“Zombies tend to represent consumerism. Americans are the leaders of the world and the ultimate consumers in every way. For the future of the genre I’d like more exploration of the aftermath of consumerism—the post apocalypse and rebirth.”—Sarah Langan, author of The Missing.
“To quote a line from one of Romero’s movies—‘because we’re them and they’re us.’ I think that’s the key to it—we can become these nightmare creatures, and there’s generally nothing we can do to stop it happening. We can put it off, but it’s usually inevitable that the dead will catch up with you.”—David Moody, author of the Autumn series of zombie novels.
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THE FINAL VERDICT: EXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT
Disasters are news. Death is news. Pain and misery are news. Catastrophic loss is news. Wars are news. Epidemics are news. There’s no doubt at all that if the apocalypse happened, you’d be watching it on TV or reading it in the morning paper.
11
To Die For
The Rise of Zombie Pop Culture
The Dead Elvi by Chris Palmerini
“Back in 1993, when the Chiller Theatre convention moved to a larger venue and a ballroom became available, promoter Kevin Clement asked his friend Chris Palmerini if he could help put together a band so Kevin could put on a costume ball. Thus was the birth of the Dead Elvi! Little did they think that twelve years later they’d still be performing, appear in several movie sound-tracks, have a cut on a Rob Zombie CD, and appear on at least a dozen ‘Something Weird’ DVDs…and to be the last band to play a gig with the late, great Bobbie ‘Boris’ Pickett!”
—Reprinted with permission from www.deadelvi.com
Cecil B. DeMille is reported to have said, “Give me any two pages of the Bible and I’ll give you a picture.” We love taking the big (and small) events of our lives and making them into movies, songs, TV shows, documentaries, comics, and even T-shirts. We are a pop culture society.
How long after 9/11 did the first wave of movies hit the theaters? There are novels written about Hurricane Katrina. Whole TV episodes are built around recent headlines.
More than we love to write factually about the events of history—ancient or recent—we love to weave the top stories into the fabric of our pop culture. This is in no way a criticism—it’s who we are, and to a degree it helps us understand the events that shape our lives. By using a media format, we can explore the nuances of an issue that might otherwise not be something folks could or would talk about. Look at the original Star Trek TV show: Despite the cool phasers and warp drives that appealed to our innate geekiness, there were also the weighty social issues in each episode, cleverly disguised as science fiction. During the incendiary 1960s, the show openly tackled racism with a crew that was racially mixed, the very first TV screen kiss between black and white races occured between Kirk and Uhuru,1 an entire episode was used to mock the very nature of racism by depicting a struggle between aliens who were black on one side of their bodies and white on the other (the nature of their contention being the orientation—one was black on the left side, the other black on the right)2; and the ongoing racism of human against Vulcan even among friends. Very touchy stuff back then.
But then theater has always taken issues of the day and made them into entertainment. Go ask Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Epicharmus of Kos; or jump forward and see where William Shakespeare was getting his ideas. Same goes for just about anyone who wrote a play or a book, or wrote scripts for TV and film.
At this writing, we’re all deeply embedded in the Iraq War. So far we’ve already had a number of movies set during this war, ranging from psychological studies, such as Jarhead, (2005) to pure exploitive entertainment, like Transformers (2007). We’ve had TV episodes and series by the dozen set in Iraq or touching on the lives of the men and women who have gone there to fight. Novels have been written about it; comics, too. Hollywood and the entertainment industries, political sides notwithstanding, recognize the war as a source of good storytelling. Or, more cynically put, they see it as a way to make money.
We’ve had feature films like United 93 (2006) and World Trade Center (2006), and more of these are on the way. On a bigger picture scale, the global War on Terror is an endless source of entertainment. Middle Eastern terrorists and/or religious extremists have become the new standard movie villain.
All this offends a portion of our society, and these critics say that these are not fit subjects for entertainment, that it’s too soon, that exploiting tragedy is in poor taste; and to a degree they’re right. But they’re not completely right because pop culture is not necessarily as shallow and ephemeral as all that. When Homer wrote the Odyssey, he certainly profited by it, but did that diminish its value? The book’s been required reading for a couple of millennia and, let’s face it, he played pretty fast and loose with the facts in order to tell a more compelling story. Was Dickens a cad for writing A Tale of Two Cities, when clearly so much human suffering was associated with the French Revolution? Was C. S. Forester merely pandering to his audience with his Horatio Hornblower Napoleonic war novels?
The answer will always be yes and no. A little bit of yes and a whole lot of no because art imitates life. It always has, since the first time a caveman painted a picture of a buffalo on the wall and tried to convince his in-laws that he’d actually seen something like that. Art—literature, dance, film, music—has grown up around the need to tell us stories, and many of those stories will be based in whole or in part on real events. It’s how we explain our world to ourselves.
JUST THE FACTS
Dead On!
