A Brief and Frankly Half-Arsed History of Zombie Cinema
When did the undead start crawling from their graves in search of lunch? Just how hungry do you have to be to come back to life to fill your rotting stomach with living flesh? Pretty damn hungry, surely.
Cinema has followed the lurching gait of the zombie since the 1930’s to see where he was headed. It has marked his relentless pursuit of internal organs as a picnic treat and wallowed in his unhygienic table manners with fascinated repulsion from his first formal appearance in the Halperin Brothers’ White Zombie (1932).
White Zombie (1932)
Audiences had been lapping up the blood along with Dracula in the Count’s early movie appearances starring Bela Lugosi and were no less enamoured of Boris Karloff’s brilliantly sympathetic turn as the creature born out of the rabid experiments by everyone’s favourite doctor-with-issues, Frankenstein. But they were ready for a new challenge, for a new monster to roam their fevered dreams and the Halperins found him. There was a popular contemporary fascination with Haiti and voodoo, with romantic, culturally distant settings that helped lure audiences into the zombie’s chilly embrace. But there was something more, some deeper fear at work in 1930’s America that the appearance of the walking dead coincided with to startling effect. As the stock market crashed and people fell into debt and out of their homes the zombies symbolized the powerlessness of the American workforce. Their new hell was a vision of unemployment lines full of blank-faced, expendable humans who had lost their individuality and increasingly, their will. Zombies resonated with the American public in a way they would never have anticipated. As the mindless, soulless automaton segued his way into the popular American consciousness, he reflected their deepest fears as the Depression bit down hard. Brain-eating would come later. Right now his low moans whispered to a more significant part of them. It wouldn’t be the last socio-political comment the zombie would make.
The zombie was off and running. Well, not so much running as staggering slowly with his arms outstretched making an Urgghhhh noise. Hollywood capitalised on the popularity of the walking dead with several lesser movies throughout the thirties until the zombie’s next significant moment came in 1943 with Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie. Teaming up with classy RKO producer Val Lewton, Tourneur, who would go on to make British horror classic Night of the Demon, he sought to return the zombie to his Haitian roots and make a startlingly atmospheric shocker that went beyond the zombie’s increasingly commercial existence in movies and reintroduce deeper themes. He created a poetic masterpiece that was both serious and frightening in its take on repressed sexuality and societal disorder. It substitutes physical attacks for psychological terror, making magisterial use of light and shadow, which became Tourneur’s trademark. It was new and disturbing grammar for the zombie movie combining commercial and critical success.
I Walked With A Zombie (1943)
Years of similarly themed films came and went. The zombie was driven into B-movie shockers, pale imitations of Tourneur’s mournful, voodoo-moulded, empty-eyed creations. The zombie wouldn’t become truly peckish again until the sixties and until then had to idiotically wander the byways of American cinematic culture. His cousins made a elliptical but telling appearance in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) as alien seed pods opened up for the zombie-like doppelgangers to take over from their unsuspecting human twins and threaten the world on a global scale in a way the zombie never had traditionally and frankly making him seem a little lazy and unambitious by comparison. He would take this on board learn from it. It took him a while but worldwide zombification did eventually filter through his dead brain cells and finally seem like a good idea. Body Snatchers, of course, fed off Cold War paranoia and the perceived threat of Communism. Siegel denied political intention, but whether coincidence or not, once again the emotionless hordes pointed at the soul of America. Though not strictly a zombie feature, Body Snatchers remains significant to the genre for its influence on a young film- maker who would change everything. The most explosive change in zombie cinema would come in 1968, when the zombie would enjoy fine dining to gruesome effect and would scare and repulse the crap out of everybody who cared to look in equal measure. The seismic shift in question came to a remote farmhouse in rural America. It arrived with that nation’s conscience dripping from its bloody teeth. The man who invited it to dinner was George A. Romero. The film was Night of the Living Dead.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
For the first time, audiences were subjected unrelentingly to the fact that the zombies on the screen were not the monsters they were used to but reanimated human beings consuming the survivors. The new monsters were their friends and neighbours. And boy, were they hungry. Many shots were handheld and combined with stark black and white photography, gave Romero’s vision a documentary feel, a million miles from the studio-based zombiethons of the past. This new ‘reality’ was underscored by the use of TV news reports of the undead’s exploits, each of these sections played in a downbeat style of disbelief by a shocked news team.
The fun had been subtracted from the horror movie and replaced with visceral scenes of body parts being gnawed and parents being trowelled to death by their freshly risen offspring. Nothing was left to the imagination. Romero shipped in real animal organs and sought extras and friends willing to chow down on them for the cameras. It was the moment where zombies became food snobs. They wanted their meat fresh. They wanted their food warm. If the organs were still pulsing with life, so much the better. The ghouls in the film represent everything that America was struggling to come to terms with at the time. As the collective consciousness came to realise that all wasn’t apple pie and moral certainty with the advent of Vietnam, so too do the zombies in Romero’s world, represent America’s fear of itself. On a more philosophical level, it can also be read that the survivors’ desperate bid to hold off the zombie threat is the attempt to deny the inevitability of death. The nihilism in the film was a new departure too. The questionable, morally compromised hero Ben is killed by a roaming vigilante gang of self appointed authority figures in a shock ending that inverted any normal narrative arc the American public had been spoonfed throughout the young history of their cinema.
