Marco Polo and the Zombie

The following excerpt is from Marco Polo’s diary. This passage was meant to be included in Il Milione, the published version of his diary from his travels in Asia, but it was ultimately censored by the Catholic Church. As scholarly and informed as The Zombie Survival Guide has proven to be, the passage found there about Marco Polo is sadly inaccurate. Here is the real story of Marco Polo and the zombie.

I was traveling to Xanadu to meet with the Great Khan with my faithful guide. We had just passed through the city of Kan-Chau and night was descending upon us. We decided to set up our tents and rest the night, for we could not make it to the next town, Etzina. We built a small fire to keep warm and went to sleep. A few hours later, we were awakened by a rustling and moaning in the bushes. I sent my guide to see what sort of animal was in distress. It was a man! He had been injured and was bleeding from wounds on his arms that looked as if he had been mauled by an animal. His clothes were torn and stained red with his blood. The man fell unconscious when my guide helped him over to our fire. We cleaned and bound his wounds while he slept. We waited until morning to see if he would awaken, but he did not. He had expired over night. We said a prayer for him. Then we commenced to dig a shallow grave to save the unfortunate man from eternal damnation. Midway through our digging, we heard a moan. Had we mistaken this man for a corpse? I would have sworn to the Great Khan himself that the man had been dead. My guide bent over the man to check on him. Suddenly, the man took the guide by the shoulders and tore out his neck with his teeth. As I stood horrified, the man continued to devour my guide as the lifeblood poured over his face. In a panic, I looked around for a weapon. I took my sword from my pack and stabbed the man in the chest. He barely looked up from the guide, exhibiting not even discomfort from the mortal wound. I stared in disbelief, not knowing what to do. I freed my blade from the monster and decapitated it with one swift stroke. His body stopped moving, but the head still bit and snarled at me. I buried the corpses and hurriedly left, wanting to get as far away from the horrific scene as possible. I took the monster’s head with me as a gift for the great Khan as a sign of my loyalty. I wrapped it up in many layers of cloth. When I arrived at Etzina, I purchased a glass jar to carry the monster’s still animated head in. After a long and arduous journey, I presented this to the great Khan. He was very pleased with it and left it on display for all to see.

**This post is for Velvet's September Zombies.**

May

May is a very sweet and odd girl. As a child, she was ostracized in grade school because she had to wear an eye patch to try to correct her lazy eye. The only friend she had was the creepy doll her mother gave her that she wasn’t allowed to take out of the case. As an adult, her doll continues to be her only friend while she works as a vet’s assistant and enjoys making her own clothes at home as an accomplished seamstress. One day, she observes a boy that works at the auto shop from afar and falls in love with him and his beautiful hands. She goes out with him for a while, but scares him away with her odd behavior. This trend of people disappointing her and things generally going wrong extends to all of her friends and endeavors to reach out to people, so she decides to follow her mother’s advice: “If you can’t find a friend, make one.” On Halloween, May arms herself with vet’s tools and a cooler to gather the best of her friends and make her very own best friend.

This is an odd little gem of a film that I heard about on my search for more horror films to watch. It took me a while to find the DVD, but it was definitely worth the wait. May is a wonderful modern retelling of Mary Shelley’s classic novel, Frankenstein.

The beginning of the film just makes me smile. May is so odd and sweet. Her budding romance with Adam is so cute and it seems as if they are made for each other. She is incredibly creepy and nonchalantly talks about a dog’s stitches bursting, his guts spilling all over the yard, and dying because of a mistake by the vet. He makes weird cannibal romance films. Their relationship doesn’t work out and Adam ends it, but doesn’t extend even the opportunity for friendship to May.

