Zombie movies have always held a special place in my heart. I will put up with any amount of bad acting and cheesy special effects a B-movie zombie flick can throw at me if it means a chance to thrill at the horrors of the dead rising from the grave. Like many young boys growing up, my cinematic and literary tastes tended toward the macabre. I read everything that Poe wrote, was a huge fan of Stephen King, and devoured classics such as Frankenstein and Dracula to slake my thirst for the bizarre and frightening.
Years later, I was teaching English language arts to high school students full-time on Replica Audemar Piguet a community college campus. One of the greatest aspects of this job was the freedom it provided me to experiment with different approaches to the study of literature. In this particular case, this freedom manifested as a question: How do I incorporate zombies into my classroom? More importantly, how do I do this without being gratuitous? I knew the undead would hold the interest of my students, but just because something is interesting does not make it appropriate for the classroom.
Well before my undead aspirations, a colleague and I developed a unit exploring advertising as literature, using James Twitchell's Admit USA: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture as a central text. One of Twitchell's major in Adcult is that advertising is becoming a language we use to experience the world. In other words, we read the world around us (in part) by considering the advertisements that are ubiquitous to our culture. I began the ad unit by illustrating just how much students already knew about advertising (which was a lot) and moved on to a more in-depth study of the communicative power of ads—with students acting as experts.
I took this same approach when developing my unit on the undead. Everyone knows something about zombies, and if they don't, surely they know something about monsters, or horror movies, or things of a similar nature. I thought of the movie Scream, a brilliant postmodern experiment in moviemaking premised around the archetypes of horror films, where the characters in the movie are themselves aware of the clichéd scenarios that abound in horror films even as those situations unfold around them. My students, like the young people in Scream, were experts in a way. The undead could be used as a Vacheron Constantin Replica device for exploring what students already know, how they know it, and how that knowledge affects their understanding of the world.
Rather than jumping straight into the undead in classes on that first day, the students and I started out with a brainstorming session on mythology. I wanted students to see just how much they already knew about Greek and Roman mythology. This exercise served as an example of how much knowledge students retain, often unaware. I likened it to a pop-cultural twist on Jung's notion of the collective unconsciousness—information we share as a culture, even if we are unaware of how we know it. They were indeed surprised at how much information they were able to give me about didactic myths, the gods and their powers, and even the present-day uses of mythological references in American culture. They knew, for instance, that Nike was the goddess of victory and thus an appropriate brand name for athletic apparel.
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