or, the History of the Internet, According to Horror
The Golden Globe nomination for Alan Ball’s new HBO series, True Blood, reminds us of two things: we like vampires, and there wasn’t a whole lot of great television in 2008. Stuck somewhere between gothic and camp, True Blood makes a point of being neither serious enough to be affecting, nor silly enough to be fun. It certainly hasn’t been able to do both at the same time, like its more adroit predecessor, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
What does any of this have to do with the Internet? That depends on how closely you subscribe to a reading of history sometimes popular among fans of the horror genre: All hitherto existing society is the history of struggle between vampires and zombies.
The theory, roughly, goes like this: symbolically, the vampire is powerful, often majestic and seductive, usually solitary. Zombies, on the other hand, are mindless, slow, driven only by appetite, and move in hordes. A period that is dominated by powerful individuals — dictators, charismatic CEOs, iconoclasts — will also be a period that glorifies vampires. A period that celebrates the masses over the individual will fixate on zombies.
It’s a theory that probably won’t hold up to much scrutiny, and I’ll ask you not to give it much.
Buffy premiered on the WB in 1997 and played on that network for five years. (The show itself rose from the dead, for two more seasons on the UPN network, finally wrapping up in 2003.) This same period coincides with Wesley Snipes’ Blade movies, and the creation of the Underworld film series — both of which lend credence to the idea that vampires were in the zeitgeist, though neither franchise is an especially proud addition to the vampire genre.
More to the point: this time period is, almost exactly, the first rise of the Internet, during which brazen, single-minded startup companies, led by egomaniacal corporate execs (who often worked — and played — till dawn) drove the NASDAQ index nearly in stride with the Buffy series: the NASDAQ’s peak came weeks after the TV show’s Emmy-nominated episode, “Hush,” and the index’s lowest point came in mid-2003, just as Buffy and her gang were leaving Sunnydale (and television) forever.
NASDAQ Index - 1997-2003
If you’ve read this far, then perhaps you’re willing to consider what has happened over the period since then: vampires have gotten dumber (30 Days of Night) and tamer (True Blood); zombies have gotten faster (28 Days Later) and smarter (I Am Legend); and the web has shifted toward “crowd-sourcing” and the “smart mob.”
The age of the intelligent zombie is upon us.