Ain’t she sweet?

The little girl zombie (or LGZ as I call her for short) does seem to be a staple of the living dead genre. Heck, Night of the Living Dead started the trend, as well as the associated trend of the parents-in-denial (PID?) that get murdered and/or eaten by the adorable tyke. The latter doesn’t always happen, but the LGZ herself shows up a lot. It’s probably because she more than anything punches up that whole theme of lost humanity, of innocence and potential reduced to empty, ravening instinct. Also because people on the whole rarely consider cute little girls to be dangerous, any more than they could be convinced a dog like this could potentially rip their throats open:

So when little Karen or Katie or whoever goes feral and starts chewing on necks, it’s a bit of a shock.

Little girls gone bad aren’t restricted to zombie-dom. The Exorcist, The Ring, The Shining… the only thing creepier than a murderous little girl is a murderous little girl with a British accent, so thank you very much Resident Evil movie for deciding to do that with your killer computer personality in addition to having zombies shambling around.

Not all precocious little girls in horror movies are bad seeds, though. One particular example comes from the movie we made oblique reference to last week, the science-fiction awesomeness that is Aliens. Some out there don’t consider Aliens to actually be a horror movie, but it’s close enough for me. Someone around this wide, wild Web of ours, and sadly I can’t remember who at the moment, actually drew comparisons between Aliens and a classic “siege” zombie movie. There’s a lot of truth to that. Barricading, infighting amongst the survivors, the “horde” trying to force their way in, even a run to the helicopter (or VTOL assault craft, tomato, tomahto…) at the end. And Newt, resourceful little Newt, holding out in her cubbyhole like a pre-teen Robert Neville.

(Trivia bit: “I am Legend” inspired George Romero so much that to this day he cheerfully claims to have stolen the idea for Night of the Living Dead from Matheson’s novel. And so we come full circle.)

Anyhow, the in-joke from last week’s comic was that the last three digits on the Z Tracker readout are the same as the number of the planetoid where Aliens takes place, LV-426. We were showing something much like the motion trackers in Aliens (one of the greatest cinematic tension devices ever conceived), so it seemed appropriate. 426 was also the number of page views logged for the site on Oct. 7th, our first regular Wednesday update. Layers within enigmas.

No Western spiel this week, even though I watched enough Old West documentaries over the weekend that my wife threatened bodily harm if the marathon continued. Gotta keep the artist happy, or at least non-homicidal. Also by the time you all read this, I’ll probably be up way too late playing Left 4 Dead 2. Unless something goes horribly wrong with my pre-order, it’s time to take Ellis’ official instructions to heart and “Kill all sonsabitches”.