Democrat administrations lead to an increased incidence of vampire movies, while Republicans are accompanied by more zombie flicks, according to Peter Rowe at the San Diego Union-Tribune. Why would this be? Rowe cites Annalee Newitz of sci-fi website io9, whose engaging view is that it's pure class warfare:
"Democrats, who want to redistribute wealth to 'Main Street', fear the Wall Street vampires who bleed the nation dry," Newitz argued, noting that Dracula and his ilk arose from the aristocracy.
"Republicans fear a revolt of the poor and disenfranchised, dressed in rags and coming to the White House to eat their brains."
A further piece of "research", also from io9, shows that war and crisis lead to higher numbers of zombie films in production. The graph is below: note that mummies are included, but vampires and ghosts are not, as the definition is the living dead, not the undead. Isn't science cool?
Looking at both these pieces of work, there appears to be a missing link. Although the Democrats have hardly done much on the economy that they can be proud of since FDR, perhaps the real correlation is between Republican Presidents and both deficits and economic crises.
Incidentally, Obama's sci-fi and fantasy interests are elsewhere - Spiderman and, implausibly, Conan the Barbarian. Perhaps this Schwarzenegger interpretation of the latter (youtube) is one of his inspirations. Personally I hope to see a little more Admiral Adama and a bit less lamentation.
Apologies for having completely failed to blog less about American politics.
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