Feb 8, 2019
Rabbi Daniel Lapin and his wife Susan take a lighthearted look at movies. Before World War 2, about 1/3% of movies released were what we would call “horror movies”. By 1968 over 2% of movies were horror movies, by 2000 it was 4%, and by 2015 it was 12%. By then Zombies were taking over the (entertainment) world. To date, Hollywood has produced 1,000 more zombie movies than cowboy movies. The walking dead? Really? When did the zombie craze really take off? It was 1962. Yes, there’s that date again. Could there be any meaningful correlation between the extirpation of Judeo-Christian Bible faith from everyday life and the rise of zombie horror taking its place? As religion’s ability to help us cope with death declined, did we turn to “zombie escapism”? Michael Jackson, the boy who never got old, and his music video-Thriller. The arrival of ten-minute movies brought to you by Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg—for your phone! If you don’t consciously “choose life” the automatic default is ‘death’. From abortion to euthanasia, what a large crowd of people do does matter.