Zombie Fallacies

While researching for my Night of the Living Dead paper, I have come across various fallacies in which the writer tries to grapple with the phenomenon of the midnight movie and why this film created such a vast underground following. Often, the author will use the prodigious fallacy, which "mistakes sensation for significance" (Fischer, 70), in combination with the fallacy of accent, in which "meaning is distorted by emphasis" (Fischer, 271). Some writers seem to latch on to the midnight cult audience of this film as a sensational event that proves the "classic" status of this film without explaining how these midnight showings came about. Furthermore, some attempt to quantify immeasurable emotions and the atmosphere of these showings as empirical evidence (Fischer's quantitative fallacy, 90).

A favorite example comes from Stuart Samuels book, Midnight Movies: "You could not be neutral about seeing Night of the Living Dead. It either turned you off or it turned you on, eliciting strong reactions everywhere. The images weren't haunting as much as they were disturbing. When the zombies start chomping on the flesh and bones of the beleaguered living you either hoot with laughter or shriek in disgust –or both. To be unaffected meant that you were beyond hope or just trying to be cool" (Samuels, 62).

If only I could come up with these witty false dichotomous questions! (Fallacy of fictional question framing??) Although this style of writing is cute and fun, these kinds of grandiose assumptions and sensational motives attached to the historical reception of Night of the Living Dead are trivial and elementary. It is useless to attribute such polar opinions to an audience as a means to explain the phenomenon of the midnight movie, and then use it as evidence within the history of the film.

Kelly Bogel