At every turn, Romero defied the genre’s accepted characteristics. The public were appalled and fascinated in equal measure. The zombies’ behaviour could no longer be put down to voodoo or the supernatural. They didn’t need a reason to be here. They didn’t need an invite from the Gods. Suddenly they were us and we were them. Body horror had truly arrived. Romero had opened a door through which the zombies sprawled out into the American home. The zombies couldn’t believe their luck. There was so very much to eat.
Dawn of the Dead (1978) & Day of the Dead (1985)
The majority of zombie films that followed in the Living Dead’s dark wake, apart from his own sequels, were a footnote to the apocalypse Romero had created. Film-makers out-gored each other for many years. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) provided a mall-set critique of modern consumer-driven America. It seemed he had completed his zombie CV with Day of the Dead (1985), an altogether darker offering set amongst military personnel fighting for survival in an underground silo as their fences keep out literally thousands of baying undead. The departure here is the human effort to understand what drives the zombie and by understanding him, train him, remind him of his humanity. This third film has a bleaker tone throughout and once again humanity’s destruction is down to the living rather than the dead. Interestingly, though, the film ends on a Caribbean island with the survivors, returning the zombie to his spiritual home.Romero returned to his vision -as if unable to resist- with 2005’s Land of the Dead, which whilst entertaining and still fearlessly political, did feel like it was retreading old ground. However, at the time of writing, he has completed work on Diary of the Dead that is receiving rave reviews for its handheld, documentary, super-realist style.
Hundreds of zombie films have come and gone with varying takes on the gestation of the zombie, while many have simply been about successive make-up artists trying out-Savini Tom Savini, Romero’s special effects genius on Dawn and Day of the Dead. However, there are notable exceptions down the years and below are a few unmissable gems, some of which will be shown at the festival:
The Italians LOVE their zombies and the greatest exponent is Lucio Fulci who masterminded the classic Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979). Also known as Zombi 2, Fulci brought a relentless orgy of bloodletting in this Caribbean ‘answer’ to Romero’s classic. Fulci created a brooding, sweaty atmosphere, upping the effects ante with squelching eyeballs and entrails. The action never stops and though the film became notorious for its zombie/shark punch up, it is in the most part beautifully shot considering it’s micro-budget and it’s monsters are lovingly rendered by Fulci’s Savini, Giannetto de Rossi. This is splatter movie territory, but its fascination with stripped flesh and exposed innards, its arch acting style and its spare, direct storytelling set it apart from its peers. And it made a ton of money.
Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979)
Many of the films in later years mixed in a degree of comedy to the recipe with varying success. Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead (1984) nodded and winked respectfully towards Romero. O’Bannon had worked on the script for Alien (1979) and had no little pedigree in quality horror and sci fi. Having said this, O’Bannon doesn’t skimp on cheap gags and ferocious gore. His zombies were the first with a real sense of humour and certainly the first with a punk sensibility and a taste for brains above all other human delicacies.
When Stuart Gordon’s Reanimator (1985) came along a few months later, it continued the trend of comedy horror. Ostensibly, it is an adaptation of H.P.Lovecraft’s Frankensteinian story of a mad doctor bringing the dead back to life. God knows what Lovecraft would have made of this hilarious gorefest. It is a finely balanced piece held together by a marvellously over the top performance by Jeffrey Combs as Herbert West who has the ability to make even the most ordinary utterance seem biblically dramatic. It spawned two strongish sequels and has the happy knack of seeming timelessly, shamelessly silly.
Comedy had become, in zombie movies most commercial successes, the default mode for the genre. In Peter Jackson’s Braindead (1992) he managed to out-gore everyone, before or since, with an insane comedy thriller that has to be seen -and hopefully will be at the festival- to be believed. He may well have gone on to make the cutesy sprawling goblin/fairy monster hit trilogy that cannot be named for reasons of good taste, but this remains his most anarchic and uncompromising work.
Shaun of the Dead (2004) is perhaps the wittiest expression of the genre and to zombie fans’ great relief did not skimp on the gore. Superbly structured and with classy dialogue and clever-clever visual motifs, Shaun is arguably the greatest British zombie movie ever made. It reintroduced a sense of fanboy hero worship to zombies, a snobbishness about what is best in the genre that perhaps stirred the zombie back to (undead) life. In the same year, a surprisingly good remake of Dawn of the Dead hit the screens and subtracted the comedy. Its success has set in motion a new outbreak of zombie mania unseen since Romero’s first three zombie films. A new confidence in the genre means that filmmakers are unafraid to treat the creatures with a new seriousness and a bigger budget. As Romero’s flesh eaters return in his fifth zombie outing, filmed on digital handheld cameras and the modern zombie staggers over as the old master commands them to heel, the zombie movie has perhaps rarely been in better shape. Even with his intestines dangling from his open stomach.
Oh and the Evil Dead films are NOT zombie movies, no matter what Dom my co-conspirator in this bloody enterprise may say. Or anybody else. And that’s an end to that argument. There. I said it.
