Zombies

In honor of tonight's season four premiere of AMC's The Walking Dead (2010-present), today's post is all about those moldy, slobbering, decomposing animated corpses that have absolutely dominated pop culture in the last several years: the zombie. 

Kiss, pookie? 

Because the zombies are definitely back, my friends, rising up all over the world to wrap their clammy fingers around horror fans' hearts. You might be able to attribute this new trend to the no-holds-barred gorefest of Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses (2003) but I'd say the true resurgence of interest (obsession?) with the zombie is thanks to Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake, and the first installment of the recently completed Cornetto Trilogy, Shaun of the Dead (2004), which some say spurred George Romero, unchallenged grandfather of the zombie subgenre, to make his undead comeback with Land of the Dead (2005). Either way, they're back, everyone is obsessed with them, and it looks as though they're here to wreck havoc on those with beating hearts for some time yet.

Which is somewhat strange, if you think about it. Among all the movie monsters, zombies make the most unlikely stars. They lack the glamor of their fiendish counterparts; Dracula is a bona fide Count, the Mummy was once a king, the Wolf Man a true romantic at the center of his hairy heart, and the Phantom of the Opera and the Hunchback of Notre Dame are poignant reminders that behind a twisted visage noble thoughts and feelings can flourish. There's even a sneaky complicity experienced in the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

But zombies, on the other hand, are rotten. Literally. Decaying flesh lacks the glitz factor. Unlike the above monsters, the zombie is devoid of any hidden passions or depths, and yet audiences still find something tragic and compelling about these sorry creatures to warrant an absolute barrage of living dead paraphernalia in recent years, from novels, Max Brooks's  Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z (adapted into a movie this year), Stephen King's Cell, Seth Grahame-Green's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, to art, Jillian McDonald's "Horror Make-Up" video art and Karim Charredib's interactive tableau "Them!!!", to slews of college campuses turning up for rounds of Humans vs. Zombies, an established live-action roleplaying game. There are even annual "zombie walks" in most big cities, including a fairly popular one in our own backyard.

If there ever IS a zombie apocalypse...Pittsburgh may be way too into it

So for whatever reason, people love their zombies, even though they frequently herald the end of civilization. The best zombie movies either detail the real-world collapsing upon itself, like the original Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985), or depict reality itself coming under siege as in the Italian horror classic City of the Living Dead (1980). 

And unlike the other major players in the horror genre, zombies have no foundations in literature. They began as an anthropological curiosity, more or less, from interest in William Seabrook's non-fiction account of Haitian Voodoo practices, The Magic Island (1929). The first film to pick up on Seabrook's research was Victor Halperin's best-known work, White Zombie (1932) which started the initial treatment of zombies as being slaves, sometimes dead, sometimes alive, under the control of a Voodoo master. This depiction continued well into the 1940's, though they were mostly cheap knockoffs, until the interest in zombies died out during the monster craze of the 1950's. 

The zombie crawled out of the grave with the Hammer Horror film Plague of the Zombies (1966), in which a Cornish village is wiped out by a mysterious, fast-spreading disease only to have the cadavers re-animate under the control of the local quire/Voodoo expert. This gave rise to the second phase of the zombie in horror film, what most fans consider the true birth of the zombie, with George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), filmed primarily in Butler County (if you didn't know, Romero went to CMU and worked for WQED before getting into mainstream filmmaking, having gotten started by working on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (1968-2001)). 

Night of the Living Dead became the Bible of the modern zombie film. Simple yet horrifying, it tells the story of a small group of people thrown together by chance who must barricade themselves in a dismal and dreary farmhouse as hordes of the newly risen walking dead attempt to break in. Romero's film came up with several innovations that the genre still relies upon today: 1) a pervading sense of meaningless which induces terror, 2) those in power and authority being unable to explain what has occurred, 3) the surviving humans being a motley crew ill-equipped to deal with the rising crisis, 4) and zombies fresh out of the morgue, toe-tagged and dressed in their finest. Perhaps his greatest innovation, though, was to have his ghoulish creatures eat the flesh of the living. He tapped into the incredibly taboo subject of cannibalism that unleashed a truly primal fear. Plus, once you're bitten, the wound spawns a terminal infection, forcing you to become a zombie too, a sickening idea borrowed from vampire lore. 

"I'm starting to think that this MIGHT not be a mosquito bite"

The game-changing Night of the Living Dead has been followed with five sequels, Dawn of the Dead (1978), an action-horror hybrid easily as terrifying and influential as the first, Day of the Dead (1985), a bleak and exhausting film with some extraordinary effects, Land of the Dead (2005), a mesmerizing Pittsburgh-set film with creative allusions, Diary of the Dead (2007), a quasi-found footage prequel following several University of Pittsburgh film students as they document the initial outbreak of the zombie apocalypse, and Survival of the Dead (2009), which, I shall admit, I have yet to see. It will, I'm sure, function in the same way as its predecessors by adding conceits about the decadence of consumer capitalism that is derived from Romero's famous raging pessimism. 