I connect with May. I feel like I would be friends with her if she weren’t homicidal. Like May, I also had to wear an eye patch as a child. I have never heard of anyone else having to do that, so I immediately felt a kinship with her. Her mother is incredibly overprotective, yet seemed really cold towards May. The beautiful porcelain doll in a glass box is a great metaphor for May’s relationship with her mother, with May as the doll, protected but alone in her box. This image is reinforced when she dresses up as the doll for Halloween in the final night of the film. It saddened me when May really tries to find any sort of relationship and the results always proves disastrous. Although her actions are extreme and people hopefully wouldn’t do that in real life, the motives behind it are understandable by anyone. Everyone can relate to feeling alone and wanting to connect with the people around them. In this way, May is like Dr. Frankenstein and the monster in one. She sets out to create a creature, but feels the anguish and loneliness that the creature feels. This character would be very easy to dislike and even demonize if it weren’t handled as well as Angela Bettis did in the film. May does some very odd things, even before she resorts to murder, but the viewer is with her the entire way because of the endearing quality she has. She remained sweet in her own odd way, even while murdering people and sewing their parts together.

One of the aspects of the film that I liked is the doll that is May’s only close friend. It talks to her throughout the film. At first, the viewer figures that May just talks to it like a person would talk out loud to themselves. Later on in the film, when May’s life is crumbling around her, the doll seems to be screaming at her, conveyed by soft, incoherent murmurings and the cracking of the glass surrounding the doll. The cracking gets deafening when May talks to Adam to try to spend time together and he rejects her, partly because she yelled very loudly in an effort to silence the doll. The moment where May’s world really unravels completely is accompanied by the destruction of the doll and the glass box that protects it, which extends the May as a doll metaphor.

This film is very memorable with its almost fairy tale feel coupled with grisly scenes of murder. It straddles the line between horror and comedy, resulting in great black comedy. I would recommend this unique film to just about everyone just to get it out there, but it seems like such a quirky movie that only a select few would actually like it.

My rating: 9/10 fishmuffins

**This post is for Velvet's September Zombies.**

Frankenstein's Monster

Captain Robert Walton cultivated a close relationship with Victor Frankenstein, so after Victor’s death he became distraught and then enraged. He holds the creature Victor created responsible for his friend’s death and takes up Victor’s vow to rid the world of the violent creature. The creature, contrary to what is believed about him, simply seeks peace and an accepting relationship with someone. He is constantly on the run from Walton until he decides to settle in Italy. A mute woman that he saved from being sold and raped decides to stay with them and act as his companion. Walton sees her as disgusting for having any sort of relationship with her and then kills her. Enraged and hurt, the creature vows to take his revenge on Walton’s family. Will this circle of revenge ever end? Will the creature ever find peace?

Frankenstein is one of my new favorite books and I have high expectations for novels that attempt to continue the story. This novel reaches and exceeds those expectations beautifully. Susan Heyboer O’Keefe’s style is similar to Shelley’s, but makes this new text her own with a different point of view. The entire narrative is presented as the creature’s diary, allowing him to express his depth of emotion and his innermost thoughts in his own voice. As with the original, his failures in creating sustainable relationships with other people break my heart. He isn’t just a mute monster, but a heartbroken man who lashes out when he is constantly rejected. Although he may commit atrocious acts, the reader sees his struggle and sympathizes with him. Walton grows to be more of a monster with his relentless pursuit, constant violence, and resistance to listening to reason.

My favorite part of the book is that it retains the interesting internal philosophical debate that is seen throughout Frankenstein. What is a person’s humanity dependant on? Of all the characters in the novel, I see the creature as the most human because of his willingness to accept anyone. He attempted a friendship with the lowest of the low of society and felt a kinship with them. Many of the other characters reject him based on his appearance and assume that he committed terrible acts when he did not. Even the woman he falls in love with who is undeniably beautiful proves to be one of the most monstrous and sociopathic characters.

I absolutely love Frankenstein’s Monster. Susan Heyboer O’Keefe treads the line between mimicking Shelley’s prose and keeping her own identity as an author beautifully. The story ranges from touching to tragic to violent and it all rings true. I look forward to seeing more from her.

My rating: 4.5/5 fishmuffins

**This book comes out October 5. Pre-order it here.**

**This post is for Velvet's September Zombies.**

Frankenstein's Bride

Jonathan Goodall is a wealthy Englishman who befriends Victor Frankenstein in 1825. Soon after their meeting, he is asked by the scientist to help restore the speaking voice of Maria Clementi, the mute opera singer with a mysterious past. Victor’s scholarly interest rapidly turns to an all encompassing obsession. Jonathan struggles to help Victor return to reality, but a hulking figure appears around the Frankenstein house. When Victor’s wife and child are killed, Jonathan immediately suspects the mysterious figure. Victor dismisses the possibility and, after a very short depression, redoubles his efforts in pursuing Maria. Can Jonathan awaken Victor from his obsession and stop the murderer from striking again?

