Putting An Entirely …Different Spin on the GAO Election Fraud Report …
Dante’s Inferno
A horror movie brings out the zombie vote to protest Bush’s war
by Dennis Lim, Village Voice
November 29th, 2005 12:44 PM
TURIN, ITALY
“This is a horror story because most of the characters are Republicans,” director Joe Dante announced before the November 13 world premiere of his latest movie, Homecoming, at the Turin Film Festival. Republicans, as it happens, will be the ones who find Homecoming’s agitprop premise scariest: In an election year, dead veterans of the current conflict crawl out of their graves and stagger single-mindedly to voting booths so they can eject the president who sent them to fight a war sold on “horseshit and elbow grease.”
The dizzying high point of Showtime’s new Masters of Horror series, the hour-long Homecoming (which premieres December 2) is easily one of the most important political films of the Bush II era. With its only slightly caricatured right-wingers, the film nails the casual fraudulence and contortionist rhetoric that are the signatures of the Bush-Cheney administration. Its dutiful hero, presidential consultant David Murch (Jon Tenney), reports to a Karl Rove?like guru named Kurt Rand (Robert Picardo) and engages in kinky power fucks with attack-bitch pundit Jane Cleaver (Thea Gill), a blonde, leggy Ann Coulter proxy with a “No Sex for All” tank top and “BSH BABE” license plates. Murch’s glib, duplicitous condescension is apparently what triggers the zombie uprising: Confronting an angry mother of a dead soldier on a news talk show, he tells this Cindy Sheehan figure, “If I had one wish . . . I would wish for your son to come back,” so he could assure the country of the importance of the war. The boy does return, along with legions of fallen combatants, and they all beg to differ.
Dante and writer Sam Hamm ( Batman) adapted Homecoming from Dale Bailey’s “Death and Suffrage,” a 2002 short story that puts a morbidly literal spin on the idea of the dead being used to pad the Chicago voting roll.
“Death and Suffrage” was published in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2002 and in Bailey’s 2003 short story collection, The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. In 2003, it won the International Horror Guild Award for intermediate-length short fiction. From the Golden Gryphon Press:
Know the joke about dead people voting in corrupt elections? In Chicago, perhaps? Dale Bailey has heard it, too. Except it prompted him to wonder what only a prolific horror writer could: What if the dead really could vote? The Lenoir-Rhyne English professor’s answer to the question ? a short story titled “Death and Suffrage” ? has already earned him acclaim. Now, it’s headed to the small screen.
“I had seen all of these horror movies about zombies rising from the grave,” Bailey said. “What they always wanted to do, apparently, is feast on human flesh. I was kind of fascinated with (was), what if they just wanted to cast their ballots?” The story opens on a presidential election day, when the dead approach the balloting station to vote and “throw the election into disarray,” he said. And as it turned out, the tale eerily aligned with real events: Not more than a month after Bailey finished the story, the 2000 presidential election was also thrown into disarray, in Florida ? minus zombie involvement, of course. (Or so we think!)
“Death and Suffrage” was published in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 2002 and in Bailey’s 2003 short story collection, The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories.
