Wolf Gnards

A new federal report has found:

While, vampiric love in and of itself may cause only minimal personal harm, it is a dangerous habit because it leads to the use of “harder monsters” like Frankenstein, Godzilla, and Cthulhu. Suburbia has come to gripes with a growing concern over a vampire’s role as a “gateway monster,” which makes subsequent use of more potent and disabling creatures more likely. The gateway monster theory has found that the younger children are when they are first exposed to vampires, the more likely they are to become infatuated with werewolves or mummies, and become dependent on monsters as adults. Individuals who liked nosferatu by age 17 had odds of other monster love, zombie dependency, and monster abuse that were 2.1 to 5.2 times higher than those who did not see nosferatu before age 17 years. The Center on Abominations and Creature Abuse at Columbia University found adolescents who love blood suckers 85 times more likely to worship Cthulhu than their non-blood sucking loving peers. And 60 percent of youngsters who use vampires before they turn 15 later go on to use Cthulhu.

While I don’t understand why the government would take the time to put this study together, they do raise an interesting point. The market has become over-saturated with Vampire books, movies, TV shows, and just as it seems the public has gotten sick of vampires, suddenly Hollywood latches onto zombies. What’s next? If it’s just a matter of the living dead, then the next logical step would most likely be mummies of some sort.

Progression of living dead monsters:
Vampires ⇒ Zombies ⇒ Mummies

Follow up:

I’d like to think that the next big monster will be a swamp creature, either a plant human hybrid of Swamp Thing origin or more of a Creature from the Black Lagoon or Gill-man. Swamp creatures though do not have that immortal appeal. It’s not necessarily that people love vampires, it’s that they fear dying. And the spousal abuse metaphor of Twilight aside (he bites me because he loves me—or, I guess, he doesn’t bite me because he loves me), the vampire represents not just the offer of eternal life, but eternal love. It’s interesting how romanticized vampires have become considering the concept of Dracula was a metaphor for venereal disease.

If vampires is a response to dying, zombies is a response to a long, but ordinary life. As the zombie shows us, living can be just as bad as dying. For the Zombie life is living the same day, over and over, the same boring day of eating brains and limping along and saying, “grrh, argh.” How far off is this from the same daily commute on the same route, sitting the same desk, eating the same lunches, going home and watching the same TV shows, day after day? Zombies have it right, why a bullet to the brain is the only cure for the boring day blues (A note from our legal department: Wolf Gnards does not advocate bullets or brains or the use of the two together). More than just gore porn, though, killing a zombie is a cathartic release to all of life’s mundane problems. And, of course, it’s also fun killing zombies; zombies being The Three Stooges of the monster kingdom.

So, what’s the next big monster fad? If vampires are our fear of death and zombies are our fear of life, perhaps some fear of procreation? Monster babies (much like Muppet Babies but more dead)? The Jersey Devil as in giving birth to some sort of abomination (which would also jump on the Jersey Shore fad)? Maybe, vampire kittens, which doesn’t have much to do with anything, but would just be plain adorable. Or maybe something cellular, composed of many micro-organisms like the hive mind of corporate life, or something as primordial as the ooze we came from? Which leads us to the good ol’ gelatinous blob. It lives forever, and it has only the most basic of animal instinct, it’s fun to kill and yet unkillable because a gelatinous blob is about as smashed up as anything is bound to get. Picture this: a hunky blob moves to town to seduce the beautiful outcast girl next door, it practically writes itself.