Creating life, sometimes from death. Many a book, film or idea has been put forward about reanimating the dead. There seems to be a mild, if not fanatical obsession we have about the dead, and what may or may not happen in the afterlife. The Egyptians worshipped and revered it, as did the Mayans they say, and other civilisations and cultures throughout history have had a place for it. Life and death go hand in hand. Halloween approaches too which is apparently the day where the lines are thinnest between what is, and what it to come, and maybe sometimes, things can cross over, or come back. But in many of the themes I will use as examples from films, it isn’t always about stopping death, or bringing someone back, but about creating something new, from something dead.

Frankenstein – A tale of longing, madness and revenge. A scientist builds a monster from ‘human scraps’ and gives it life, through the medium of electricity. Note that, it’s a running theme you will notice.

Weird science – a great film, where two teenage boys decide to ‘create’ a woman using computer programming and a plastic barbie doll, and what should be the catalyst for making it work? A crazy lightning storm just happens to hit the house. And suddenly, there is life.

Short Circuit – A military robot gets hit by lightning, and it creates ‘life’ in him, developing a personality and learning. Another great film, and although not a human as such, it is still lightening and life. Which leads into the next one quite neatly.

Transformers – not the robots themselves, but the focus of the films, the Allspark. A metal cube that has the ability to give ‘life’ to metal objects. A spark of electricity is seen being emitted from it when it it’s activated.

War of the worlds – machines in the ground, activated by extreme lightning from the sky.

Resident Evil – The whole premise of the film starts around a virus, the T-Virus. A liquid compound that when injected into something dead, will bring it back to life. But as with most weird and unnecessary creations, it doesn’t stay as liquid, turns into a gas, and has a horrific effect on already living tissue, thus creating the ‘zombie’ for the storyline. No lightning, but a weird play on creating life, because it turns it around and creates ‘living death’. As I mentioned at the start, it doesn’t always seem about saving people from death, but about creating something new, from something dead.

Pet Semetary – this one being a classic example of that, trying to bring back a child, but what comes back isn’t what was expected or happily received in the end.

Nine – slightly different film to the above, but a delightful watch being honest. But the premise is the creation of nine little dolls, which each have a part of the scientists’ soul in them. He put his living self into objects and gave them life. It also has hints of a technological revolution and takeover by machine, and is a great story. I enjoyed it very much.

But they all have a thread of there being a mechanism, a spark that creates life. We bring people back to life with electricity to the heart when it stops, and people can die by being struck by lightning. A big bang of sorts to the system it is introduced to. Like what the hadron collider is trying to do. People think of it maybe creating a black hole, or a vortex, but what if it is there is create ‘life’ from the underworld, raising a leviathan? I’ll leave that idea there; it crosses into other realms. Once they reanimate or create something though, can you maintain it as such? All the storylines show that no, we can’t control it, but it doesn’t stop people trying. To be the commander of life and death really would set you apart from the average person. But what if you could, instead of creating ‘life’ from death that staggered on in a half-life, do the opposite. Create death within life, to have the same result of a half-life, creating a shell of a person, I only say this because it sometimes appears that is what has happened to some. And while in some ways I have speculated on their being another entity here, using our dead as vessels as said in the film Dark City and in my article Not like us, maybe I have missed the obvious. That they may also require the living, even though I should have realised this after writing Vampires, but not as you know it, but sometimes it takes a while to link things together. Because although things like this may only be fiction, and work their way into storylines and tales, there is no harm in considering what if it was real, and to ask yourself, would they? Could they? Have they?

(c) K Wicks