Earlier tonight I gave some thoughts on Teenagers From Mars and I thought I'd hop over here and drain out a couple things about it from a horror standpoint before I passed out for the night.
While TFM certainly isn't a straight-out horror comic (If you find blind conformism, witch-hunts, and the burning of comic books horrific, like I do, then it is horror in that sense), it owes an awful lot to the genre. From Macon's Dawn of the Dead t-shirt to grave-robbing to throwing a party where people are done up like zombies for a film being shot to the comic book Macon writes, horror is ever present in the story.
And, hell, the story structure itself plays out like any good standard zombie film.
The main characters meet up, a chain of events unfolds leading to everyone else in the down going insane and straight down the shitter, the main characters have to band together to survive...even down to the last sequence, it's a zombie story. Only without flesh-eating zombies.
This is a device I'm personally interested in -- using a conventional horror story arc to tell a non-horror story. While it's been done before, unsuccessfully, here it's pulled off perfectly. Even though zombies are constantly mentioned in one way or another, it's not until Macon remarks, in regards to the angry townsfolk, "Fucking zombies...they wanna eat my brains," that you start to realize what Rick Spears and Rob G are doing.
And I'd like to give 'em a big sloppy hug for it.
Is there anything else out there that uses this sort of device to tell its story and does it well?
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