpless survivors trying to fight off their inevitable doom.

and when we think of zombie films we think of several things.

1. Zombies (stereotypical)
2. Survivors
3. The end of the world
4. weapons (most likely bashing weapons and/or guns)
5. Screaming
6. Blood and gore
7. and some sort of safety point (house,mall,underground facility)

See these things are all intertextual, they are repeated over and over again.

Films and TV shows such as

-Dawn Of The Dead (Old and new)
-28 days later
-Resident Evil
-Land Of The Dead
-The Walking Dead
- Dead Set

etc etc etc ETC.

all have these intertextual tissues in them. Indeed they even span into other medias such as video games with media such as Dead Rising (where the lovely image above is from) House Of The Dead, and of course Resident Evil.

So anyway, in summary, zombies and the zombie genre are highly intertextual, much like how Dracula informed our mordern perception of zombies, most of the zombie media we see today was infact inspired by one man.

Enter Mr George A Romero..

Night Of The Living Dead indeed is quite responsible for shaping the zombies and zombie genre, we know and love today. It laid down the foundations for all that intertextuality we see over and over again in the huge bank of zombie media out there. Indeed George A Romero is guilty of using his own material over and over again, but we'll let him off.