From Bernice Murphy's essay "Imitations of Life: Zombies and the Suburban Gothic"
"Andrew Currie's 2006 movie Fido is an ambitious satire that combines elements of Sirkian melodrama, George A. Romero's Living Dead series and the "Timmy's down the well" plotting of heroic dog films such as Lassie and Old Yeller...As one reviewer put it, the film's depiction of 'an undead chattel class hits an authentic socio-political nerve. It seems to capture perfectly what 1950s upper-class suburbia might have looked like had slave labor still been available.' By projecting Romero's vision of zombie apocalypse slightly backward into a twenty-first-century vision of 1950s suburbia, Currie's film also manages to make some pertinent points about the containment culture of both that period and our own. The film evokes the upscale suburban developments of the present that rely on cheap migrant labor in the form of underpaid and often-illegal nannies, housekeepers, gardeners, and workers. Further, the security obsessed and manipulative conflation of the military-industrial complex epitomized in ZomCon evokes much-criticized elements of the presidency of George W. Bush."
What do you think about Murphy's take on the film's exploration of zombies in suburbia? Or what are your thoughts on how the zombie conventions placed in the midst of the 1950s boy and dog story fits into the zombie genre lexicon?
This being an extra credit post will be accepted up until the end of the semester. It is still a 400 word minimum to get full potential credit.
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