Since then there have been a number of played-for-laughs zombie flicks, including Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (1987) and Army of Darkness (1993); Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead (1985), Peter Jackson’s Braindead (1992), Jonathan Wack’s Ed and His Dead Mother (1993); Andrew Currie’s Fido (2006), and others.
Haitian zombies were played for laughs, too, in films like The Ghost Breakers (starring Bob Hope. 1940), Gordon Douglas’s Zombies on Broadway (with Bela Lugosi, 1945), Bob Balaban’s My Boyfriend’s Back (1993), and there are even comedic elements in Jean Yarbrough’s classic King of the Zombies (1941).
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“Romero-style zombies are a wonderful combination of fears: death, loved ones turning on us, disfigurement and disease, cannibalism, distorted artificial images of the human form (such as dolls and mannequins), and the notion that there is no afterlife (at least, not a heavenly paradise). As horror archetypes, they provide so much rich material for writers and film-makers,” muses Tim Waggoner, author of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Protégé (Black Flame, 2005) and the Blade of the Flame series (Wizards of the Coast). “Zombie storytelling is marvelous because it allows for so much variety. There are so many good ones out there! So many favorite zombies: Bub from the original Day of the Dead, the Zombie Master and all his undead minions from Piers Anthony’s Xanth books, all the zombies in Shaun of the Dead, the bizarre demon-possessed undead in the Evil Dead films, Big Daddy from Romero’s Land of the Dead, the alien-slug infested zombies in Night of the Creeps, Simon Garth from Marvel Comics’ Tales of the Zombie, the dead characters from Corpse Bride, the creepy tall zombie from Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie, Bud the Chud from CHUD 2, the zombies in Rich Hautala’s novel Moonwalker, Brian Keene’s undead in The Rising and City of the Dead…I could go on and on.”
“The zombie model is incredibly flexible, which is great for writers,” explains journalist Sam Anderson.7 “Zombies don’t have to adapt because they’re already dead, so you can throw them in any situation and let the high jinks ensue. What, you need alien zombies? Alien zombies it is. How about zombie guppies? Those zombie guppies wouldn’t even be relegated to staying in the water. Zombies offer possibilities that few other foils can. When you get the best writers working the most fertile soil—which this genre certainly has—you’re going to get some pretty special outcomes.”
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Ramsey Campbell on Zombie Classics
Ramsey Campbell is one of the world’s greatest masters of horror, the winner of more awards that we have pages here to list, and is also a reviewer. I asked him to comment on his favorite zombie movie.
“I Walked with a Zombie is director Hal Lewton’s worst title and finest film (not to mention screenwriter Curt Siodmak’s). It’s the greatest zombie film too, though as far removed from the familiar genre as Vampyr is from vampire movies. The title was preordained by RKO and dismissed in the opening voice-over. While the basic concept of the film is Jane Eyre in the tropics, this becomes as elusive and ambiguous as the entire narrative. Far too delicate to be contained by even my definition of horror, I Walked with a Zombie shares an unemphatic sense of the supernatural with a very few other films (Vampyr and Ugetsu Monogatari among them). Its contradictions and subtleties resonate in the mind, leaving echoes of an experience almost impossible to define and aching for repetition. Even the final voice-over adds to the uncertainty, replacing the female voice with a disapproving male one that seeks to sum up the narrative more neatly than it achieves, instead directing the audience to look afresh. Night of the Demon is the Tourneur film I most love, but I Walked with a Zombie is arguably his masterpiece.”
Ramsey Campbell’s works include The Grin of the Dark (PS Publishing, 2007), Secret Story (Tor, 2007), and The Overnight (Tor, 2006).
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Canadian horror writer Steve Vernon, has a wickedly hopeful view of zombie popularity: “It’s your ultimate mystery story, isn’t it? What comes next? Everybody nowadays is worried about the coming apocalypse, and it’s a great comfort to imagine we might all come back as part of a brainless headcheese-munching undead mob. Writers and storytellers have been messing with this theme from as far back as the days of Gilgamesh or Odysseus visiting the Underworld. Everybody wonders what goes on beyond the grave. Once you bring someone back from the dead all bets are off. Removing extinction from the equation eliminates all sense of limitation.”