Which brings us to zombies. If there was a zombie plague, there would be brand new zombie movies—even before the plague was resolved. I mean…we make movies about them now and there are no actual zombies. Do you want to sit there and tell me that if there were actual zombies we wouldn’t be making films about them? Or books? Or comics? Of course we would. And we can justly say that Romero told us to. After all, Night of the Living Dead was a statement about the times as they were happening. So was Dawn, so was Day.
So often pop culture is either a mirror that we can hold up to view all the big pores, warts, pimples, and blackheads of our society; or it’s a window into aspects of the world and points of view we can’t otherwise see. Zombie films and books have frequently polished the glass on those mirrors and windows, or provided filters that block out distractions and allow us to see a specific thing with great clarity. It’s a kind of Jonathan Swift effect. His Gulliver’s Travels was no more about giants and little people than A Modest Proposal was about actually eating Irish babies. Along those same lines, Night of the Living Dead was not about monsters attacking humans, not on the level where the writer envisioned the story. Zombies were a by-product. For Romero, Night was, among other things, a way of shouting out about the state of our society, about the disconnect between human beings and their basic humanity, about the fracturing of openness and how human dignity takes a beating in the presence of uninformed bigotry. It was no accident that the hero of the piece, Ben, was played by a black actor. It was not an accident that the white majority hides behind locked doors.
What’s so fascinating is that we probably already have a glimpse of what the pop culture would look like if zombies were a reality. We have zombie movies by the hundreds; zombie novels, zombie comic books, zombie art, zombie music, zombie toys, zombie everything. In the summer of 2007, JCPenney launched a series of commercials in which zombified clothes attacked school children (granted it wasn’t to munch on them but to amp up their post-grunge sense of style). Zombies are everywhere.
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The Zombie Presidents
Mount Rotmore by Yale Redd Bender
“Romero and his followers showed us that zombies and politics go hand in hand. Some people have taken that more to heart than others, and none more so than The Zombie Presidents. Founded by pop culture retailer Brett Dewey and Hollywood special effects artist Mark Tavares, the grou
p promotes some very dry political humor (no one is spared) and also has a line of T-shirts and other merchandise. Dewey says, “The Zombie Presidents were conceived in the vein of the Zombie as social commentary. Seeing the current division in the country and frustration over the lack of inspiring leadership, the American voters cried out for leaders like the great ones of the past—and to everyone’s surprise they answered! Why look for the next JFK or Ronald Reagan when you can have the original!”
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Johnny Gruesome
Johnny Gruesome by Zach McCain and Greg Lamberson
Zombies are usually the villains of the piece, but for subversive horror author Greg Lamberson the zombie is definitely the leading man. His creation, Johnny Gruesome, is the ghost of a murdered high school student who reanimates his own corpse in order to exact a bloody revenge. Johnny Gruesome has been turned into a comic book, a video short, and a head-banging CD. Zach McCain renders the comic with moody brilliance, and songwriter Giasone Italiano crafted the thrilling theme music.
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I asked people in different aspects of the zombie pop culture to talk about what’s hot in rot and what’s cool for ghouls.
Expert Witness
Derrick Sampson, an actor and theater teacher from Chicago, was very frank about the role of race in the Romero films. “Romero was ballsy to cast a handsome black man—Duane Jones—as the lead in Night of the Living Dead. Especially in rural Pennsylvania. Most people are unaware that Pennsylvania has more KKK members than any other state in America. And Night was shot during the 1960s…not exactly the least turbulent time in American race relations. Duane played a strong, sensible, courageous man trying to do his best to protect the people in his charge—all of whom were white. Another director might have done that as a kind of stunt casting, but Romero is, if anything, fiercely outspoken when it comes to fairness. He may be cynical, but at the same time there is a thread of hope built into what he does.”
Tony Todd, the actor who played the character of Ben in the 1990 remake of Night agrees. “I was always a big fan of the original Night of the Living Dead. It was so powerful, so iconic. And it had an African American leading man back in the 1960s, which you really didn’t see that often. Not enough. Duane Jones did a terrific job as Ben. He had real power, real humanity. For Romero to have cast the movie that way showed insight and it showed backbone.”
“Sadly,” Sampson adds, “Romero was deeply mired in a dismal view of the world at the time and Ben is senselessly and tragically killed at the end of the movie. He’s the strong one, the survivor who overcame predators and outlasted those too weak to follow his lead. He tried his best and deserved to live, but Romero isn’t Disney, and he made another harsh social statement by having Ben gunned down at the end. Romero never said as much, but I remember talking with Duane about this about a year or so before his death,3 and he admitted that he sometimes viewed that ending as a metaphor for the old racist view that ‘you can’t tell them apart,’ switched from a comment about blacks or Chinese or any ethnic group to zombies. When the redneck hunters arrive in the morning they shoot everyone because in their eyes they all look like zombies.”
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Zombie Crawls
Zombie Walk by Jill Hunt
Philadelphia and Minneapolis may have helped zombie crawls to get started, but they are now worldwide. This picture of the Zombie Walk in Baltimore shows the living dead having a bloody good time.
