Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (4 page)

Romero was so inspired by the book that when he decided to make his first film some fourteen years later, he set out to create a loose adaptation of
I Am Legend.
In fact, Romero’s and Matheson’s stories are so similar that Matheson initially mistook
Night of the Living Dead
for his own work:

I caught that on television, and I said to myself, “Wait a minute—did they make another version of
I Am Legend
they didn’t tell me about?” Later they told me Romero did it as an homage, which means he gets it for nothing!
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Though
Legend
has been directly adapted to the big screen three times, most recently as a Will Smith blockbuster,
10
many argue that
Night of the Living Dead
is a truer interpretation of Matheson’s vision than any of the official versions. But what sets Romero’s film apart from
I Am Legend
, what makes it truly great, is Romero’s deliberate rejection of all aspects of the vampire myth in favor of a much scarier, much more realistic threat.

Matheson’s goal was to bring the vampire into the modern age by creating a biological explanation for its existence. He invented a bacterial infection that created vampires,
Bacilli vampiri
, which could then be scientifically researched and understood. Matheson’s vampires could no longer fly or trans-figure themselves. They didn’t have superhuman strength, and they didn’t turn into bats. But Matheson carried over several elements of the traditional vampire myth. His vampires still hated crosses and Christian symbols. They couldn’t tolerate exposure to garlic. They died in direct sunlight and could be killed using a wooden stake through the heart. Romero rejected this cultural baggage.

By creating the flesh eater, a creature that literally arose in the modern age with no limiting Carpathian Mountain mythology, Romero was able to remove all of the Old World superstition and give birth to a completely scientific monster. No myth, just pure biology. No special powers, just the limited
humanlike abilities of a rotting corpse. No supernatural force, just the logical result of modern man’s polluting impact on the natural world. Still, the relationship between Romero’s flesh eaters and Matheson’s vampires remains the closest that the modern zombie has to any other creature.

As you might expect, given the history of Romero’s connection to
I Am Legend
, he didn’t consider the creatures he created to be zombies at all. He called them flesh eaters.

In fact, Romero was so dedicated to the brand-new concept of his flesh-eating monster that he originally named his film
Night of the Flesh Eaters.
It was only in the eleventh hour that the distribution company swapped in
Living Dead
for
Flesh Eaters
in hopes of appealing to a wider audience.
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At the time,
living dead
was a term used broadly to refer to various undead monsters, including vampires, mummies, and even Frankenstein. By way of example,
Cave of the Living Dead
(1965),
Fangs of the Living Dead
(1968), and
Crypt of the Living Dead
(1972) were all released around the same time as Romero’s
Night
, and all are vampire movies. The title was changed so late and in such a rush that on Wednesday, November 1, 1968, one month after its official premiere, a
Pittsburgh Gazette
review still referred to the film as
Night of the Flesh Eaters.

So how did we get from flesh eaters to living dead to the entire planet calling Romero’s monsters zombies? It was a slow ten-year process, culminating in yet another distribution company changing the name of yet another Romero film.

In 1978, Romero was approached by famed horror director Dario Argento, who offered to bankroll his next film, giving Romero $750,000 cash as long as Argento could have the
European rights.
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Argento then changed the name of Romero’s second flesh-eater movie from
Dawn of the Dead
to
Zombi
. Presto, the label stuck. The film raked in $55 million worldwide, becoming arguably even more iconic than
Night
, and that’s how we all came to mistakenly believe that Romero’s flesh eaters were zombies.

The modern zombie has remained remarkably consistent since it first lurched into popular consciousness in 1968. Most films follow a basic plot structure that is very close, if not identical, to that of
Night of the Living Dead
. But there are certain qualities or aspects of zombies that have changed over the decades. Most notable is the process by which a human is turned into a flesh eater.

Romero’s original vision was that zombies were not contagious. They were created by an infection present in the environment, not spread from zombie to human. Anyone who dies for any reason will acquire it. According to Romero, a bite is not necessary to transmit the infection, and he remains true to this original conception and uses this approach in all of his zombie films. It was Romero himself, though, who unintentionally opened the door to a new interpretation of how zombies are created. In
Night of the Living Dead
, the first person to turn from human to zombie on-screen is a little girl. She has been bitten on the arm and is suffering some strange illness. The bite doesn’t appear to be substantial enough to cause any real damage, but the girl is barely conscious, and she soon dies and comes back as a zombie.

This terrifying turn of events sends a clear message: bites
matter. They’re toxic at the very least and at worst may be directly related to becoming a zombie and spreading the plague. In Romero’s second zombie film,
Dawn of the Dead
, the two main characters who expire and return as zombies both die as a result of bite wounds. Though Romero has made his perspective clear over the years, the genie was out of the bottle.