Vernon also views zombies as an unlimited source of creative freedom, a view shared by many authors of the genre, who often bring in non-Romero elements to make the stories uniquely their own. “When I wrote Long Horn, Big Shaggy8 I was searching for a melting pot mythos that could encompass any number of suppositions. I reached back into the roots of Native American mythology. These tales and legends often involved journey back and forth from the land of the dead. Then I poured a little Frankenstein science into the mix, spiced it off with a touch of dark Christianity, and let it steep and simmer for a while. In short, zombie potage.”
“Zombies are monster icons,” argues Stephen Jones, editor of The Mammoth Book of Zombies (Carroll & Graf Publishing, 1993), “and have been so now for more than seven decades. Vampires may still be the most successful, and Frankenstein and Dracula the most recognized, but zombies are now up there in popular culture with Mickey Mouse, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis! Show any small kid a picture of a grey-faced rotting corpse and the chances are that they will identify it as a zombie straight away! It can only be a matter of time before the walking dead are used to promote breakfast cereals and Happy Meals.”
“I chose to write about zombies,” says Scott A. Johnson, author of Deadlands (Harbor House Books, 2005), “because, to me, they’re one of the most frightening of all the monsters. They are, in essence, our friends, relatives, and loved ones coming back to get us. In the span of a few moments, a person who was your wife or daughter could turn on you and try to eat your flesh. That concept gives me the creeps more than almost anything. When creating it I chose not to write strictly inside the Romero world. For the most part, I created my own mythology, though I definitely borrowed from the greats. From Lovecraft, I took the concept laid out in ‘Herbert West: Re-animator’ that we, playing God of course, might have created them. From Romero, I took the concept of the evolving zombie. I drew from every zombie movie I’d ever seen, the visuals and the movements, and developed my own take from there.”
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Stephen Jones on the Evolution of Zombie Popularity
“Although the cinema was slow to catch on to audiences’ fascination with the resurrected dead—the 1932 independent film White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi as the zombie master ‘Murder’ Legendre, was one of the first—there is no doubt that it was George Romero’s equally cheap-looking Night of the Living Dead that influenced every zombie-themed project that followed it. But let’s also not forget the part played by Italian filmmakers, such as Lucio Fulci, who did much to popularize Romero’s film with unsanctioned sequels and rip-offs during the early 1970s!
“Since then, zombies have become firmly established in the pantheon of Monsters, albeit somewhat below the top-tier of recognizable Classic Creatures. This is perhaps because there has never been a single major zombie character along the same lines of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Mummy or The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
“That allows us to see the blank-faced zombies as metaphors for whatever we choose—from a statement on our uncontrollable consumer society (as in Romero’s 1978 sequel Dawn of the Dead) to the disaffected dead of countless pointless wars (in everything from the obscure Revolt of the Zombies to Joe Dante’s recent Masters of Horror episode, ‘Homecoming’).
“In literature, for the most part, zombies have been influenced by their more popular cinematic incarnations—from the anthologies of John Skipp and Craig Spector to David Wellington’s enjoyable trilogy of ‘Monster’ novels, we are basically still in the world of Romero’s flesh-eating ghouls.”
Stephen Jones is a multiple
award-winning editor and one of Britain’s most acclaimed anthologists of horror and dark fantasy. He has had around 100 books published, including The Mammoth Book of Monsters, The Essential Monster Movie Guide, and Clive Barker’s A–Z of Horror.
