Plague of the Zombies

Now we can understand how zombification operates as an elaborate programme of mind invasion supervised by Vampire Management. It can be regarded as a complex process of manipulation at the level of symbols and aims at implanting specific forms of ideology into zombie minds, to ensure that they think and act in accordance with the dictates of zombie culture. But what is far less banal is how to discover ways of resisting and outflanking the zombie assembly line.

An opposition to zombie culture has emerged which focuses on schizoidical, psychic counter-attacks that are combined with the deliberate deployment of contradictory ideas and concepts. Such insurgent semiotics will move in several directions at once, whilst always keeping in mind the awareness that every belief is infact an enemy. These strategies realise that they can never completely escape the attachment that existing languages have to the current distribution of resources, as well as the historical development of language in shaping the present order of knowledge. Although these epistemological excavations do much to emphasise the flows of power that are inherent to words, they do so as rhetorical devices that expose their own didactic impulses. And yet it is one of the paradoxes of the zombie nation that anti-zombie behaviour is present as an immanent force in everyone.

One group tirelessly working towards establishing some kind of collective manual for anti-zombie living is the Hammer House of Horror. But what the Hammer House of Horror exactly is is very hard to tell. It is infact a multiple name. The first Hammer House of Horror appeared in 1957 and was a British-based low-budget film company. Various radical groups throughout the sixties and seventies adopted the name and used it as a vehicle for their own activities.

Since then, countless discourses have referred to the Hammer House of Horror as a mythical place where dominant social relations are turned upside down. When searching the phrase “Hammer House of Horror” on the Internet, there can be found several references to projects that use this name. There is a mention of a “triple H” in the writings of Alexander Trocchi, and the psychiatrist R.D. Laing often referred to his experimental communal retreat for schizophrenics as a “Hammer House of Horror”.

But the Hammer House of Horror that concerns us here is an electronic mailing list. Its participants describe themselves as “residents” of the Hammer House of Horror, and regard the mailing list as a speculative playground that creates its own mythologies and complex patterns, eventually to transform itself into a self-reflexive perpetuum mobilum. One of the myths of this Hammer House of Horror is that this Hammer House of Horror is but a shadow of a shadow of the real Hammer House of Horror, and that this HHH exists to spread terrifying plots against the real HHH.

Every thirteen messages or so a hint is given as to the true existence of the real HHH, and those residents who are sufficiently enlightened can begin their counter plotting on behalf of the one, true HHH. Every few months, in conjunction with appropriate astrological events, usually a full moon, this Hammer House of Horror publishes its own newspaper called “The Hermetic Hammer” in which they reveal, through text and images remixed from the HHH mailing list and connected web sites, how it is that the Hammer House residents know, “Absolutely everything about nothing and absolutely nothing about everything” (to quote the slogan beneath the paper’s heading). The “Hermetic Hammer” is usually handed out at football matches.

Hammer House residents regularly make use of fake names. One of the more commonly utilised is “Boris Karloff”, “a name that anyone can use.” Recently in Dublin, a group of thirteen Boris Karloffs were involved in the high-jacking of a school mini-bus, which they demanded should drive them to the birthplace of W.B. Yeats in Sandymount Avenue. Once there they planned to “hammer into disunity evolving dimensions of experience”. Unfortunately the mini-bus was stopped by a police road block. The thirteen Boris Karloffs were subsequently arrested and placed on criminal charges. All thirteen gave their name as “Boris Karloff” and claimed that a multiple identity cannot be judged by a state that maintains its power through the illusion of “democratic rights”. Media coverage of the case has interpreted it as a huge prank, and this has now made it unlikely that the Boris Karloffs will receive custodial sentences.

Some members of the Hammer House of Horror have taken the multiple name tactic to its logical conclusion and refuse to use any name whatsoever. In the sender part of an email message the name space is simply replaced with ….. . A meeting of these ….. ‘s was organised this summer in Cornwall. Participants were asked to bring with them their “hermetic hammers”, which they would be using to beat standing stone circles with as a symbolic protest against the reactionary Celtic identity promoted by establishment institutions like the bardic Gorsedds.

The …..’s regard themselves as modern-day Celtic warrior-poets and view Celticism as a mongrel culture of continually evolving cross-fertilisation and hybridisation. When communicating with each other in a face to face situation these …..’s have experimented with an imaginative re-creation of the “Cornish” language by mixing spontaneously created mouth sounds with continually changing and invented words that have an entirely arbitrary relationship to any actual object they may or may not be referring to.

Another project of the Hammer House of Horror has been to apply what they term as the “intelligence of music” to their investigation into non-verbal communication and extrasensory perceptions. This has involved organising subterranean gatherings in basements where harsh, broken up electronic dance music is played until the morning, at which point the celebrants retire to a nearby cafe for a ritual breakfast consisting of chips and beans. Extreme frequencies and complex sonic constructions are employed to increase psychic energies. Hammer House of Horror residents usually refer to these events as ‘Fifth Force Parties’.

Even though the Hammer House of Horror is often accused, even by its own residents, of an “anonymous elitism” that depends on a thorough immersion in hermetic codes for their extraordinary games to be comprehensible to anyone, the Hammer House of Horror is still an inspiration to those searching for ways to go beyond mere polemic against zombiefication and to actively engage with the challenge of transforming the world. Included in the signature to Hammer House of Horror email is the following declaration, “The non-existence of this Hammer House of Horror is guaranteed by a multiplicity of discords, paradoxes and contradictions. Listen carefully to these tangled plots and you may hear a new world”

This text is taken from “Dialectical Immaterialisms”, which will be included in the forthcoming Public Netbase publication “Cyberzombies”.

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