@Mouser - +1 for
Pontypool. Nice bit of originality in a sea of me-too zombie themed movies. About the only zombie apocalypse treatment I ever found believable and genuinely scary. Didn't even mind the absence of the lovely and outrageously athletic Milla Jovovich (as Alice) in that one.
An interesting cross-genre riff with some zombie/possession (and H.P.Lovecraftian blending of science and religion) is John Carpenter's 1987
Prince of Darkness. This one has it all: sci-fi, horror, demonic possession, some allusions to the (then radical) notion of the relationship between mathematics, information theory and DNA...
What are your favorite movies?Suppose you could somehow capture the source of all evil and contain it in a reliquary kept hidden in the basement of an abandoned church. Suppose this evil was a tangible thing only temporarily imprisoned within a parallel dimension that was now beginning to replicate itself here in order break free within our own reality? That's the basic premise behind Prince of Darkness. An idea that got used quite effectively by Clive Barker when he penned his now legendary Hellraiser/Books of Blood series.
A university scientist-professor, along with his handpicked team of graduate students, is called in at the request of a priest to study something hidden and guarded by the church for centuries: a large glass container that was somehow
sealed from the inside. It contains a swirling and radiant mass of...
something. It used to be dormant. But as the priest points out -
something inside has started to awaken. Something that is trying to get out...
This film has it all. You even get a few appearances of none other than Alice Cooper as a possessed street derelict!
A few great quotes from the film:
(from the quantum physics lecture at the start of the film)
Let's talk about our beliefs, and what we can learn about them. We believe nature is solid, and time a constant. Matter has substance and time a direction. There is truth in flesh and the solid ground. The wind may be invisible, but it's real. Smoke, fire, water, light - they're different! Not as to stone or steel, but they're tangible. And we assume time is narrow because it is as a clock - one second is one second for everyone! Cause precedes effect - fruit rots, water flows downstream. We're born, we age, we die. The reverse NEVER happens... None of this is true! Say goodbye to classical reality, because our logic collapses on the subatomic level... into ghosts and shadows...
From Job's friends insisting that the good are rewarded and the wicked punished, to the scientists of the 1930's proving to their horror the theorem that not everything can be proved, we've sought to impose order on the universe. But we've discovered something very surprising: while order DOES exist in the universe, it is not at all what we had in mind!
A life form is growing out of pre-biotic fluids. It's not winding down into disorder, it's self-organizing. It's becoming something. What? An animal? A disease? What?
(static distorted borderline hysteric voice) This is not a dream... not a dream. We are using your brain's electrical system as a receiver. We are unable to transmit through conscious neural interference. You are receiving this broadcast as a dream. We are transmitting from the year one, nine, nine, nine. You are receiving this broadcast in order to alter the events you are seeing. Our technology has not developed a transmitter strong enough to reach your conscious state of awareness, but this is not a dream. You are seeing what is actually occurring for the purpose of causality violation.
