#only to turn around and marry her father (navy flavor) and become her mother

[yourfaveisamuppet]

[antonio-morra]

[ nick zano, thirty-nine, cismale, he/him ] ━ hey, I just saw [ antonio morra ] walking down the streets of crownsville. they’ve lived in town for [ on and off his entire life ], and you can catch them around town working as a [ cruise ship entertainer and mc ]. i hear they’re known to be [ intrepid & savant ] and [ stubborn & irascible ]. if asked, they would say their aesthetic would be [ a crowded room full of laughter, a thumping bass, waves slapping against the side of a boat, a reassuring smile, joints rolled with flavored papers, black coffee, & intense debates about historical theories ].

aaayoo! it’s lisa and here is my new bby ant or tony. he’s going to be a quite a bit like an old muse i used to have here, PJ and i’m reallllly excited to use him because he’s a real goofball. though fair warning, his backstory is very sad and intense.

[ triggers: bad parenting/parental negligence, alcoholism, violence, physical & emotional abuse, pregnancy, drowning, & death ] 

The Morra family has resided in Crownsville, Georgia for generations, each family having fallen in love with the small town a little more than the one before them. Though for one branch of their intricate Italian family tree, the feelings of contentment for their home never existed at all. Alessio Morra knew he would never find happiness in Georgia so at eighteen he enlisted in the US Navy hoping to see enough of the world to find a new place he might like to call home. The home he ended up finding wasn’t a where, but a who. Rosalie Hassen was the first woman he ever fell in love with and for several years their life was more like a fairytale than reality.

He finished his tour with the Navy and brought Rosalie back to Crownsville so they could be married; Alessio was foolish enough to believe that she would be enough to erase the deep-rooted resentment he’d always harbored for his hometown, but unfortunately, she wasn’t. Nor was their healthy, beautiful baby boy who they named Antonio. The three lived together feigning happiness for four years before Alessio’s drinking and Rosalie’s ill-temper tore them apart. In the middle of the night after a screaming match turned violent that resulted in two broken windows, Alessio disappeared leaving only a note stating it was what was best for everyone. 

Unfortunately for Antonio, it wasn’t the case. His mother grew to resent her son in time, just as his father had resented the “perfect American life” his family had tried so hard to force on him. On all of them. All she could see when she looked upon her son was the man she once loved who’d abandoned them. He possessed so many of his father’s best qualities like his intellect and free-spirit, yet she could only focus on the bad ones and blamed the child for what their life had become.

They relied heavily on the Morra family for support in the years to follow, often struggling just to pay their rent and get dinner on the table. Rosalie began to dull the sense in the same way her husband used to, with alcohol. And for a short while, she’d achieved the desired effect, but the booze only brought out the worst in the woman. During her drunken fits of rage, the cruel mother often took out her anger on Antonio, punishing him for things that were never his fault. Putting him down however she could, every step of the way as he grew up. 

Though the beatings and the bruises didn’t go unnoticed by other members of the Morra family and when his Uncle confronted him, demanding the truth, Antonio told him everything. At fifteen, his mother was arrested and for the first time in his life, he felt truly safe and unafraid. He moved in with his Uncle, but it didn’t last more than a few months as his father returned to Crownsville upon receiving the news of what had occurred. 

It was difficult, to say the least, trying to make a relationship that no longer existed work. Alessio tried his best to be a father, but Antonio’s respect for him disappeared the same night he did and the teenager refused to take orders from someone who’d left him and allowed him to be abused. The father who didn’t take him away when he’d had the chance, knowing full well what kind of malicious acts his mother was capable of. It was his own personal resentment toward the man he’d been carrying with him for years, one he didn’t think would ever go away.

Despite Tony’s very troubled home life, he’d always been popular among his classmates, never failing to make everyone around him laugh or smile. The young boy refused to let his mother change him, to turn him cruel and monstrous as she had been, so he always did whatever he could to make everyone around him happy. Happier than he ever thought he could be. While he had plenty of friends, none of them knew what was really going on in his life, except for one very special best friend. They were the only person Antonio shared his darkest secrets with.

After graduation, Tony left for California where he attended Stanford on a full-ride scholarship and studied History and Philosophy. The choice he made to leave Crownsville was all too easy for him, just as it had been for his father when he was the same age. He left his best friend behind and it was something that ate at him for years, but he feared what his life would have become if he’d stayed in the small town he saw as nothing more than a dead-end. 

