Yum, Brains: Understanding the Undead
Caitlin Carter
January 21, 2010
Filed under A & E
“When I die, I want people to find my body on a huge pile of dead, bloody zombies,” proclaimed a senior at lunch last week. This hope is one symptom of a fact that many people do not realize: there is something indescribably awesome about a zombie apocalypse.
In fact, the idea is so awesome that it is yet another film genre proven to almost always result in monster (no pun intended) box-office hits. Take one part decomposing flesh, one part brain east, and a dash of gunshot wounds to the head, and the production studio representing the film is set for serious profit for two primary reasons. Firstly, horror movies of any ilk are produced on low budgets; a combination of less-than-realistic make-up and prosthetics and mostly-unknown actors provides a healthy profit margin when a horror film does even mediocre in theaters. Secondly, despite their distasteful appearance and appetite, zombies are just plain fun.
While zombies certainly do not receive the same degree of fanaticism as those attractively evil vampires, flesh-eaters have what blood-suckers do not: consistency. Put metaphorically, vampires burn hot when in vogue, but zombies are forever.
However, while zombies have name-recognition, much of the general public suffers from an unfortunate ignorance of zombie matters, like student Ashley Steele, who confesses, “I don’t really know of any zombie movies.” That age of ignorance is now ended (or, in actuality, will continue, but this zombie-loving pseudo-journalist will feel better about it).
The most famous and critically-acclaimed series of zombie movies is George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its six sequels. Romero’s incarnation was not the first undead creature to grace the widescreen, it is the standard to which all other zombie flicks are compared. The slowly-lumbering, flesh-eating, dead-eyed creatures within American pop culture canon owe their entire identity to Romero’s imagination and ingenuity. The writer-director set the standard for cheap yet effective filmmaking by producing Night with a measly budget of $10,000.
More recent horror films that take on the zombie trope include Resident Evil and 28 Days Later, with both of those films spawning commercially successful sequels.
An equally successful subgenre is the zombie-comedy film. From 1993’s Army of Darkness to the British flick Shaun of the Dead, from Robert Rodriguez’s gruesome Grindhouse: Planet Terror to the very recent Zombieland, the concept of combining gore with jokes (an idea that a journalist from Time Out New York calls “yucks-meets-yuks”) is nothing new yet still feels fresh and original.
As far as popularity and frequency, the zombie-comedy hybrid dominates the subversive horror genre. Possibly the greatest cause for its popularity is the reverence it shows toward the genre it playfully mocks. While the parodying Scary Movie franchise has experienced enough commercial success to warrant a veritable deluge of sequels, it has been met with critical condemnation, in part because it implements crude humor to send up the source material for cheap laughs. The most popular zombie parody flicks (some of which will be discussed in some detail below) function both as tributes the original genre and as a way to form newly relevant themes.
Classic:
Night of the Living Dead and its subsequent sequels: The previously-mentioned Romero masterpiece is undiluted horror. It was considered a commercial hit in its time and forever injected zombies into Western pop culture canon. The themes tackled include government corruption, the powerlessness of the populace, isolation, social and financial instability, and racial tensions—all issues befitting its decade.
Pet Sematary: This 1989 film is an adaptation of a Stephen King novel of the same name. The gist is that there exists a manner to resurrect dead pets and humans in a creepy town in Maine. When the film’s protagonist loses his young son tragically, he seizes the opportunity to revive him, to dire consequences. This incarnation of the zombie myth, like others of its ilk, is based on the idea that the refusal to accept death is dangerous and debilitating. The intentional misspelling of the title is derived from the child’s spelling of “cemetery.”
Re-Animator: The 1985 film about evil, competitive doctors transformed from an H.P. Lovecraft adaption to a cult classic noted more for extreme violence and gore than cinematic value. Despite dubious quality, two commercially successful sequels followed.
Comedy Blend:
Shaun of the Dead: This British film stars Simon Pegg as a directionless ne’er-do-well torn between his commitment to his girlfriend and his desire to remain a carefree guy devoted to doing nothing with his best friend Ed. The zombies in this incarnation are classically slow and deeply stupid. In actuality, however, the zombies function as a plot device to spur the development of Shaun into an actualized, responsible adult. Very few films can boast the accomplishment of using zombies to work out a protagonist’s Daddy issues. Shaun of the Dead is among that rare breed.
Planet Terror: Grindhouse is a double-feature (two films in one sitting) by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino made in tribute to the low-quality, highly-exploitative films of the 1970s. The first of these is Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, which subverts zombie film tropes like government or military corruption, victimized women becoming heroines, the heroic self-sacrifice of a few characters to ensure the survival of the rest, and an unexpected pregnancy acting as a metaphor for hope in a world ravaged by flesh-eating monsters.
Zombieland: The most recent zombie film encompasses a wide variety of genres and tropes. It is part action film, road trip movie, and part teenage romantic comedy. While the primary conflict at first appears to focus on the difficulty of surviving in the new land of zombies, the film’s actual antagonist is the characters’ fear of trusting other human beings.
If that list of films is not enough to prompt your immediate desire to gorge on zombie gore, take student Dylan McNeil’s words to heart. “Zombies are awesome because they present the ultimate challenge in a guy’s life. You would probably be alone with little weapons and vastly outnumbered. Every human they kill reduces your allies and increases theirs. They can’t be ‘shock and awed;’ they can’t be scared; they can only terrify you. It is the ultimate back-to-a-corner situation where you can just go out and be awesome in the face of the end of the world. It’s like a Viking’s philosophy, except instead of Ragnarok, it’s the Zombie Apocalypse.”
Translation? Zombies test human beings after they have had every social nicety or habit stripped from them. They are, at heart, challenges that bring out the best and worst in human nature. Conversely, they could just be blood-vomiting savages who enjoy brains. The choice is yours.
Note: the feature photo is property of Universal Pictures.
This article is an EPIC win.
+5,000,000 cool points.
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