#animated corpse

So I couldn’t do things simply, so my attempt at @whumptober2020 is combined with @lookbluesoup’s excellent Fallout 4tober prompt list, mostly mashing together the two themes for each day. Naturally, we’re starting with New Vegas instead of 4, because Day 1 just begged to be an expansion of Carrot’s experience in Vault 22.

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1 | LET'S HANG OUT SOMETIME / Better Living, Underground

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Carrot crawled through the gap left by the great gear door, fingers brushing the pocked rust of the surface. The interior glowed an eerie green that almost seemed to come from the strange plants that draped every surface. She gazed around the hall, entranced.

“The logs show that several people have entered the vault over the past few months, but none have left…” Veronica’s voice startled her out of her reverie. She glared at the offender, who was reading from the entrance terminal with a look of concern growing on her face. “Maybe warn a girl next time, yeah?”

Veronica jumped as well, returning the glare. “Sure, I’ll just make sure next time I read a creepy terminal entry about how everyone before us has died that I warn you before I do it.”

Carrot grinned. “Perfect! So uh…remind me what this vault was? I think I zoned out when he was talkin’ bout the ‘speriment.”

Veronica frowned in thought, a hand on her chin. “Spearmint, huh? I dunno, I don’t think I see any spearmint around here…” She took a searching look around the room. “Might see some peppermint though!”

Carrot cocked her head, confused.

Veronica almost managed to keep a straight face, but finally broke down into snickering. “Sorry, bad joke. They were breeding hardier crops…er, making food plants stronger so they’d grow well even in bad conditions. Looks like it was successful.” She gestured broadly at the plant-enveloped room.

“That’s good though, right? What could be so bad about plants?”

The concern returned to Veronica’s face. “It should be good. For once, this vault was looking into some actually useful technology and clearly got results. We could do amazing things with the data they got. Make life better for the whole Mojave. Who knows what went wrong…Fingers crossed we don’t have to find out.”

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They found out. The giant mantises were nothing they were unprepared to handle, but Carrot shrieked the first time she stumbled over one of the fungus-infested corpses and it grabbed at her ankle. With that macabre discovery made, they were able to continue on in relative ease, until they reached the final level.

On the fifth level, they discovered violent plants. The Mojave always provided, at least, in excitement if nothing else. The plants had giant gaping, snapping, thorny mouths and a nasty tendency to spit spiky balls of some sort. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they also had snakelike tendrils that reached and grasped in search of anything that stepped too close.

And Carrot stepped too close. The vines that curled and clung with a life and intelligence no plant should have tangled around her arms, restraining her, reeling her in. The chatter of angry mushroom people and yells from Veronica faded as her mind returned to a shallow grave in the moonlight that was supposed to be forgotten, her hands bound, staring down a gun, no escape, no way out this time—

Her vision lit up with bright orange sparks, and heat seared along her wrists. She fell backwards, freed arms flailing, heart pounding.

“You alright?” asked Veronica, dropping her laser pistol.

Carrot squinted up at her from where she’d landed on the floor, rubbing her wrists frantically. She was breathless, panting, blinking the scene from her mind.

Direction: Robin Campillo  Rating: 6/10 Production: France Running time: 102min There is certainly no lack of zombie movies out there. Like the vampire the zombie is a creature that refuses to meet it’s demise - in modern times it haunts our screens more persistently than ever. The sheer numbers of the fiction made however requires new fresh takes to muster up some interest in us, the audience. We have numerous fiction focusing on the grisly and the gore of the animated dead as well as those focusing on the survival aspect among the survivors of the zombie outbreak (World War Z, the Walking Dead). The main characters consist of pairs of three different generations - and elderly mayor and his returned wife, the 30-year old Rachel and her deceased husband Mathieu and two parents with their returned six year old boy, Sylvain. All of the living face their own difficulties dealing with the reappearence of loved ones that come back transformed. They appear vital and familiar but their behaviour is different and slightly off. Closely monitored by their community scientists the dead can hold no secrets. Studies show they seem to have no need for sleep. They need to pace a certain amount of distance every day. They can not perform the most menial tasks without certain pause. In many ways it seems that they are forever stuck in their memories of the life they had before the incident. In recent times a new category has emerged that elevates the question of the undead to the realm of existential philosophy: what would we do if if the deceased simply came back to life? No flesheating involved. In 2005 swedish horror novelist John Ajvide Lindqvist raised the question in his novel Hanteringen av odöda. Robin Campillos the Returned hit the screens about the same time. Not to be confused with the new american tv-series with the same theme this french feature has a slow pace and a minimal amount of action. The direction focuses on internal rather than external events. This is bound to disappoint an audience expectant of classical horror. Beyond a few unsettling scenes and some mimicry of zombie conventions the film is a dramatic thriller with a slow buildup and questionable payoff for the audience that will engage the film.