Interrogating Ideology With A Chainsaw

One year before terrorists struck the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Final Destination hit theaters with transcendental terrorism. The film is about a High School trip to France thwarted by Alex’s (Devon Sawa)promotion that the plane would explode. Startled by his vision he makes a ruckus and is tossed off the plan with several of his cohort. The twist is the rules. The premonition caused a change in transcendental plan. Alex and his friends were designed to die in an exploding plane plummeting to the tarmac. The alternation in this plan creates a ripple in transcendental fatalism which forced death herself to take matters into her own plans. Stalking each survivor and eliminating them by manipulating physics and orchestrating elaborate Mouse Trap like murders. The teenagers become aware of the rules of the game early and seek to survive the diving bureaucracy that seeks to right wrongs in the eternal design by killing what should have died.

Earlier on in the week, I interviewed J.Q. Davis from The Official Website of J.Q. Davis about her zombie novel Turning Grace. Be sure to check out her spooky blog! 
Tell me about yourself and your writing?
I was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. I met a Marine about six years ago. We started dating and shortly after, he got orders to work in California. Having never lived anywhere else and thinking there was no way I was going to let this great guy get away, I decided to take a leap of faith and move. We got married and became the proud parents of three wonderful doggie daughters. We now reside in the desert, which isn't my favorite place in the world, but we make the best of it.

I managed to acquire a bachelor's degree in Healthcare Management, as well as a certificate in Medical Transcription. I am currently working as an administrative assistant at our local hospital.
I published “Turning Grace” on my birthday this year, June 10th. It's my very first novel, bu…

Dear Zombies,
What a wild month. As I probably did not mention in addition to writing all these wild posts, I am also in ruthless pursuit of employment. The masters in social work I fought tooth and nail for over the last year is not the golden ticket I thought it was going to be. I specialized in community organizing, or rather getting people angry and then getting them in the same room. Problem is most of the social work jobs in the Chicago land area are for boring therapists. Let me cut this long story short to say, I have refocused my time and priorities this week. And my bad for not letting my faithful zombies know what’s what.

Tell me about yourself and your writing?

I'm a crazed serial killer with an ax to grind, the boogie man who creeps down alleys and peeks into your windows, the thing that's pushing aside the dust bunnies under your bed--all of these and more. I'm the nightmare that you relive, when you awake, clammy and sweating, to reassure yourself that it's all a dream--that reality is sane and safe. I'm every rule that your mother gave you and you broke.

I'm your thrill ride and that strange noise an elevator makes when you wonder, just for a second, did a cable just break, are you about to go plunging to your death... Hold on tight, maybe if you grip that railing and brace yourself, you'll survive.

Turn the page--and see...

What kind of fiction do you write?

Romantic comedy--OK, horror..

Welcome to our journey into the guts of The Walking Dead. What kind of journey? A philosophical, psychoanalytical and political kind. What I would like to do over the next couple months is dig through the Walking Dead episode by episode to see what it can teach us. Thank you for following me on this journey. I look forward to reading your comments. Be forewarned: There are spoilers everywhere. Don’t forget to check out my previous post in the Philosophizing TWD series: Philosophizing The Walking Dead S3E7 When The Dead Come Knocking and Political Torture
Made to Suffer caps the first half of season three with a bang. Rick and company launch an assault on Woodbury. Michonne goes rogue out of anger and attempts to assassinate the Governor on her own. But what the hell is Michonne so pissed off about? The Governor, of course, is a seedy character, but what has he done that warrant’s Michonne's Rage? Let us turn to the comic to see what we can dismember.

Good luck surviving a horror movie if you are an atheist. Even if you make it to the end of the film the Christian agenda that give an atheist screen time only bring the character in the film to be converted. The use of the atheist here serving Christological function to show that underneath her grumpy and goat-ly exterior they really hide their belief in Jesus existence and divinity. But does not weaken belief in general, if belief is so easily influenced by peer pressure and special effects, then what are we to make of these conversions? The second atheist story arc ends with the atheist committing suicide, albeit, for some noble cause. Like the end of I Am Legend, where Will Smith grenades himself in order to save Anna and Ethan. Atheist suicide has its rooting in French existentialism, and Albert Camus specifically. Camus who famously stated There is but one truly philosophical problem and that is suicide. (Camus, 2014)

Tell me about yourself and your writing?
Every train journey to and from work would always see me with my latest' horror find' perched on my lap, trying to finish just that one more page before I had to relinquish my seat and reluctantly put my book away.Inevitably, the books that engrossed me for my meager train journeys, while those around me plugged themselves into the latest from the top ten or something notable from the Booker list... well mine, to be honest, had either Zombies, Vampires or Werewolves in them and if I was really lucky, all three... not very worthy or highbrow I know, but for me whenever I opened those pages and let reality fall away, it was like being a teenager again watching an old Saturday night horror flick... and I loved it.

Surprise, Surprise one more pair of boobs have arrived on the internet! In the zillions of images and videos of boobs that arrived on the web in the last week one set belonged to Jennifer Lawrence. The actress that rose from nothing to something in her neurotic portrayal of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. Why is media blanketing the news challenges with constant discussion, over saturated news articles, and false morality tales? Why is she more important than anyone else? Why is her anatomy a voice for sympathizing liberals and delusional conservatives? Let's get interrogating.

As Above, So Below is a post-modernist romp par excellence. The film uses the loose relationship between the signifier and the signified in order to create scenes where physics and reality based mechanics are left in shreds. This engagement with the past by dissociating the past from the past creates a parallel to the experience of trauma, specifically the experience of re-traumatization. Re-traumatization is the moment in therapy where the experience of telling his/her story compels the client to not only relive the narrative but the emotional experience of a horror. Re-traumatization like the post-modern shift works on a displacement of the past by the past. A painful memory recalled and relieved as if it was happening contemporaneously with the originating pain is a psychological mystification where our biology is firing off fight/flight/freeze responses in order to protect us from pain by relocating the divide between the past and the present.

Dear Zombies,

Booyah! I visited the theater for the first time for about a year and a half. Grad school suckered away a lot of my time, money, sanity and energy over the last year. On top of school, I had no interest in watching many of the movies that hit the big screen. There has simply been a gold mine of films that went direct to video or streaming.

What did I shamble out to see? As Above, So below. I wasn't  really sure what I was walking into. If a movie looks appealing I try to avoid any news about it. What I did have to work with were a couple reviews I skimmed at Bloodydisgusting. I, usually, agree with most of the films that they hype up.

Edge of Tomorrow is about conformity. Cage (Tom Cruise) is a worm. Who thought he could trick blackmail a general (who was in turn using Cage as pre-emptive scapegoat) into escaping combat duty. What happens next forces him to fully materialize, more than general wished, the generals desire to send another soldier into combat. Once in the combat zone Cage kills a super-alien that drips magic time traveling blood and convenient plot devices on his face, melting it. Boom! Cage is in a time loop. Forced to conform beyond expectation to the military’s code of conduct. The Edge of Tomorrow is about Cage’s journey from soulless lemming to soulful lemming. In the end, Cage shows us the trap of the individualistic hero who only serves the purpose of reconfirming what society already believes.