Time for one of my characteristic intros, when before going deep talking into the movie the article is about I express some sort of opinion and/or get the readers into the climatic mood of what the movie is about. This time, it is about school shootings. Hah! An open range situation for me, a declared liberal with not much faith for mankind to start to shoot out, fire at will. But no, I won’t this time. Not because I consider this to be a too delicate subject to frivolize, I think such things don’t even exist, but only because those school shootings define us as a disgusting and worthless species that the text would end up being too depressing and not fittable for an entertainment platform as this is. But, if allowing anonymous citizens to purchase unlimited firearms already sounds like the worst idea ever, a society that is alienating the individuals in a systematic way, when poisonous drugs like religion, racism, and all kinds of supremacy propaganda are everywhere you look, one can only expect the worst. Yeah, I know this intro has not much to do with the contents of today’s article, but I felt like sharing this opinion. Sorry, I know, again, this was not the right vehicle to do such a thing. So, now, let’s go straight to entertainment.
A Stranger Among the Living (2019) centers on a young teacher who finds himself haunted by the undead after narrowly escaping a school shooting. Such a terrible experience comes back to him as a dramatic trauma one can’t easily get rid of, but also as supernatural forces searching for relief.
The movie has been produced, written, and directed by Christopher Wesley Moore, responsible for other horror films like Triggered (2019) and Blessed Are the Children (2016). He is also one of the main actors in a cast that includes Meredith Mohler, Jake Milton, Victoria Posey, Keni Bounds, Shari Plumlee, Eric Riggs, Cheryl Abernathy, J.C. Patterson, David Wozniak, Mandy Kate Myers, Mandy Meyer, and Dustin Barron.
A Stranger Among the Living (2019) has been part of the line-up in several film festivals along 2019 and 2020 including Desmond District Demons Film Festival, FEARnyc, Horror On Sea Film Festival, and Oxford Film Festival, and since this October it is available on Amazon Prime Video.
Here you can watch the official trailer of A Stranger Among the Living (2019).
In order to write this little article, I have been documenting myself in the subject of school shootings. Because we all think of the USA when we relate guns and schools, especially that very popular Columbine High School massacre in Colorado back in 1999, but sadly it is a global issue. The first known school shooting in the United States was the Enoch Brown school massacre on July 26, 1764, when a group of Lenape Native Americans entered a schoolhouse, shot and scalped schoolmaster Enoch Brown, and killed nine or ten children. But the school shooting in the USA that caused the highest number of casualties last century was the University of Texas tower shooting where 25-year-old engineering student Charles Whitman fatally shot 15 people and wounded 31 more during a 96-minute shooting rampage from the observation deck of the university. He was shot and killed by police. He had earlier murdered his wife and his mother at their homes. And although this century barely started we have already smashed the casualty charts with the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, with 33 and 28 casualties each respectively.
Europe is also familiar with this drama. The top of the casualties list is the Kerch Polytechnic College massacre in Crimea, in 2018, where a bomb exploded on the first floor and then Vladislav Roslyakov, an 18-year-old boy, started shooting people in the college’s dining room on the second floor. That is the highest registered death toll. It is followed by the Dunblane massacre in the UK, with 19 deaths including the perpetrator and an unborn child in 1996, and the Cologne school massacre in Germany with 11 deaths in 1964.
Still, the macabre award goes to Garissa University College attack in Kenya, Africa, where Somali Al-Shabaab militants killed 147 students, in order to free Muslims and killing those who identified as Christians.
And that’s only the most notorious ones because incidents as such are constantly happening everywhere in all continents and rising the deadly figures every year.
