Just how likely is melting permafrost in the north to release bacteria or viruses that kill us all? Was Val Kilmer trying to warn us all in "the thaw"?
Find out all the details about what's really dangerous and what probably isn't, in my latest article!
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RPGPundit
Currently Smoking: Lorenzetti Oversize + H&H's Chestnut
The theme of the past coming back to haunt and harm us goes pretty far back, easily to Oedipus Rex. The meme of an ancient frozen biological horror is a bit newer.
ReplyDeleteThe movie Horror Express (1972) is a fairly low budget story about transporting an archeological find in the form of an “ice man” on a train through Siberia. The ice man awakes and it’s revealed that it is the host of alien entity that can jump from person to person. It’s a kind of reboot of the story Who Goes There? (1938), which was later made into the 1951 movie The Thing From Another World. So the idea of ancient evil awakened from a frozen hell to wreak havoc appears to be an old one.
Actually a lot of this goes back to the pre Victorian fascination with mummies. One of the first books about animated mummies is Jane C. Loudon’s 1827 book, The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (in two volumes). The book is available at Archive.org for those who are interested. It’s a kind of pre Victorian steampunk SF novel with an ancient mummy crashing an airship into a structure during a jubilee in the future. Who could ask for more?