The stereotypical movie zombie holds his arms out in front of them in the sleepwalk pose, shuffles slowly forward, and mindlessly mutters “Braaaaaains.”
If there is a movie featuring zombies exactly like that, it’s going to be surprisingly recent. The outstretched arms comes from Boris Karloff’s The Mummy, though a lot of 40’s and 50’s era monster movies would depict whatever monster–Frankenstein, Dracula, whatever, reaching forward to grasp their victim.
The modern American pop-culture zombie basically begins with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in which the zombies do move slowly, they don’t say anything, and they aren’t particularly associated with brains.
The brains thing comes from Return of the Living Dead whose zombies are hungry for brains, but these zombies are fully sentient, they’re capable of solving problems, Tarman rigs up a winch to pull open a door, they can speak and understand English, one uses a radio, and depending on their state of decomposition they’re able to move like normal humans.
28 Days Later features zombies that are fast and aggressive rather than slow and shambling. The Walkers from The Walking Dead don’t speak at all and aren’t specifically brain hungry. Other than very intentional parodies, I can’t find a single film that depicts the stereotypical movie zombie.
That’s genuinely so embarrassing.
The most famous zombies ever, and we forgot to actually make the movie.
The zombies in Warm Bodies are insightful, though.
The most famous is “the butler did it,” which is a cliche with that apparently predates the reference.
This article in The Guardian suggests a story where the butler did it earlier than that - The Strange Case of Mr Challoner in 1921.
Even so “the butler did it” is still a great example of a cliché that hardly ever actually happens.
I could easily believe the cliché originated independently from any particular book, purely as a piece of writing advice meaning “don’t be obvious!”
If you do a write-up like that you should probably include some information which works you are talking about.
No need, I’d trust this account with my life. You don’t ask Prof Brian Cox for his sources, do you?
I don’t know if this counts, but:
In the 80s, when horror movies were super popular, there was sort of a generic killer that was sometimes used to broadly reference the slasher movie: Hockey mask and chainsaw. The only two specific references I can think of off the top of my head were a Bloom County strip, and the Cape Fear episode of The Simpsons.
The hockey mask is obviously Jason Voorhees, but he never once used a chainsaw (unless he did in the remake, I haven’t seen it in a long time). The chainsaw was intended as a reference to Leatherface in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The closest thing that Jason ever used to a chainsaw was a gas-powered tree saw which is a circular blade on a long stem; he used this in Part 7. Jason used a lot of weapons, many of which were household appliances, but his signature weapon was a machete, not a chainsaw.
You know…that kind of mask, the plastic shell that sits close to the face you called a hockey mask…I’ve never seen a hockey player wear one of those, a hockey mask looks like this:
And, possibly because of a brief scene in Christmas Vacation where Clark Griswold wears a hockey mask in order to chainsaw the root ball off the tree, I grew up thinking it was simply chainsaw PPE.
The Jason Voorhees one is the old goaltender style hockey mask from many years ago, before helmets were required. No one wore them, then there were lots of injuries from goalies so they started to wear what Jason wore. Then eventually the tech evolved, players started wearing something more similar to an army helmet, then that evolved too, to what you posted. The goalie helmet is still different than the player helmet though, but doesn’t look much like the Jason mask.
It’s obviously a lot more complicated than that but you get the idea. I’m not a hockey history expert, just a casual fan, so I may have something slightly off but it’s relatively accurate at least.
Oh I’ll fully believe it originated in the sport of hockey, it’s just, the media I’ve been exposed to during my one brief human existence has caused me to associate it more with chainsaw maniacs than the sport of hockey. Even if that isn’t actually a thing either.
This is Jacques Plante, who in 1959 was the first NHL goaltender to create and use a practical mask. The design changed a little bit but you can see where it comes from.Jacques Plante, who in 1959 was the first NHL goaltender
Woo! 🇨🇦
Oooo good pull. I’ve been idly considering this question at work this morning and I haven’t yet come up with anything, but this seems to fit the bill.
It’s kind of funny that the horror franchise I associate most with chainsaws is the Evil Dead series, and not the franchise named after the implement itself lol
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