Ideally, trigger warnings include a brief comment on the type content that follows.  The intent is to allow people to be forewarned and make their own judgements about whether they want to deal with a topic at the moment rather than having a potentially emotional or traumatic content sprung on them (another idea that fits with the “trigger” verb).

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0783238/

And I don’t think the purpose of the film is to resolve all ethical dilemmas on the subject, merely to make the audience question the internal dilemmas in the film, and how its related to a larger context to how people in other zombie movies act. If the movie DID specifically resolve any kind of philosophical argument that one could cook up in regards to automatons, it’d be a lot bigger deal. Instead it’s just adding a voice to the choir, rather than trying to solve it completely.

In regards to the questions it raises up in regards to date rape, or abuse of coma patients, I think that’s an interesting analysis. If someone doesn’t remember a crime, and it doesn’t leave any “harm”, did the crime ever happen at all?

I PERSONALLY don’t need to grapple with them, to me, they are of course wrong, but it’s an interesting idea, similar themes were dealt with in “Memento”, if you don’t remember a murder, did it really happen? If you don’t remember a victim, can you really mourn them?

The difference here I think is that with a crime against a coma patient or a drugged person, they can come out of it, it’s reversible, they go from an unconscious person back to a person, the state is temporary. With the zombie, she’s dead, so it’s irreversible, and impossible to make her a “human” again.

In regards to Voodoo zombies, those are the REAL zombies though, even though they aren’t Romero-style zombies, it’s still been done to people, and people have still been allegedly made into “Zombies”. I know they aren’t actually dead, i’m just saying that “Zombies” actually exist, and that the modern film zombie is influenced by a real world thing.

Well, if it isn’t supposed to have any purpose or desire, why not rape and torture useless husks of zombie sheep? Why don’t they just make the subject of the movie an actual blow up doll? I’d say it’s different than a blow up doll because it isn’t a blow up doll, and slapping on some makeup hardly makes it some kind of literary allegory worthy of deep discussion IMO. Besides, let’s say we resolve all the moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding the treatment of zombies; what then? What practical purpose does that have?

If anything, a hot young female zombie seems more an allusion to molesting a passed-out woman in a somewhat socially acceptable way than it is a way to ask deep moral and ethical questions about treating an object (no soul/purpose/desire) like an object. She can’t say no, she can’t feel anything, she isn’t even aware of what’s happening to her and probably won’t recall it so does that mean it’s ok to do whatever we want to her, no matter how depraved? Is this a description of a zombie woman, or could it also apply to a young female college student who was drugged or otherwise passed out in some frat house basement? How about a woman in a coma being molested by hospital staff? Do we really need to grapple with these kinds of dilemmas?

And unless the dosages are extreme or the affected person is not properly taken care of, zombie powder will wear off. It’s mostly puffer-fish toxin with local variations in admixtures (such as tropanes like scopolamine or atropine in some recipes). Also, unless the alkaloids from solanaceous plants are used, the voodoo “zombie” will remember everything that their eyes saw, their ears heard, and their body felt while they were paralyzed. Tropane admixtures cause amnesia, however, but also more delirium/hallucination. So, zombie powder is a temporary chemically-induced paralysis and is not analogous to undead zombies in any way.

But that’s exactly what the movies doing, it’s asking if it’s actually rape if it’s a creature that isn’t supposed to have any kind of purpose or desires. It’s a useless husk of a person, so how is it any different than if they’d gotten a blow-up doll?

Other horror movies have set up that various “crimes”, are permissible against Zombies, so why (separated from social taboos) should what they do be any worse than anything anyone else has done in horror films to zombies. What is justifiable or allowable to do to a creature that isn’t supposed to be alive, and how we exactly define “alive”, I think are both questions that the movie is dealing with. It’s also dealing with group dynamics, and social coercion ideas. It’s not just an empty exploitative movie I think.

Being paralyzed by “zombie powder” isn’t the same as being a zombie. There really is such a substance made from some extremely potent psychoactive plants native to the region Davis was studying when he wrote that story, but making someone appear dead is a far cry from turning them into undead flesh-eating monsters.

In Deadgirl, I’m not seeing these deeper themes that horror is supposed to allow us to consider unless it’s a question of whether rape and torture is ever justifiable and if so, when. Shelley’s Frankenstein was subtitled “The Modern Prometheus;” is Deadgirl‘s subtitle “The Modern Rape Victim?” You did also say “Good stories, horror or otherwise, are valuable…” and my point was that in this particular case we might not be dealing with a “good” story.

