Tragic? Absolutely. Maybe all I needed was the proper motivation, maybe my love for the automobile interfered, but the fact remains that as someone who is irreparably infatuated with Steampunk and its various corollary’s, it’s almost unfathomable that I haven’t at least been in a sidecar.

My Lust is Palpable:

“You are my reason for existence. The light that lessons my thirst. I am going to love you….forever.”

Forever? Really? I can barely decide on a brand of fabric softener for the 3 month old pile of laundry sitting in the corner of my room, let alone choose a significant other for all eternity. Yet if the over-saturation of sympathetic vampire flicks has taught us anything it’s that loneliness driven teen angst is the perfect vehicle for the 90 year-old vampire trapped in a 17 year-olds body, to taken advantage of. The irony here is that lust, romance, violence, the gamut of interpersonal emotions, means nothing against the backdrop of immortality. How can I, as a viewer, feel invested in that which has nothing to loose other than the prospect of replacing the “lets longingly stare at each other endlessly in a field of poppies”, for the far more realistic “I can’t believe you gave me another friendship ring on our 75th anniversary.” Nothing of real meaning can be lost, and therefore it looses all real meaning.

In Christopher Nolan’s first feature length film “Following” a Don Draper-esque thief, familiarly named Cobb, breaks into an apartment with the curiously in toe protagonist and says the following philosophical treatise about burglary: “You take it away… to show them what they had.” One can never know the extant to which they valued certain things in their life until these objects are removed. While this inherently represents the largest weakness in Vampire Romance media, conversely, it is the strongest attribute of the Zombie genre. People running away from cannibalistic living dead, against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic existence, have lost everything that used to hold their world together; their job, a government, and loved ones. They love harder, behave more violently, and do things they would never be capable of if the rules they had been living under still held true.

This leads us to what I believe to be the most visceral truth about the Zombie genre; It is not about the monsters running after people, but rather, it is about the people descending into monstrous behavior. Victims of a zombie uprising do not have a vampiric eternity to dissect the meaning of their existence, they have between now and “when the wooden blockade on the door fails” to get shit done. What are you capable of when stripped of the rules that make you civil and you are left with only the most basic of instincts- Survive?

Looking at a pool of media that is saturated with bloodsuckers of all types it’s not hard to imagine that this trend is likely to fail in the near future. Twilight, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, The Gates, Daybreakers; these are just a few of the vampire themed movies and shows that have come out over the last year or so, and aside from True Blood, they all have hollow shells for characters that allow tween girls and lonely, cat-obsessed housewives, to inject themselves into these objects of vampire obsession. People are going to crave more, and they will turn to a genre that satisfies this character driven voraciousness that delivers.

So bring on AMC’s “The Walking Dead”!

If you don’t know, now you know.

A Clark+Huot fan made trailer.

To quote my Brother, Max Tedaldi who writes for Doug Liman’s action blog 30ninjas.com: “The trailer is an attempt by a film’s producers to excite audiences into buying a ticket. Recently, dedicated fans and skilled editors have begun to ask the question. Why can’t the reverse be true? Why can’t we claim the awesome power of the trailer as our own? Why can’t audiences use the trailer in an attempt to excite movie producers into creating a movie?”

So I pose these questions to you Winnipeg Office; “What movie do you want to see made?” and more importantly “What trailer should we create”.

Onamountaintop.com allows users to say whatever it is they want to say with no accounts, no friends and no poking. Once the user’s entry fades to white, their words are gone forever. Ultimately, it’s a lighthearted look at social media, something that is becoming more and more a part of our daily lives. So, shout from the mountaintop and let your words fade into the valleys.

Have fun!