Nazi Zombies from www.deadsnow.com
Not going to see this movie (I can’t handle gore-as-entertainment) but this concept intrigues me: the difference between “Nazi zombies” and “zombie Nazis”.
The latter seems to me to imply a sort of, if not ennui, then a desensitization. Nazis not horrifiying any more? Make them undead! But you can still kill them, so there’s still the pleasure of slaughtering those bastards.
Things wrong with this: If Nazis, as a group, are no longer abhorrent enough on their own, is that good or bad (in terms of our having—apparently—moved past that part of our history?); the second problem makes me think of Inglourious Basterds, which is being marketed as essentially a revenge fantasy. Except I don’t know much about that movie yet, so I’ll set it aside for now. Basically, this is the ultimate in dehumanization. That should say it all.
And the former, well, I’m not sure. It sounds to me more like, what would make one of the most terrible things more terrible? If they came back and you couldn’t kill them/they were “even less human”. So there would be less of the desensitization with this approach, but there’s still the disturbing dehumanization aspect.
This is probably pretty incoherent (my apologies) so I’ll sum up: neither phrasing makes me completely comfortable, because there’s really no good answer. Of course, the easiest answer would be that this is supposed to be a brainless (har har) blockbuster movie, so to analyze it at all would be to over-analyze it.
