Don't try to imagine what's ahead.

Good evening, citizens of Earth, citizens of Earth origin, or any other planet in the Solar System.

And thus, it begins.

The decision to start blogging wasn't because I had anything in particular to get off my chest, so I guess you could be thankful that for the most part, this won't be one of those 'issue' blogs, where I take big business to task on shady business practices, tell everyone how sad I am that I've been cheated on, or ask people's opinions on what to wear to the prom.

I figure the best place to start, though, is with something fairly definitive. Something that continues to influence who I am, how I feel, and how I perceive the world (those second two ultimately inform that first one though - I guess I should warn you now that I'm very big on bumping up my wordcount with tautology).

Call me crass, but the closest thing I ever had to a religious experience was watching Night Of The Living Dead as a child. It's hailed now as a masterpiece, and I think it honestly deserves that title, for the way it deftly dances between making deliberate concessions to genre expectations (ie, Romero knows that if you watch a movie about dead people coming back to life, you want to see a few guts here and there), and painting - in relentless detail - a picture of modern social collapse.

On top of that you've got genuine DRAMA: the characters aren't always the most logically-behaved of folk, but the conflicts between them, and the allegiances/feuds that develop, are never short of compelling. Harry Cooper, the boneheaded, pride-driven family man, is an arsehole. You hate that guy. You want his wife and daughter to be saved, but you want to see that coward die.

Until you realise that he was right about the physical situation all along. You root for Ben for the entire movie, because he's caring, he's heroic, and he keeps his shit together. Then you start to notice that he's actually vastly overestimating himself, to the point where he's got to be a bit of a moron, and you wonder if maybe the only reason he's survived this long is because of sheer, dumb luck.

It was the movie to show me that there aren't evil people, and there aren't saints. There's just filthy, blood-, sweat-, and shit- stained people trying to survive. There's no bigger picture, there's no clear-cut scenarios, there's no salvation, and you're just a stupid fucking kid who's alive until he dies, so get used to it.

Also, speaking of genre, the "zombie movie" as a subgenre didn't really exist in 1968: there was the old voodoo horror movies of the 30s, certain visual elements of which carried over into a few Hammer Films in the 60s (Check out John Gilling's "Plague Of The Zombies", one of Hammers most lavish and underrated productions - it's got Andre Morell from the third Quatermass serial in it too!), but for the most part, the lurching, moaning "zombie character" who behaves exactly as you'd expect him to, didn't exist so firmly in peoples' minds. Night Of The Living Dead is a movie about dead people coming back to life. It's also a movie about people eating other people, and I think part of it's success is in its chilling simplicity.

And yet, it's not simple. The film is an assault. It's nasty and it's mean and it wants to harm you and it's not going to let you think "it's only a movie" because it's not - those people on the screen that just want to harm you? They're not make-believe, man. They exist.

I was about 6 or 7 years old. For the first time in my life, I realised that just beneath the surface of 'normal', there lies something else. Something sinister, something that genuinely wants to hurt you and upset you, and when it's 'over', things aren't going to go back to being ok again. The world is a nasty, disgusting, destructive place and there's nothing you can fucking do about it, kid.

There's no cure, no antitdote, and there's absolutely nothing to suggest that you won't PERSONALLY be targeted by it. These fucking monsters will look up your address if they have to, kid. Sure, you can hope that maybe you'll be ok. You know they are going to hurt you, and you know they're going to use everything in their power to do so, but maybe there's a change they won't kill you... right?

But hope, Night Of The Living Dead so astutely informed me, is pointless exercise. It gets you nowhere. Even that happy-go-lucky posse of zombie hunters at the end, headed by Sherriff Good-Ole-Boys, aren't going to win. They're going to get killed, and then the threat is going to go to their houses and kill their wives, and then it's going to kill their children, too. And if you don't like it, well that's just too fucking bad, kid.

None of this is going to work, guys. We need a whole new system because we can't fight this problem head-on. That's the first real lesson I ever learnt, and I learnt it from George Romero.