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The ending of Night changed in the remake. In the Tom Savini version, not only does Barbara escape but Ben actually becomes a zombie, succumbing to wounds received in the struggle to stay alive during that hellish night. As times had changed, the theme shifted from racism to sexism, and Barbara emerged as a feminist icon.
I asked Todd to comment on the different take on Ben in the remake. “When I heard that they were doing a remake of Night of the Living Dead I went straight over to the production offices and cornered Tom Savini and said: ‘You have to test me for the part of Ben.’ I think he was knocked out by my passion and determination. I wanted that role, and I got that role. Once we started shooting, though, I didn’t want to do a retake on what Duane Jones did. That was his performance, this was mine and I wanted to give it a new sensibility. Ben was an interesting character to play. He’s a reluctant hero. He didn’t sign up for that crap. We get some hints about what happened to him before he gets to the farmhouse, we know that he feels like he failed his family during the crisis, and that’s why he’s so determined to keep everyone together and safe in the house. He didn’t or couldn’t save his immediate family so he doesn’t want to fail his new ‘family.’ And, let’s face it; somebody had to be a leader.”
“Bad actors read lines,” observes Sampson, “good actors become the character. Duane put a lot of depth and complexity into Ben. He made that character into a man, a human being. Ken Foree did the same with Peter in Night, Terry Alexander did with John in Day, and Tony Todd did in the underrated remake of Day. Strong black men and strong actors, each bringing qualities to the performance that rose above even the quality of the scripts. And each role, each character is a kind of statement of the times. Duane was the black man hated by the pale masses during the 1960s. In the late 1970s Ken Force plays a tough, competent SWAT officer—a sign of forward momentum showing that in just a decade blacks had gotten into the system, were part of it, were crucial to it, but were still black men with all of their individual and cultural integrity intact. Then we get to the dispirited 1990s and the character of John. He’s strong and smart and valuable (he can fly the helicopter and none of the military grunts know how), but he’s become disillusioned because becoming part of the system doesn’t mean that the system has evolved or become better. Sometimes the grass on the other side of the fence has just as much crab grass as what’s on your side. And yet Romero gives us more optimistic endings in both Dawn and Day, in which the races, white and black—seen in the microcosm of Peter and Francine in Dawn and John and Sarah4 in Day escape together. Male and female, black and white, unified through shared adversity and hopefully with the appropriate cultural lessons learned. The actors all made these characters, these relationships, and these outcomes believable.”
So what makes zombies so fascinating, and why do so many screenwriters and authors turn (and return) to this genre? I posed that question to a number of top writers in the field and got some illuminating responses:
As bestselling author Yvonne Navarro5 sees it, “It’s because to tell a truly frightening story, you need a truly frightening opponent, and zombies really fit that bill. Yeah, you can see them, so it’s not like they’re the big unknown. But it’s that known that’s the core of why zombies cause so much terror. First, in most of the stories, they’re everywhere and they multiply faster than you can fight them. They’ll pop out of bushes, closets, sewers, you name it, and there’s no place to hide, day or night. Secondly, they are utterly relentless. Unless you can get a bullet or a machete to that sweet spot at the brain stem, they’ll just keep coming. Finally, the Big Question as to why they make such a popular topic for horror stories: Who wants to be eaten alive?”
Bram Stoker Award-winner Weston Ochse says, “Nothing is more scary than encountering something that can’t be reasoned with. Most of us believe we can talk ourselves our of any situation. Still others believe that they can fight their way out of any situation. Zombies represent something that can’t be talked to and can’t be fought. Cut off an arm? No biggie. I know the movies make it look easy, but the average Jack and Jill wouldn’t know what to do regardless of the all cinematic and literary primers we’ve provided.”
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Tony Todd versus the Living Dead
I asked actor Tony Todd to speculate on how he would handle the events in Night. Would Tony become a zombie at the end of the flick?
“Hell no, Tony would have survived. Mainly ’cause Tony wouldn’t have stayed there. You see with zombies it’s a
ll about keeping your calm. You can outrun them, outthink them, and that’s what you do. Keep fighting, keep moving, and stay ahead of them. That’s what I would do.”
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“The visual horror world needed a new archetype,” says Rocky Wood, author of Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished.6 “The others having been worn close to the living (or dead) bone. While I like the socio-political angle behind the original upsurge my gut feeling is mindless cannibals with no socially redeeming features whatsoever were always likely to appeal to those who largely consume their horror in the movie theatre or through their video/DVD players.”
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Zom Coms
Zombie comedies have become a genre unto themselves, anchored (though not started) by the cult classic Shaun of the Dead (written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg).
As frightening and intense as zombie films frequently are, there is also a tremendous amount of room for comedic expression. Romero pioneered this in Dawn of the Dead, which includes the satiric subplot of zombies compelled to return to a shopping mall because it was an “important place” in their lives. That film even had a bunch of bikers throwing custard pies in the faces of the ghouls.