A lot of diverse oddities followed in Romero's wake, among them Willard Huyck's Messiah of Evil (1973), touching on themes of dreams gone sour and consumer society gone crazy, and Deathdream (1972), a Canadian film about a Vietnam soldier who dies in combat and then returns home to resume his old life. There is also the surprisingly creepy Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1972) and the totally messed up The Child (1977) in which a nasty little girl uses psychic powers to terrorize her family before introducing them to her friends from the graveyard. Somewhat less serious, but still icky, is John Hayes's Garden of the Dead (1972), with talking, formaldehyde-addicted chain-gang zombies involved for some reason. 

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971) ended up spawning three sequels and became a major influence on Spanish horror, what with its chilling skeletal zombie Knights Templars riding around on horseback. The success of Dawn of the Dead in Italy, as well as Jorge Grau's Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974), inspired Lucio Fulci to make Zombi 2 (1979), which made a noticeable mark on the genre. Fulci favored excess decay and rot in his zombies, and his film had shocking, gory attacks that elicited far more disgust than Romero's films. He added ghostly weirdness in both City of the Living Dead and The Beyond (1981), with cadavers that could appear and disappear at will, emerging from the most unlikely places to attack their victims. 

Promotional still from Zombi 2 (1979)

The 1980's saw several comedy-horror zombie flicks, the ancestors of Shaun of the Dead, starting with Return of the Living Dead (1985) and Re-Animator (1985), which both combine splashy gore and macabre humor. But this formula got old fast, in my opinion, and there are a lot of zombie sequels and sluggish teen trash that should be avoided at all costs (unless you're like my dad and you love 80's horror crapfests, in which case I should recommend David Acomba's Night Life (1989) and Dan Hoskins's Chopper Chicks in Zombietown (1989), which...really just says it all). This decade did give us Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), however, and that is anything but comical. A return to the original concept of Haitian Voodoo being able to enslave and torment, it easily makes Top 50 Horror lists to this day and, personally, gives me the creeps one each repeat viewing.

The recent zombie revival is certainly a mixed blessing. Looking at the Dawn of the Dead remake there is certainly lots of adrenaline, but no interesting characters, and Land of the Dead is bogged down by a corny super villain and a boring hero. Even though the running, screeching, horrifying "rage" victims in 28 Days Later (2002) aren't technically zombies, Danny Boyle milks the sub-genre style. A similar approach is used in the claustrophobic and very well-done Canadian film Pontypool (2009), about a shock jock turned radio announcer who becomes trapped in a small Ontario town by both a blizzard and a swarm of  locals infected with a deadly virus. 

Other recent clever approaches to the zombie game have been Jonathan Levine's Warm Bodies (2013), which plays with the idea that a corpse could return fully to human life, and the critically acclaimed Zombieland (2009), which, though dropped by Amazon, is developing a spin-off television series and a sequel. And of course there's the immensely popular AMC drama The Walking Dead, adapted from the comic book series by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard, which follows deputy-sheriff Rick Grimes (played by Andrew Lincoln in the series) after he awakes from a coma to find himself in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-dominated world. The series is on Netflix Instant, along with a good chunk of the above mentioned films in this post. 

If that still doesn't satisfy your lust for the lovable flesh-eating walking dead, here's a list of notable zombie films worth checking out for one reason or another that I just couldn't get to. The subgenre is huge, so have at it zombie-freaks. Binge wisely.

• Zombie Holocaust (1979)
• Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980)
• Zombie Creeping Flesh (1980)
• Burial Ground (1981)
• Oasis of the Zombies (1983)
• A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1971)
• The Grapes of Death (1978)--very moody, very underrated
• The Living Dead Girl (1982)--cited a lot by horror buffs as classic, I feel it's overrated
• Zombie Lake (1981)--charmingly awful
• Night of Horror (1980)
• Curse of the Screaming Dead (1982)
• The Alien Dead (1980)--amusing, if inept at times
• Fiend (1980)--the rare post-Dawn of the Dead zombie movie that owes nothing to Romero. Has a reanimated cadaver, possessed by a demon, giving violin lessons in Baltimore
• The Dark Power (1985)--zombie Toltec Indians on a rampage; suddenly becomes a sorority slasher film 
• The Crazies (1973)--a contagion in the water; also directed by Romero
• Forest of Fear (1979)
• Frozen Scream (1980)--dead people stored in cryogenic suspension are ordered to kill by radio control...as if Walt Disney could get any scarier
• Raw Force (1982)--cannibalistic monks who can raise the dead
• Resident Evil (2002)
• Black Sheep (2006)
• Slither (2006)
• 28 Weeks Later (2007)--sequel to, you guessed it, 28 Days Later
• I Am Legend (2007)
• REC (2007)
• The Signal (2007)--also utilizes the concept of radio waves as a way to trigger violent behavior in everyday people
• Dead Snow (2008)--Nazi-zombies. Yep.

You can go now, even if she doesn't want you to...