He graduated from Stanford magna cum laude but was unable to find a job he actually wanted to do. A year later, he found himself working on a cruise ship unsure of exactly what to expect except maybe a little adventure. History seemed to repeat itself as the young Morra found himself quite at home on the cruiseliner, enjoying the open sea more than he’d ever enjoyed anything in his life. The passengers loved Tony and the high energy and can-do attitude he always seemed to carry with him, it was something his higher-ups noticed as well and it helped get him out of hospitality and into entertainment.

Tony couldn’t imagine a life any different, the thought of settling down in one place was enough to give him nightmares, He revisited Crownsville every few years to see his family and nothing ever seemed to change which only made him all the more eager to set sail once more. 

At thirty-two, Antonio found himself falling in love with another member of the crew and it was something he never expected to personally experience. Always having believed it was the sea who held his heart, but Lydia had stolen it without him even being the wiser until it was too late. They became very close and spent almost every free minute they had together, 

Settling down was never something he’d imagined, but the thought of doing so with Lydia was enough to change his mind, though knowing it was something she didn’t want he was too afraid to speak up and tell her. They had no choice but to keep the severity of their relationship a secret out of fear of being fired for breaking the company’s code of conduct, though they didn’t seem to mind as it only made things all the more exciting. They were so in love with each other they decided that one weekend when they found themselves at port in Florida, they got off the boat and got themselves married.

A few years later, they had no choice but to come clean as Lydia found out she was pregnant. Her contract was terminated early and so Tony insisted she go to Crownsville, knowing his family would help her with anything she needed and he promised he would join her as soon as his own contract was up the following year. Antonio was right and the Morra’s did everything they could for her, including Tony’s own father who helped get her set up in Tony’s childhood home. They wrote to each other constantly and for the first time in his life, he wanted to fo back to his hometown. 

One month before Antonio was set to come home, Lydia gave birth to a healthy baby girl who they decided to name Orabelle, meaning beautiful seacoast. For seven blissful months, they lived in perfect happiness, in a place Tony was once sure he’d never find it. His relationship with his father even began to heal as it meant the world to Antonio that his father took Lydia and their baby in and made sure they were safe in his absence. He continued to work for the same cruise line company having worked out quite the nice deal for himself to stay on as one of their master of ceremonies, but only for special occasion cruises. Which was, of course, his favorite kind. 

They took their first official family vacation together to Florida, excited for their little girl to take her first dip in the ocean. Though the trip quickly turned into an unimaginable nightmare when Lydia found herself trapped in a powerful rip current with no way to escape. By the time Tony left Orabelle in the care of his father and managed to reach her, it was already too late and he nearly drowned himself while trying to rescue her.

Her death broke him in a way he never thought he could be, as though she took the most important piece of him with her when she left this world. Orabelle was a constant reminder of his beloved wife and what he lost, but also what he’d gained. Lydia would be with him forever because they’d created the most precious thing in his entire world, their daughter. Where he is now in life is so far from where he thought he would be, but he’s come to terms with the fact that it’s now exactly where he belongs. 

❦ WANTED CONNECTIONS ❦

childhood best friend — would be happy to have this be a highschool sweetheart type thing

childhood friends

new friends

college friends or roommates

family members 

coworkers

other friends with kids

[aion-rsa]

How The Living Dead Completes Romero’s Zombie Legacy

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This post is sponsored by

George A. Romero figuratively wrote the book on zombies with his low-budget, independent 1968 horror film epoch Night of the Living Dead. World War Z, 28 Days Later, Zombieland and even The Walking Dead trudged that territory but didn’t map much new terrain. Romero’s final novel, The Living Dead, completed by author Daniel Kraus (The Shape of Water novelization), doesn’t expand on the basics of the zombie apocalypse. It doesn’t challenge the zombie trope Romero filled out with his subsequent works on animated corpses, when The Living Dead had their Day, Dawn, Land, Diary and Survival. But, with it, Romero and Kraus do peer deeper into the mirror to find a bitter reflection of the horrors Romero brings out in The Living.