Popular understanding accepted Romero’s idea that the zombie condition is caused by an infectious plague, but the spread of the plague was narrowed to include only those who have been directly infected by a zombie bite or exposure to zombie blood or body fluid. Not only does the current zombie-contagion model align more closely with its vampire roots, but it also conforms to our knowledge of infectious diseases, allowing zombie outbreaks to dramatically mirror more common outbreaks such as swine flu, mad cow, and rabies. The zombie sickness doesn’t automatically afflict everyone, but we all have the potential to be infected if exposed.

A
lab experiment goes horribly wrong, and a new virus is unleashed on the population, turning those infected into bloodthirsty maniacs driven by pure rage and capable of running at full speed. This is the premise of
28 Days Later
, the 2002 hit British film that introduced the most popular advancements in the subgenre of zombie films since George Romero invented the modern zombie in 1968. It also sparked a heated debate among enthusiasts about what exactly constitutes a zombie and how fast is too fast for the ghoulish horde to move.

28 Days Later
was groundbreaking as a low-budget horror film because of its immense mainstream success, but its core concept of a communicable rage infection was nothing new. A lesser-known film released seventeen years earlier,
Warning Sign
, depicts an accident in a secure lab that exposes workers to a deadly toxin that attacks the rage center of their brains, driving them to hunt and kill those not infected. Sound familiar?

The premise of the two films is almost identical, with the main difference being that
Warning
’s infection is airborne and contained within the boundaries of a secure research facility, while the
28 Days
infection is transferred by direct fluid contact to the entire population of Britain.

So why did
Warning Sign
hardly make a splash in the popular evolution of the modern zombie when
28 Days Later
completely turned the subgenre on its head?

From an execution standpoint,
Warning
is a relatively forgettable effort. Hal Barwood, its writer-director, has yet to make another movie.
28 Days
, however, was the first big hit in Danny Boyle’s directing career (although his 1996 film,
Trainspotting
, enjoyed some success at the box office and in critical reviews). He went on to win an Oscar for
Slumdog Millionaire
in 2008. But could there be something more at play? Could the key to the popularity of
28 Days Later
and its particular significance to the development of modern zombies lie in its quintessential zombieness?

Unlike those in
Warning
, the infected hordes in
28 Days
behave like rabid animals, unable to speak or reason. They will stop at nothing to accomplish their simple mission of finding and destroying every last surviving human on the planet. Though they don’t eat the living, they do bite, scratch, and claw to transmit their deadly infection, much as conventional modern zombies do. They also lack any sense of individual identity or distinguishing characteristics, leading most to classify the picture as a zombie film despite the fact that no one ever comes back from the dead.

I first met Danny Boyle in the mid-1990s when he gave a talk at New York University in support of his first feature film,
Shallow Grave.
It’s an indie suspense thriller about greed, madness, and roommates killing each other. The movie develops an impressive sense of tension, so I cornered Boyle after the screening and asked if he’d ever considered making a horror film, more specifically a zombie movie. He emphatically said no, that he had no interest in the zombie subgenre whatsoever. Jump forward eight years, and
28 Days Later
was raking in upward of $85 million at the box office, putting Boyle solidly on the map as a bankable director.

But if you ask Boyle today, he will still tell you he’s never made a zombie movie. He doesn’t see the rage-filled humans he created in
28 Days Later
as modern zombies. Zombie purists would agree with Boyle, arguing that a zombie that is still alive is not a zombie at all. Technically, they’re correct.

If we look at our three criteria for the modern zombie, the third stipulates that a zombie is a reanimated human corpse. By this standard, the infected freaks of
28 Days Later
don’t qualify. Living zombies are by definition not undead. They can be killed by stopping their hearts, and once dead, they do not come back to life as conventional zombies. In this way, they are fundamentally different from Romero’s original vision of the flesh eater raised from the grave to feast on the living. Even the title,
28 Days Later
, refers to how long it takes for the rage-filled humans in Boyle’s film to become so starved and dehydrated that they die out. Modern zombies don’t starve, and they don’t become dehydrated in any human sense of the word.

But what Danny Boyle essentially did with
28 Days Later
was to create the living zombie—and in doing so, he
revolutionized the zombie subgenre, introducing a whole new arena for characterizing zombies and for zombie storytelling.

Like their undead counterparts, living zombies are biologically infected, relentlessly aggressive, and no longer cognizant individuals. If we set the definition of the modern zombie next to a definition of the living zombie, we can see how well the infected of
28 Days
qualify and how similar the two types are.

Here is the modern zombie:

The modern zombie is a relentlessly aggressive reanimated human corpse driven by a biological infection.

And here’s the living zombie:

The living zombie is a relentlessly aggressive human driven by a biological infection.

The brilliance—and the original core quality—of Romero’s flesh eaters is that they are grounded in science and reason rather than superstition and myth. The living zombie conforms to this core quality. If the infected maniac lumbering down the street looks like a zombie, bites like a zombie, and is contagious like a zombie, then for all intents and purposes, it’s zombie enough for most.