Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (28 page)

For the first time in human history, more of the world’s population lives in crowded urban centers than rural environments, and in most industrialized nations, that number is quickly approaching 90 percent. Correspondingly, global job satisfaction is at its lowest point in more than two decades,
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with the younger generations leading the pack in unhappiness. We grow up. We get uninspiring jobs to pay the rent. We work our whole lives to no real end. We get promotions. We get laid off. We find new uninspiring jobs that are pretty much the same as the old ones. We sit in traffic and wonder how it came to this. We grow old. Our health fails. We die. Another zombie bites the dust.

Before becoming one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century, Franz Kafka had a career as a corporate lawyer at an insurance agency in Prague. He hated everything about it, stating that office work should not be considered a proper occupation but, rather, a form of decomposition:

What do I do? I sit in an office. It is a foul-smelling factory of pain, in which there is no sense of happiness. And so I quite calmly lie to those who inquire after my health, instead of turning away like a condemned man—which is in fact what I am.
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I hope your job doesn’t stink as badly as Kafka’s did, but as a veteran of the corporate grind myself, I certainly know where he’s coming from.

Another contributing factor to the modern zombie’s current relevance is that it has no long-standing literary tradition. In fact, the last dozen years aside, zombies have almost no literary tradition at all. Unlike most other popular monsters, zombies don’t reflect the ancient superstitions of a bygone age. They’re not born of myth or legend. There is no romance in the living dead, no classic hero or moral lesson to counterbalance their grinding advance. They aren’t driven by religious commitment, lost love, or some misguided yet noble pursuit. Their curse can’t be cured by a battle victory, a kiss, or a kind word. They are the here and now. They are the painful reality of what we must suffer in this life. Simply put, they are the most compelling, relevant, and enduring monster of the last half century.

And they happen to scare the bejesus out of me.

D
ollar for dollar, horror is the most popular and profitable film genre, with its comparatively low production costs and obsessively loyal fan base. It’s also, unfortunately, the least respected. Dozens of celebrated actors got their start in successful horror franchises, including Johnny Depp in
A Nightmare on Elm Street
(1984), Jennifer Aniston in
Leprechaun
(1993), and Kevin Bacon in
Friday the 13th
(1980). But horror movies themselves are routinely dismissed by critics and ignored during awards season. And the least respected subgenre in horror, deep at the bottom of the barrel, is unquestionably the zombie movie. Even comedy legend Rodney Dangerfield, who made a fortune out of being the butt of his own jokes, recognized the lowliness of zombies. As he riffs in one of his routines:

I walked into a bar and asked the bartender to make me a zombie. He took one look and said, “God beat me to it!”

In March 2010, the eighty-second Academy Awards ran a three-minute video tribute to modern horror in film. Zombies were featured on-screen for less than one second. It was a flash so brief that if you blinked, you’d miss it. Other movies receiving considerably more time in the tribute were the 1988 comedy
Beetlejuice
, the Steve Martin musical
Little Shop of
Horrors
, and the romantic teen juggernaut
Twilight.
None of these is actually a horror movie, underscoring the widespread confusion that exists about what horror is, even within the governing body of the industry.

If horror is confusing, then zombies are a complete mystery. While other film monsters enjoy clearly defined characteristics and widespread acceptance, the modern zombie continues to languish in the shadows while scholars and film critics make sweeping statements about the living dead that don’t hold up to the harsh light of reality. In fact, scholars and critics who write about zombie films often include a wide range of horror, comedy, and action movies in their zombie category, despite the fact that no actual zombies are ever featured on-screen. This irresponsible cataloging does the subgenre a great disservice and literally drives me insane.

I recently rewatched
Night of the Living Dead
with my twelve-year-old nephew. He’d never seen it before, so I explained to him that each zombie movie has a specific set of rules for its undead creatures to follow. Some are afraid of fire. Some are slow and lumbering. Some can open doors and use tools. Some can even speak. He thought about this for a few minutes and then jokingly asked, “Is one of the rules in this movie that the zombies have to stay twenty feet away from the camera?”

Insulting
Night
is fighting words in my book, no matter how old you are. But in my nephew’s defense, he was referring to repeated wide shots of zombies milling about outside an isolated farmhouse while survivors inside argue over what to do to stay alive. I had to remind myself that because he’s grown up on contemporary zombie video games and movies,
the notion of the dead rising to eat the living is nothing new to him. But when
Night of the Living Dead
was first released on an unsuspecting public in the late 1960s, it scared the wits out of just about everybody, including some of the biggest names in modern horror.

Legendary author Stephen King was a junior in college when the film premiered, and he has said that it turned him to jelly. Director of the
Evil Dead
and
Spider-Man
franchises Sam Raimi credits
Night of the Living Dead
as being the first film to have a profound impact on him:

I was probably about ten years old and my sister snuck me into the theater under her coat, if you can believe that. It was a crime that she committed against me, watching that film. I was too young. And it blew my mind, the terror. I could not believe it. I was so terrified watching that film.
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In his late twenties, Wes Craven had never seen a horror movie before and had no interest in the genre. A friend dragged him to Romero’s
Night
, and it shook him to the core: “I was hooked, and it was George’s fault.”
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Craven would later go on to direct dozens of iconic modern horror films, including
The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street
, and the wildly popular
Scream
franchise, to name a few.