The Living Dead is character-driven in ways the feature films could never be. In Night of the Living Dead, the audience didn’t know, nor would they have cared, whether Helen Cooper (Marilyn Eastman) put on weight after marrying Harry (Karl Hardman). But we know this about Rosa, the wife of novel protagonist Luis Accocola, the Assistant Medical Examiner who logs the first case of reanimation in The Living Dead. We also know Luis paid for Rosa’s education and had to wait to marry her because she was so much younger than him. We know Rosa suffered a miscarriage long before the recently deceased became the ambulatory diseased.

We’ll never know if “They’re Coming to Get You” Barbra (Judith O’Dea) ever dreamed of dancing with Fred Astaire at night. But we know Luis’s assistant Charlene Rutkowski recoils from the very sight of Astaire when her mother Mae tunes in to the classic movie channel because the top hatted, tuxedo-sporting tap dancer tries to lead in her nightmares. Even before John Doe becomes the archive in the novel’s version of Patient Zero, Luis wants to know more about his history, whether he mattered. Why the homeless man is dressed so fine, and why he doesn’t have the curved spine of the long-term vagrant. In this respect, he is Romero. The unimportant details may not solve zombification, but it holds clues to the fading humanity.

The Living Dead is a fitting end to Romero’s zombie chronicles. The novel form allows him to bring more of himself into the pages, each of the characters filled out with flavors Romero himself test-tasted. There is also a bittersweet meta irony to the fact that the horror genius died before finishing the work and it was reanimated by Kraus, an unabashed fan and likely successor to the “Father of the Modern Zombie Film.” He hides Romero “Easter eggs” throughout the book, while also bringing in references to the pandemic apocalypse novel The Stand. Romero worked frequently with Stephen King, adapting his writer’s nightmare The Dark Half, having a barrel of fun with Monkey Shines, and indulging their shared love of EC Comics with Creepshow. The feature film adaptation was even shot in the four color scheme which defined the magazine. They further explored the horrors of publishing with Bruiser. The city of Bangor, Maine, which is King’s home turf, is referenced within the first few pages. He and Romero are wonderfully horrific friends.

The Living Dead is divided into three acts. Act One tells the story through the introduction of disconnected characters. It unfolds like an archive from the future written from multiple points of view. The history is being put together by a team in Washington, led by the researcher Etta Hoffmann. She is autistic and unflappably records survivors’ stories. Goaded on by an internet troll named Chucksux69, News anchor Chuck Corso at the cable station WNN broadcasts the events as they come in, even though he has no idea if anyone can see him. He does this while his co-workers try to eat him. Similar things happen at sea, where the US Navy aircraft carrier Olympia becomes a floating arena where dead sailors face off against the living crew. The gospel of the dead is spread zealously by a preacher in the book.

“When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth,” Romero warned in Dawn of the Dead. The characters in The Living Dead have to learn this for themselves. The only problem with living in a world written by George A. Romero is that the inhabitants didn’t grow up in a world with Romero in it. They don’t know what to do when the dead won’t stay dead. One of the most consistent things about zombies, whether they’re found in the Living Dead universe or one of the many other genre works, is you kill them by shooting them in the head. It doesn’t have to be a gunshot; Daryl on The Walking Dead does the deed with a bow and some arrows (though that series has gone on for a full decade without ever using the word zombie). From the very first ambulatory corpse, played by Bill Hinzman in Night of the Living Dead, to the present, a fractured skull is the only way to stop chomping teeth. Try telling that to the people in the book.

Why do zombies keep on biting? Day of the Dead posited the corpses reanimate because of primitive impulses in the spinal column. We, the audience, know from that movie onward it was because of special effects wizard Tom Savini. It would be nice to think of his hand on the elderly zombie in the novel who tries to gum someone to death. In The Living Dead, we learn zombies just wake up hungry. “This hunger is different from any you knew before,” a chapter opens. “This hunger is a lack. Something has been taken from you. You do not know what. This hunger is everywhere. Hunger, the fist. Hunger, the bones. Hunger, the flesh. Hunger, the brain.” Zombies aren’t evil, they are animalistic. Humans, on the other hand, are free to act horribly. If this particular horror niche is dead it can be reanimated here with this book. Night of the Living Dead brought the genre to life. The Living Dead gives Zombies souls. 