Frankenstein’s Bride occurs after the events in Mary Shelley’s classic novel, but with a major change: Victor created a mate for his creation. It’s an intriguing premise, but the concept in actuality has many flaws. Hilary Bailey doesn’t make it clear what events in the original occurred in relation to her novel. She decided to make a random person not in the first novel the narrator. He doesn’t figure anything out until the very end when everything is spelled out for him, but the “mystery” is pretty glaringly obvious from the beginning. She also decided to change the aspects of the main characters. Frankenstein’s monster is reduced in stature (from around 8 feet tall to 6 ½ feet tall) and in intelligence. One of the best things about the creature is that he speaks with the eloquence of an intellectual and has the capacity for good or evil. His shorter stature makes him into a regular, but deformed man who is mentally feeble and barely able to speak. The philosophical implications about the nature of man are absent because of these changes. Victor’s character is also very much changed. In the original, Frankenstein and his creation can be sympathized with. Neither is completely good or evil. In this novel, Victor is characterized as cruel, bordering on evil. The ambiguity is gone and what is left is a badly plotted, slow moving melodramatic story.

The other big problem I had with the book is its plausibility within its own world and the way it affects my suspension of disbelief. The reader is expected to believe that Victor is able to physically overpower his creation by himself and somehow successfully imprison him. Even if a dozen people imprisoned him, he could easily enough escape based on his strength and cunning. Also, the bride looks like anybody while Frankenstein sticks out like a sore thumb. The only weak reason for this is that Victor figured out a different way to reanimate which isn’t described in the least, which I found very disappointing.

Besides the author’s decisions, the actual writing is enjoyable. I also liked how deliciously vicious and manipulative the Bride acted. I was totally on her side for most of it because how evil Victor was written. The ending also made me smile.

Overall, Frankenstein’s Bride was a disappointment, but there were some shining moments within the text. For a much better sequel that follows the original text, I would recommend Frankenstein’s Monster by Susan Heyboer O’Keefe.

My rating: 2/5 fishmuffins

George Romero by Sprites

So io9.com posted about Kirby Krackle's Zombie Apocalypse and some of the people in the comments posted their own favorite zombie songs. One was Laura Shigihara's There's a Zombie on Your Lawn, the theme song from Plants vs. Zombies, which is totally awesome. The other song was Sprites' song George Romero based around George Romero's criticism of American consumerism, Dawn of the Dead. I just had to buy it from iTunes right away. It's really catchy and references people like George Romero, Tom Savini, Sam Raimi, and Dario Argento. If you don't know who these people are, please at least Google them. They are incredibly influential people in the horror genre, not to mention are all involved in great classic films. Enjoy!

Frankenstein (1931)

Maniacal Dr. Henry Frankenstein is obsessed with giving life to the dead and finally figures out how. He, along with his bumbling assistant Fritz, succeed in giving a man made of the parts of the dead live with the help of lightning. However, Fritz brought the doctor an abnormal brain instead of a normal, healthy brain, leading the doctor and his friends to believe that the creature is a violent, horrific oaf. In actuality, the creature seems childlike and innocent, but blunders because of lack of guidance. After the creature inadvertently murders someone, the village is after him with torches and pitchforks. Can Henry kill his creation before it strikes again?

This movie is more famous than the book it is based on. If you ask anyone anything about Frankenstein, they will probably be thinking of this film. I have grown up watching this and other Universal monster movies. They are what cultivated and inspired my love of the horror genre, so it has a special place in my heart. Colin Clive is the greatest Dr. Frankenstein, with his smoldering, slightly mad stares and random screaming. He is far from the Victor Frankenstein from the novel, but the character he creates is so striking and memorable, that I can’t complain. Boris Karloff is the master at portraying this version of the creature, from his half lidded stare to his stiff legged walk. The makeup and costuming is amazing for its time, even if it caused the actor lifelong back problems because of the back brace, padding, and 13 pound shoes he had to wear. He is a great and dedicated actor.