As we’ve seen, George Romero quite literally invented the modern zombie with his 1968 classic,
Night of the Living Dead.
Since then, hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands, of zombie films and videos have been made by backyard filmmakers and big-name directors in the United States and
elsewhere, taking Romero’s flesh eater in new and creepy directions. Though covering them all would require a book in itself, here are a few highlights of some important historical moments in zombie movie history, post-
Night.

In 1979, the late Italian horror director Lucio Fulci released
Zombie.
Fulci is widely referred to as the Godfather of Gore, and he didn’t hold back in this film. Italian zombie movies are known to be more bloody and gross than their American counterparts. In keeping with this reputation,
Zombie
includes tight shots of a woman getting her eye gruesomely poked out with a stick.

But the most famous scene in the film follows a topless female scuba diver as she’s threatened by a shark until a zombie emerges from an underwater reef to attack her as well. The zombie then does battle with the shark, which rips off the zombie’s arm and swims away after suffering a bite. In zombie circles, this scene is so famous that it has led to people using the name “Zombie vs. Shark” for everything from Web sites to rock bands. A clip of the scene was also featured in a 2010 national television ad for Windows 7, Microsoft’s new operating system. Dozens of Italian zombie splatterfests would follow in the eighties and nineties, but Fulci’s
Zombie
is the film that kicked off the “spaghetti undead” craze.

In 1985, writer-director Dan O’Bannon’s
Return of the Living Dead
premiered to mixed reviews and midlevel success, but it has since become arguably the second-most influential film in zombie culture behind Romero’s
Night of the Living Dead.

O’Bannon’s film takes Romero’s theme and moves it into spoof territory, as a pair of bumbling medical-supply workers accidentally release a secret government toxin on a bunch
of cadavers in their warehouse. The cadavers start jumping around, so the workers cut them up and burn the evidence, sending infected smoke out the chimney and into the atmosphere. Enter a rainstorm.

Ashes soon fall back to earth, making the dead in the nearby cemetery rise from their graves and seek out living humans. But instead of eating human flesh, the zombies in
Return
only want brains. This was the first time in film history that any zombie had eaten brains, said “brains,” or expressed any interest in brains at all. Today the
Return of the Living Dead
franchise remains the only major film series to include zombies that eat brains. Nevertheless, at every zombie walk and at other zombie-themed events, you will see people chanting that they want brains. This illogically comical notion caught on and will now forever be associated with the modern zombie. We have O’Bannon to thank for that.

It’s hard for me to name the worst zombie movie of all time. Ultimately, that’s a question of personal taste. But one year after
Return of the Living Dead
premiered, a film that’s on my short list was released:
Raiders of the Living Dead
(1986). Starring Scott Schwartz of
The Toy
and featuring homemade laser guns and public-domain Three Stooges footage, this stinker follows the confused investigations of a hack reporter and his accidental teen sidekick as they try to figure out why dead bodies are roaming their quiet suburban neighborhood. But even that basic description gives the haphazard events that unfold on-screen too much credit. With a poster stolen from
Star Wars
, a title stolen from
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, and a plot stolen from the mind of a two-year-old, the film is almost unwatchable.

Interestingly, writer-director Samuel Sherman’s next film was the 1987 documentary
Drive-In Madness
, which looks at
drive-in movie culture and features an interview with George Romero. I wonder if Romero knew that Sherman had just dealt a blow to the subgenre he so brilliantly created.
Raiders of the Living Dead
writer Brett Piper would not surprisingly go on to pen even worse schlock, including
A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell
(1990).

In the 1990s, zombie video games took over for film as the driver of undead representations in visual media. It wasn’t until 2002, with director Danny Boyle’s
28 Days Later
, that the subgenre got its next breath of life.

The movie opens as a confused bike messenger wakes from a long coma to find the hospital empty and the streets of London deserted. He is soon chased by raving maniacs that lead him to join forces with a small band of survivors who desperately search for hope and safety in a world gone mad.

Though both Boyle and George Romero rightly agree that the rage-filled humans in
28 Days
aren’t technically zombies, the film was wildly successful, and fans across the globe saw it as the next great innovation in the zombie subgenre. Shot on digital video and made for just $8 million,
28 Days Later
grossed an estimated $90 million worldwide and will forever be known as the film that brought us fast zombies.

The 2000s have been boom years for zombie films, such as
Shaun of the Dead
in 2004—a comedy send-up hybrid of Romero’s classic
Night of the Living Dead
and O’Bannon’s
Return of the Living Dead
—which made fun of zombies a bit but still held on to traditional elements. While Romero was critical of
Return of the Living Dead
in the 1980s, saying that making fun of the monster ruins its potential to horrify, he embraced
Shaun of the Dead
and has since included writer Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright in cameos in his own zombie movies.