I guess I’m just saying that not all movies ask “deeply important” questions. Sometimes they just suck, though I understand that’s a subjective judgment and opinions differ. Still, a movie might raise some important questions because of its content but that hardly puts the movie in question on par with the more literary and allegorical horror that doesn’t rely on mere shock value to get people talking about it.

But that aside, I think that to say that discussions of Zombies are ultimately worthless isn’t true, since Monsters exists as psychological abstracts, we have monsters because they are a creature that are oftentimes designed to specifically create situations that require moral analysis.

Psychological abstracts and thought experiments exist at all because we’re allowed to ask intriguing questions otherwise we wouldn’t be able to deal with in a complete manner. For instance the “Swampman” thought-experiment, Swampman obviously can’t exist, everything we know about biology and chemistry and nature says it can’t, BUT it asks a question about authenticity that is valuable SEPARATE from the reality of the creatures existence.

We know Frankenstein’s Monster doesn’t actual exist, but it’s an important abstract to ask questions about creator culpability, and the responsibilities of parenthood, and the morality of tampering with science that isn’t fully comprehended. The Invisible Man doesn’t exist, but then question of what morality you subscribe to when you can’t be caught or punished for whatever you do is an interesting question. So there is definitely more going on, in what horror film can accomplish than visceralness of violence alone. Vampires, Zombies, Werewolves, and countless other mythical creatures resonate with us, both because they allow us to ask these kind of questions, but because they are universal imagery that as a culture we understand and that mean something to us. They have deep meaning and importance as symbols and psychological abstracts.

Good stories, horror or otherwise, are valuable because they have weight and purpose beyond the reality of the images on the screen. They make us ask questions, they make us consider situations, there is drama and ethical dilemmas that are occurring. If there wasn’t anything interesting going on up there on the screen, we wouldn’t waste our time, so discussing the ethical implications of the story and the character’s decisions and what the audience can garner from that I think are central to the argument. If they didn’t matter, and it was pointless to discuss the implications of the fiction at all, the discussion of the film probably wouldn’t have started in the first place, since the implications of the stories we tell, and what our society finds valuable, and the questions that a movie asks are deeply important.

As such, they have no identity beyond whatever the viewer projects onto them (and we mostly project the same things); they are flesh-eating monsters, they are evil, and they are not human so morals and ethics don’t apply when dealing with them (which saves the viewer the trouble of experiencing any ambiguous reactions when they are hacked up or shoved into wood chippers). That said, they still look human enough for us to perceive them as ‘people,’ even if they happen to be infected with something that makes them eat other people. So in light of their fictional existence, grappling with moral and ethical dilemmas about how to deal with them is utterly pointless. Next I suppose we’ll need to determine if the oompa loompas working at the chocolate factory are receiving proper compensation and benefits.

When someone is being violently attacked, violent self-defense is justified. But I can’t imagine ANY scenario where rape and torture are justified. In this particular movie our minds don’t see a zombie chained up and being tortured, they see a young woman chained up and being tortured.

Our brains do not make distinctions between our external, physical reality and internalized false imagery since we’ve evolved in a context where sufficiently realistic fake imagery did not exist (see Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television</i. by J. Mander). Vivid, realistic images only began tricking our brains since the advent of motion pictures, and explains why the horror genre (among others) exists at all. If our brains could easily and immediately differentiate between perceiving the 'real' world and viewing an image then no one would be scared by horror movies, get turned on by porn, or cry during poignant melodramas.

Whether TV and films really subconsciously promote violence and rape is worth looking deeper into IMO, and may at least partly explain things like this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/8516387.stm (article is titled "Violence against women is justified, says pupil study").

Some things can potentially trigger those memories, and really depress someone after triggering a memory of a past event that they are trying to put in their past, overcome, and eventually forget about it.

You kind of have to start to forget the trauma or you’ll never live normally again, and some people, especially ones that are going through very sensitive times, may need some time to work through it without it being pulled right back to the surface.

I understand a general disturbing content warning, I think, but I guess I still don’t really know what that means, “might spark a previous or ongoing trauma”? If someone has been sexually assaulted or abused, they’re not “reminded” that they were, they’ve never forgotten that, I’d think. Likewise, is somebody really recovering or recovered if they’re unsettled by words on a screen? I guess I’m missing something. It seems overly paternalistic, perhaps?