The general plot of the film, although drastically different than the novel, is still interesting and relevant today. This is evident with the almost innumerable parodies, sequels, and spinoffs. Even films about irresponsible science like Splice are still obviously inspired by this one film. It was censored in its time because of blasphemy, encouraging immoral behavior, and scenes that were considered too graphic. One scene in particular that is still shocking today is the death of the little girl the creature throws into the lake. It’s still taboo to kill a child during the course of a modern horror film. If it is done, it’s usually implied or done off screen, in opposition to the typical bloody, graphic deaths that are shown. I really respect and admire the people willing to do this despite the public’s backlash, especially back in the 1930’s.

Although this is a great, classic monster film, I have real problem with some of the changes made in the conversion from novel to film. Making the creature mute and taking away his intelligence really destroys the philosophical implications of the nature of man and how much of our behavior comes inherently or is influenced by our surroundings. He was supposed to be man in his natural state and he turns towards violence only when he is only met with violence and disgust from others. The vastly intelligent creature is really reduced to what everyone thought him to be: a monster.

Frankenstein proves to be an enduring film that still inspires the filmmakers of today. However, when compared to the novel it’s based on, the movie pales in comparison.

My rating: 8/10 fishmuffins

** This post is for Velvet's September Zombies. **

Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus

Victor Frankenstein was a precocious child, inspired by and obsessed with the scientists of the past. In university, he continues his obsession, which culminates in the creation of a man made of corpses. As the creature awakens, Victor is horrified and disgusted and runs away. He becomes stricken with illness shortly afterwards and his childhood friend, Henry Clerval, helps nurse him back to health. After four months, Victor finally recovers, only to find that his little brother, William, has been murdered. Sure that the fiend he created is responsible, Victor returns to his home. The tormented creature eventually reveals himself to his furious creator and relays the events leading to William’s murder. After his heart-rending story, he begs his creator to make a woman for him who will accept him and become his mate. Victor agrees, but has second thoughts. Should he create another monster like the one already in existence? If he decides against this second blasphemy, what repercussions will he and his family have to endure?

Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein is an iconic work that has spawned countless spin-offs, sequels, remakes, copies, and re-imaginings. It’s hardly surprising considering the eloquence and skill that she exhibits. With all the allusions and references to literature and works of science, she shows her vast education, which is even surprising today for an eighteen year old. I absolutely love this book, but I used to hate it. I remember reading it as a child and finding it boring and hard to understand. As an adult, I see the different philosophies being illustrated and the significance of its place in the romantic era. It explores themes such as the nature of man, the effect of isolation verses society on man, science vs. nature, and the ethics of science, supported by imagery, allusions, language, and even pace. These are themes that science fiction authors are still writing about today, as seen in the film Splice, Scott Sigler’s novel Ancestor, and countless others. This is really the epitome of the gothic novel, which conveys its messages with a dose of horror and suspense.

The characters and their development is really what make Frankenstein special. I can see the suffering and anger on both Victor’s and the creature’s side. Victor is a good person who got swept up in his fervor for science without thinking about the consequences. After making the creature, he tries to move forward with his life, but his past follows him. The creature, on the other hand, is actually a sympathetic character. Far from the shuffling, silent monster seen in film, he exhibits great intelligence and is shown to be inherently good. After being consistently rejected and abused by man, he turns to violence and really only to mimic how people have always treated him. He only ever desired to be loved and accepted. I tend to side more with the monster because he was created and then immediately abandoned with no instruction on how to act or survive in the human world. I find the fact that Victor finds this acceptable and proceeds to further antagonize his creation reprehensible.

I could probably go on and on about how Frankenstein is one of the best books ever written, so I’ll stop here. This work is still relevant today and can both horrify and interest modern audiences. I think everyone should read this book at least once.

My rating: 5/5 fishmuffins

** You can read the entire book online for free here. **

** This post is for Velvet's September Zombies.**