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And this from Rick Hautala: “My novel from a while back, Moonwalker (Zebra Books, 1989), was a zombie novel where I just had fun with the Romero version of zombies and put them in northern Maine. I also used the theme in my short story ‘Perfect Witness,’ which has a concept in it that I keep thinking I should develop into a novel some day. Zombies provide a social/political commentary on 20th Century life…I mean…in a way, aren’t we all zombified to some extent or other? Whether it’s TV, sex, politics, art, sports, or whatever, we’re all kind of like the living dead when it comes to consuming.”
JUST THE FACTS
Zombies Go Global
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Zombie Self-Empowerment
“Conflict between zombies and humans allow for the audience to see themselves in the role of the protagonists. We’re not all secret agents or Chosen One vampire-slayers, though we may aspire to be as competent. Ultimately though, we all suffer in comparison to Buffy, Blade, or Hellblazer. Zombie films are all about ordinary folks, and generally from many different walks of life. The teen slasher films were all about random cuties getting killed off; there’s no contest, it’s just a spectacle. But a mix of people trying to work together, or undermine one another, and survive an (un)natural disaster, that’s compelling for everyone and not just the pimply nerds who get off on either power fantasies (Blade) or revenge fantasies (Friday the 13th).”—Nick Mamatas, author of Move Underground (Prime Books, 2006).
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Zombies in pop culture take many forms, and the love of zombies is expressed in many ways. Romero may be the big kahuna of zombie culture, but there have been others who have added their voice, shared their vision, and rebuilt the zombie world to fit their image of how things might go. Let me say straight up, though, that very few zombie storytellers have thought things out as thoroughly as Romero or kept as firm a hand on the tiller as they sailed their projects through the dark waters of undead cinema and fiction.
Certainly the name that comes first to mind is Dario Argento. Though not a zombie director per se, Argento helped bankroll Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and oversaw the recut of the film for European release. Argento’s support of Romero and his efforts to push his cut of Dawn, called Zombi, kicked off a worldwide zombie mania. Without him the living dead films might have stalled at Night. That’s a scary thought.
Argento was one of a number of Italian directors involved in the giallo genre of filmmaking, which overlapped the genres of horror, mystery, fantasy, and eroticism. Giallo film got started in the middle 1960s and by the 1970s this genre was dominated by Argento, Mario Bava (Blood and Black Lace, 1964; Black Sunday, 1960; and Black Sabbath, 1963); Umberto Lenzi (Eyeball, 1974); and Lucio Fulci. This genre was well known for excessive gore, nudity, and violence (often against women) and often dealt with psychological disintegration, madness, and emotional extremes. In a very real way they paved the way for the worldwide slew of slasher films of the late 1970s and 1980s, and also informed the disturbing amount of antifemale violence found in many Italian zombie films of the 1980s and 1990s.
Of these directors, it’s Lucio Fulci who has developed a worldwide following that, in some circles, rivals that of Romero. His Zombie 2 (1979) was an extraordinarily gory film that was marketed as a sequel to Zombie/Dawn of the Dead, which it was not (it was already in production at the same time as Dawn). It was smart marketing, however, and it catapulted Fulci into the fore-front of zombie film auteurs.
Fulci did not spend a lot of time trying to establish a credible reason for the dead returning to life. There are some vague references to a curse on a tropical island, so we can presume he links zombies to the supernatural, but we never really find out. What we get instead of a grounding in science is gore. Lots and lots and lots of gore. For example, there’s one scene where a woman’s eye is penetrated by a jagged piece of wood—and this scene is played out slowly and with excruciating attention to detail.9 Very nasty and not really necessary, though one can make the case that the scene did accomplish what Fulci wanted in that it is one of two scenes in that film that are still being talked about thirty years later. The other scene—which I rather like—involves an underwater battle between a zombie and a shark. There’s no comparable scene anywhere else in the whole zombie cinema library.
The explicit gore in Fulei’s film earned it an X rating, and it was banned in many countries, forcing the producers to submit heavily cut prints in order to get it into theaters. It wasn’t until 2005 that the complete and unadulterated Fulci version became available on DVD.
