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The obvious reference was that it looked like a group of motivated zombies. As I sat and stared at my phone screen, I could only look on as hordes of people made their way to cause chaos inside the Capitol building. I watched as raucous men convinced others to do their bidding in the name of “Making America Great Again,” and it wasn’t hard to see how the country had arrived at this point after a summer of protests and four long years of misinformation, propaganda, and agitation. I began writing versions of this piece the week that insurrectionists made their way into the Capitol building. Even more captivating than the already interesting premise is that the person everyone is listening to for updates and information regarding the illness, Mazzy, is the one perpetuating the virus.īy now, you may have a good idea where this essay is going, and you’re probably right. Pontypool uses a zombie plague that stems from infected words, where, once heard, they drive the listener into a state of madness. What has made this independent Canadian film so easy to consider throughout the last five years is the film’s main concept that words are powerful and have an impact. I find that it’s one of the most cerebral and effective zombie film experiences since George Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead and presented as if it were Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast. Pontypool is a diamond that I found myself recalling a lot between 20. The film wasn’t overwhelmingly successful, but I love independent gems. If you’ve never seen Pontypool, don’t worry-you’re likely not the only one. Mazzy decides to begin preaching his twisted perspectives of the truth rooted in conspiracy theory and paranoia in the hope of riling people up in the process. Having been used to the audience offered by a much larger broadcast, Mazzy becomes quickly bored with his new local job located in the aforementioned church basement where the station’s traffic chopper is just sound effects played in a truck while a man at the top of a hill reports what he spies in his binoculars.
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Stephen McHattie stars as Grant Mazzy, a once-celebrated shock jock radio host who now finds himself working for a local station in the titular Ontarian small town. Instead, Pontypool is claustrophobic, encapsulating the viewer in a radio booth beneath a church where the news story coming in from the outside world is one of sheer unbelievability met with caustic doubt. The film wasn’t the usual Hollywood fare of big guns and triggered explosions where survivors raced through the streets of a lifeless city, passing by iconic buildings and locations while being chased by spectacular-sized hordes of the undead. I think what’s special about Pontypool is how stripped down it is for a zombie film, especially being released in 2008, amidst the height of the subgenre’s re-emergence. Bruce McDonald’s 2008 film Pontypool is an unconventional zombie film that turns the English language into the virus and radio listeners into a blood-thirsty mob. Or maybe a word has made you so angry it wiped a smile right off your face and left a clenched jaw in its wake, turning your hands to fists.
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Maybe you don’t even understand the word or where you picked it up, in a movie or a song, perhaps. Have you ever had a word rattle around inside your head? Seemingly out of nowhere, there it is clanging around your cerebrum and the forefront of your tongue.
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