When Romero and some friends shot the indie film for just over $100,000 that would become The Night of the Living Dead, the country was going to hell. The Vietnam War was bringing death to the dinner table daily on the evening news. The generation which grew up in the shadow of the nuclear bomb was pulling away from a rotting society, unraveling like an exposed lower intestine. While women sew American flags sometime between “Year Fucking Six” and “Year Fucking Seven” of The Living Dead, Johnny and Barbara walk past a shredded flag as they enter the cemetery where their father is buried at the start of the film that started it all. The wreath is an empty gesture. Johnny can’t even remember what their father looked like.

Inspired by Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend and its film adaptation The Last Man on Earth, starring Vincent Price, Night of the Living Dead reincarnated Zombie movies. Once the realm of island magic culturally appropriated by actors like Bela Lugosi and George Zucco, zombies were now hungry legions munching on the living. Brains were not yet the delicacy The Simpsons would make them out to be. The undead are a metaphor for whatever we want to put on them. Romero is a political artist and the book is contemporary. Like the ill-equipped national response to COVID-19, we watch an unprepared society face a cataclysmic event and come apart at the seams. Similar to the effects of the quarantine, the zombie apocalypse is good for the environment. Also mirroring our times, the zombies infest a hate-filled world though they prove to be an equalizer of all classes and in the toxic racial divide.

“Someone dies, someone else learns to live,” Greer, a Black teenager who escapes an overridden trailer park in the Midwest at the beginning of the novel, is taught. Minority characters feature prominently in The Living Dead. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated the year Night of the Living Dead was released. In the film, Ben, a Black character played by Duane Jones, survives the undead campaign, the tribal maneuvering of the other captive combatants around him, casual bigotry and betrayal only to be shot in the head by passing zombie thrill-killers. The final moments of the film shows photographs of men with dead zombies which look eerily similar to lynch mob photos.

Romero didn’t only use the undead as a political metaphor. They are endemic to all society. The Zombies aren’t the only brain-dead or dying characters in his films or the novel. In The Living Dead, most of the people’s minds are already infested by paranoid distrust of the news media and the hatred encouraged by social media. Luis’s life is saved at one point because he’s not flipping through his cell phone as he usually does. He actually notices the looks on the people’s faces. In Romero’s 1978 installment Dawn of the Dead, the citizenry’s minds were numbed by TV, radio and consumerism. Its biggest scene happens in a Pittsburgh shopping mall with muzak playing in the background. 

Act Two summarizes what would be the territory of 1985’s Day of the Dead (which gave zombies class-consciousness), 2005’s Land of the Dead, and Romero’s “found footage” installment Diary of the Dead (2007), but takes a turn at 2009’s western Survival of the Dead. Subtitled “The Life of Death,” Act Two spans eleven years, all of which are being recorded in “The Hoffmann Archive of Tales from the New World.” We learn zombies are more like us than we might wish to believe. Like modern man wastes most of its animal-based consumer products, the zombies only eat five percent of their kill. They also hold grudges. Zombies outnumber humans 400,000 to one. Camels, lions and zebras are immune to reanimation, but chimps come back from the dead.

Straightforward as they may be, Romero’s films were rarely what they seemed through the action. Subversive social commentary runs through his 1978 vampire film Martin, which was more about unfettered schizophrenia than vampires. John Amplas played the title role in a very realistic, and very violent, exploration. He drugs and rapes his victims before drinking their blood. The Crazies (1973) was more about the society struck by a military biological weapon more than an epidemic containment film. The Living Dead is more than a zombie novel. It is a bitter parable.

Act Three moves 15 years after the apocalypse as survivors try to put together a new civilization amidst an evolving zombie population. It is a planetary reset. The museums are covered in graffiti and overgrown. People begin to read books, mix paint, shoot each other in the face when agitated. The dead win. 

George A. Romero died on July 16, 2017, a relatively innocent time which, although it was only three years ago, seems very far away. Donald Trump rode a racist wave of xenophobia to the whitest White House the country has seen since President Andrew Jackson, but he was still treated as a joke. The Living Dead was written before COVID-19, the killing of George Floyd and a police force which militarized against protestors faster than the zombies could run in 28 Days Later. Romero and Daniel Kraus are visionaries who were able to make a parable of today’s times in almost real time. The news on Max Headroom came at you from 30 minutes in the future. The future legend of The Living Dead was predicted only months in advance to be delivered exactly on time.  

The Living Dead will be available to buy and read on August 4th. It is now available for pre-order.

The post How The Living Dead Completes Romero’s Zombie Legacy appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/39vjTbw