The next film in the Fulci series, Zombie 3 (1988), gave directing credit to Fulci even though he only helmed part of the film, having had to back out due to illness. Bruno Mattei completed the film and went on to direct a number of low-budget zombie movies.
This film bears no thematic connection to Zombi 2 or indeed to Argento’s Zombi beyond the fact that they all include flesh-eating ghouls. In this one, a scientific reason (sort of) is floated: a bioweapon of some kind is stolen from a military base on a remote tropical island in the Philippines. The weapon is discharged accidentally and those exposed become your standard shambling zombies. Nothing much interesting happens, but a lot of people die and the bioweapon theme is never brought up again.
Released in 1988 was another name-only sequel, Zombie 4: After Death, directed by Claudio Fragasso, which veers even farther from the Romero model and gives us flesh-eating demons instead of living-dead ghouls.
Fulci returned to active zombie direction with 1982’s City of the Living Dead (also known as Gates of Hell), and again we see zombies linked to the supernatural rather than the scientific. In this story, a priest hangs himself and the act somehow unlocks the gates of hell, which in turn allows the dead to rise. True to form, Fulci finds something truly outrageous to imbed the film into the moviegoer’s psyche in that he has one character murdered by having a power drill used on his skull. Very graphic. That scene was cut from a lot of the international prints and wasn’t included in the official cut until the 2001 video release.
Fulci returned to further explore the metaphysical connections of life and death with 1983’s The Beyond. Like City of the Living Dead, this was intended to be a film about the events surrounding one of the seven gates of hell, but the distributors didn’t want that kind of film and put pressure on Fulci to make it a zombie movie. He did, and though the film has a strong following, it makes little to no sense. Fans don’t seem to care because The Beyond frequently makes it onto lists of best horror films (including the 100 Scariest Movie Moments list presented by Bravo).10
Once the Italians had the genre in gear, the zombie movie craze shot into orbit. Soon every country seemed to be spawning its own line of zombie flicks, though most notably the British, Germans, Chinese, and Japanese.
21ST-CENTURY ZOMBIE MADNESS
The twenty-first century launched a new age of zombie films, powered by advances in makeup effects and computer-generated imaging (CGI), big budgets, and a fan base that crossed over from the vast world of computer gaming. The 2002 flick Resident Evil starring Milla Jovovich as zombie ass-kicker Alice,11 is rather loosely based on the 1996 Sony PlayStation12 game of the same name (known as Baiohazado in Japan where it was developed).
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The Zombie Cheerleader
TV, cable, and the Internet abound with horror-themed shows hosted by a variety of ghouls, vamps, mad scientists, and, in one case, a cheerleader turned zombie. The Zombie Cheerleader (a.k.a Nicole M. Brooks) is the hostess of her own online show, The Zombie Cheerleader’s School of Horror, and can be seen in the first two seasons of Monster Madhouse. Her mission in un-life is to “educate the zombie masses so they may learn how to survive the impending fleshy onslaught.” Fleshies are huma
ns, and in her view they’re the bad guys.
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Eat My Brains (EMB)
One of the coolest zombie websites is www.eatmybrains.com, run by Mike “Rawshark” Hewitt, Jim Smith, and Russell “Zomblee” Lee. It’s raw, raunchy, and riotous, and features some of the best commentary, reviews, and zombie news anywhere; and they have a pedigree that sets them apart from most fans.
EMB: We met as zombie extras on the set of Shaun of the Dead. There were a lot of weirdos around, but some really nice zombies, too. It was only a matter of time before the three of us hooked up in our free time to watch as many horror flicks as we could before getting the last train home. The eatmybrains thing happened because everyone seemed to know their stuff, but the great thing was that we all had a passion for different areas. At the time, Jim was into a lot of Japanese horror, Rawshark loved Deodato’s cannibals, and Zomblee dug anything Fulci or Carpenter. Eatmybrains was a logical consequence of watching and talking horror—the site was built just so that we could share this with like-minded horror fans who we hoped would like what we had to say.