Is the Key to Violence Awareness?

andrea 110
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When I became a mother, a part of me shied away from the horror I had enjoyed all of my life. The years of reading Stephen King and watching bloody horror films... I suddenly realized that not only was I someone's mother and had to be a good influence, but that the horrific things in a lot of those movies were even scarier with a child to think about. This was even truer when it came to psychological thrillers like the original "Last House on the Left," and films of that caliper.

As she began to grow, and we started to return to some of the horrific things that had once attracted us like spectators at a train wreck, I heard more and more about horror and violence being responsible for outrageous societal horrors like Columbine. Then the so-called experts started saying that allowing children to watch television and film violence and experience violent video games desensitized them.

It's easy to fall for that when you have nothing in front of you to compare it to, but history is ripe with violence, including thousands of years of war, atrocities like the Spanish Inquisition, various witch trials and the Holocaust, and bloodthirsty killers like Elizabeth Bathory and Gilles de Rais, just to name two.

For centuries, human nature compelled mankind toward brutality, but as we became (supposedly,) more civilized, we started to cry out against the violence we carried with us from the very cradle of civilization itself.

As I grew into adulthood, having experienced some pretty evil things in my life, I was surprised to learn how many other people, men and women, who had suffered the same types of atrocities that had been committed against me as child. The more people I learned of this from, the more I started to think that the world itself was going mad.

Then it hit me. The world was always mad; we just have the means of telling more and more people about it thanks to the constant growth of communication and media. The truth is in our history, probably embedded in our very DNA. Mankind has been on a spiraling power struggle since he climbed up out of the swamps and staggered toward a cave. He stopped long enough to club his fellow cavechick on the head along the way, and dragged her off against her will. Another man came along, coveting the cavechick of his neighbor. The first brutal acts of rape and murder all within the first few hours of on two legs...

Yes, I realize I'm being blase about the whole thing, as if I know. I probably don't, but I do know that blaming television, films and video games for violent behavior is not the answer.

As a mother, I have always felt it was my top priority to be honest with my child about everything she asked me. If she asked about sex, I geared our conversation toward her age level. If she asked me about murder, I approached it from a standpoint she could digest. Opening the lines of communication with her when she was old enough to speak may seem like I didn't offer her much of a childhood, but she is so innocent compared to her group of friends. Her thirteen year old best friend just went through a pregnancy scare and was ready to commit suicide rather than tell her mother about it. We sat down and talked about the situation, the consequences and the behavior like human beings, and while I know she'll make her share of mistakes, I also feel confident that she would come to me, rather than commit suicide or homicide over them.

I know I've rambled along here, referencing some pretty crazy things that might even seem random to you, but communication is the key. I know it is. This last week, I found myself in a position no mother of a teenage girls wants to be in. A fifteen year old boy on the school bus was literally trying to molest my daughter. A fifteen year old boy whose parents don't pay attention to him, who has no sense of self or community. The really sad thing about the whole ordeal is that in reporting the incident, she finds herself "punished" by having to limit where "she" sits and goes. But the thing is, she came to me. She came and told me what was going on even though she was afraid I might resort to "violence" and murder the little bastard.


It all boils down to awareness and communication, maybe even a little bit of acceptance. Violence is a wretched thing, whether it's against our fellow human beings or even animals, but it does happen. Being made aware of the difference between what is real and acceptable and what is not acceptable at a young age may hold the power to make all the difference. Maybe I'm wrong. *shrugs* But I do know that my fourteen year old isn't going to be heading into school with a shotgun in her lifetime, no matter how much the jerks at school tease her.

Why Write Horror in a Horrific World and Time?

Recently a friend of mine asked me why I wanted to write about zombies, especially in light of dismal world circumstances. "Isn't there enough doom and gloom in the world without adding to it with another apocalyptic horror story?"

My answer was complicated. I knew why I wanted to write about zombies, but I wasn't sure how I could put it into words so someone else might understand my reasoning. Did you ever see that "Scared Straight" program the correctional facilities do to youth offenders? Instead of sending you to prison, we're going to give you a hardcore glimpse at what awaits you if you don't straighten up and fly right. The concept I'm employing for myself is similar, only with zombies and life.

I reached a point where I started to feel like my own life was askew. Not that I'm eating brains, or anything horrid, but I had fallen into some serious patterns in my life that were detrimental to my physical and mental health. Sluggishly moaning through life, the purpose behind my every move revolved around the next paycheck, the next meal, the next night's sleep... I felt like I was hardly existing in a world that was slowly crumbling down around me.

Depression? Maybe a little, but for the most part it was just this empty, lacking feeling in my life. The last big risk I had really taken had been going back to college at 27, and after I graduated I fell into a comfortable, but risky freelancing lifestyle. Life was comfortable. Even if our lifestyle didn't always feel comfortable there was a lot of pressure and fear about maintaining our comfort level. Zombies don't think about comfort. Zombies don't think about anything, they just go through the motions and devour in order to maintain their existence. To me, that is the same thing as sacrificing your wants to exist comfortably.

So, my zombie desire awakened. Suddenly I started to think about life in a new way. I thought about humanity, and how all too often things seem impersonal and disconnected in our world now. I wondered if there were an apocalypse tomorrow, how would people react. It made me think of this old episode of the Twilight Zone. A man spent a year building a fall out shelter for his family, and all of his friends laughed at him. Then the big one hit and when he and his family fled to their shelter, no one else had a safe place to go. The friends became violent, insistent that he owed them space in his fallout shelter. Even for the time it was filmed, it was brutal.

I started to question myself about how I might react in an apocalypse situation. We tend to live in a remote area, but we're also along a major highway. We have a nice plot of land and could easily slip into the woods if needed, but if people came to us looking for help would I turn them away? Would I run, constantly motivated by my own safety over everything else? Now, I don't want to be a hero, but I certainly don't want to be a coward either, so that is where my desire to write about zombies really kicked in. I wanted to explore the human condition. I wanted to put people in different situations and see how they would react under pressure. Maybe I even wanted to create a zombie slaying heroine or two that started out afraid of the world, then rose to the ranks and became a bit of a leader. Because if there is anything I learned in college that changed the way I will think about my actions for the rest of my life, it was this: There are three types of people. 1. People who latch onto leaders because they don't want to be responsible for the outcome 2. People who willingly aid leaders in an attempt to make a better situation 3. Leaders. In my life I have done everything in my power to be a #3, and when I fall short there, I do my best to be a #2, but as long as I live, I never want to be the #1.

Of course, there is a fourth type of person, but that is the zombie, and even though they once lived, zombies aren't really people anymore. I know I never want to be a zombie either.

So, in answer to that question, I do think there is enough horror and violence in our world. I could probably live out the rest of my life rather peacefully if I never saw the trailer for another SAW movie or psychopathic serial murdering Hitchhiker film. See, there's a difference between zombies, vampires and werewolves. They are the kind of nightmares we can recover from at the end of the movie. We may look over our shoulders a few times, peer through the blinds as the wind moans through the night like a corpse from the grave, but at the end of the night we can go to bed without losing much sleep. We see enough true horrors like murder, mutilation and terrorism every day in the media that it's actually nice to step back and slip into an imaginary world where the horror is supernatural and not the cruel result of our fellow man.