Editorial: Brains to see who's scary

Unaccustomed to street lights or crowds bigger than a quorum, for a rural visitor it was a trip beyond the comfort zone into sensory overload when we attended the finals of a short film competition at Auckland's retro picture palace - with golden plaster elephants and a starry night-sky ceiling straight out of enchanted childhood - The Civic, on Queen St, on a Saturday night among multi-cultural street jostling and neon high-rise bungee rides.

Not having set foot inside a cinema for years - on account of disliking movies because they demand a captive audience, something I am too rebellious to provide (give me mobile radio any day, or even television with escape opportunities in the ad breaks) - the enormous screen was a shock.

Focusing was impossible. Fifty metres back where the giant heads were less than three metres high would have been preferable. Obsession with size is another problem with the cinematic medium.

Twelve movies in quick succession, albeit short ones, is a lot to take in all at once for a person who has seen only one other in the last 30 years.

Random clips resurface like dream scenes that made perfect sense at the time but don't add up in daylight - three pianos against a fence on a suburban lawn, pasta leaping up out of a pot onto a plate, a terrible explosion, grief, rage, narcissistic indifference, a midget's gruesome revenge, strange voices, leaves falling, a sweet hopeless wizard.

Even more bizarrely, the movie we came to see - Brains - featured zombies. Research was required to get to grips with this totally unfamiliar genre.

Happily, zombies don't actually exist. Apparently the idea arose in West Africa, where sorcerers/witch doctors/medicine men - keen to establish powerful reputations with theatrical snake oil, and aware of how well fear sells - used powdered puffer-fish neurotoxin to produce a death-like state of suspended animation. Victims were buried and then magically resurrected - to the astonishment of locals in communities culturally predisposed to believe their shamans - into a psychotic state of perpetual slavery maintained by administering datura.

Later, novels and movies embellished the terror with lashings of blood, guts-consumption ("Pass the spinal fluid") - and, hey presto, victims became reviled subjects of fear.

Brilliantly, with humour and no lack of gore thanks to prize-winning glistening make-up, Brains turned the tables by making the zombies frightened of far scarier humans; which is probably closer to a truth.

Humans are the most dangerous creatures on the planet. Their traditional tendency to form bullying packs to demonise and exploit identifiable minorities remains legion.

Throughout history persecution, discrimination and genocide against ethnic, religious, indigenous, gender and homosexual groups have been enormously popular crusades.

Later I broke another habit of a lifetime by switching on morning television to watch an item about the movie.

It was wedged between ads and infomercials for miraculous gunk that cures psoriasis, cleans boots and shoes and prevents nuclear war, torture devices for dissolving unsightly flab, recipes for spongy puddings, revolutionary undergarments to hide bulges and insurance as a protection racket against outrageous fortune. They would have done a witch doctor proud.