In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if I never see another zombie movie in my life, I'll be okay. Zombies have seized the zeitgeist in a way that I find fairly unfathomable. And now we've been given every permutation on the concept we could possibly conceive of. We've got fast zombies, slow zombies, funny zombies, sad zombies, romcom zombies, Nazi zombies, even zombies as pets. We've got zombies as a political interest group. We've got zombie livestock. Now every city has its own zombie walk. Even Nerf is making zombie-themed toys.
Aside from their ubiquity, the most maddening thing for me as a classic Romero zombie fan is how much the new stuff tends to get wrong. Here are the two biggies:
1. Fast zombies suck. I'm sorry, but if you disagree with me you're clearly a dilettante and I encourage you to quit out of this blog post and go read "Twilight" or something.
I'll let zombie godfather George A. Romero explain it to you: "[I prefer] these plodding, lumbering guys from whom you can easily escape unless you fuck yourself up somehow and are too stupid to do the right thing. That’s just more fun for me.”
This is the point, and why Romero's original zombie films were so haunting. The zombies were the catalyst for the conflict, but they were not the source of the conflict themselves. In a fast-zombie universe, your characters spend so much time running away that they don't have time to think about anything else. In a slow-zombie universe, they have just enough time to get complacent and let all the petty ego-driven parts of their nature take over. They have time to argue and to second guess. And in the end, they become the agents of their own destruction.
Look at "Night of the Living Dead." The neat trick of that film is that Mr. Cooper, our antagonist, was right the whole time! If they had just gone into the basement, they would have survived! Our "hero" Ben fucked up and, essentially, got everyone killed. This isn't because Ben is a bad guy (neither is Mr. Cooper, really... he's just an asshole). It's because he's a human being and he made a mistake. In "Night," the real conflict is the dick-measuring contest between Ben and Mr. Cooper, not the struggle between the group and the zombies. This is what makes "Night" a fundamentally more human story than, say, something like "World War Z" (I speak of the movie, not the book, which is actually a pretty superlative piece of work).
There's also something more viscerally terrifying about the relentless implacability of the slow zombie. It's easy to fool yourself — one or two are easy to kill or escape. But the problem is they just keep coming...and coming...and coming. What Romero did was give us the time necessary to reflect on that.
2. Zombies are not caused by a virus. Even stories that mostly get the zombie thing right ("The Walking Dead" and Max Brooks's original "World War Z" novel) screw this one up. In our current epidemiology-obsessed culture — where we're all required to have our scheduled bird flu or Ebola freakout every year or so — we simply cannot seem to conceive of a scenario where zombies AREN'T the result of some sort of determinable, measurable contagion.
But this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of what Romero was trying to say with his original films.
Horror is fundamentally about the inexplicable. As soon as it becomes explicable, it becomes science fiction. Sure, Romero made a weak attempt in "Night" to justify his zombies as being the result some sort of "strange radiation" emanating from a returned space probe to Venus. It's such a lame explanation that I don't think Romero ever really meant for us to take it seriously. He was still trying to figure out the mythology behind his walking corpses, and the Venus-probe crap was a nod toward prevailing trends in sci-fi and horror at the time. By the time he got to "Dawn" ten years later, he pretty much did away with all of that.
In Romero's universe, the laws of physics as we understand them simply stopped working. It reminds me of something an old astronomy professor in college once said about the nature of science in general. I don't remember the exact quote so I'll have to paraphrase: Nothing is ever proved in science. We simply develop theories and evaluate the evidence and come up with the best understanding that we can, until something new comes along to show us that we were wrong. We believe in gravity because if you drop a rubber ball 10,000 times in a row, you can be reasonably certain that the ball will go down. But what if on the 10,001st time you drop the ball it goes up? Well, then you have to radically re-evaluate your entire understanding of how the universe works.
There's a reason why Ken Foree's famous "when there's no more room in Hell..." line from "Dawn" has become so iconic. It's as good an explanation as any, and it perfectly sums up the inexplicable nature of Romero's zombies. Romero is much more interested in the questions than he is anything resembling an answer.
But look at how it's used in the (pretty good but flawed) 2004 remake:
Foree's cameo is meant as a little gift to the fans, but unfortunately what director Zak Snyder does here is invert the original meaning of the line. Now we see it coming from a rabid, homophobic Jerry Falwell-style preacher/pundit. Whereas in the original we think Peter may be right, here we're supposed to immediately roll our eyes and KNOW that the preacher is wrong. Peter's statement is one of possible profundity. The nameless preacher's is meant to be tossed aside and forgotten. The cosmic and spiritual mystery has been drained completely out of the idea. Because germs, I guess.
I discovered both "Night" and "Dawn" in the early-1990s, back when zombies weren't really a thing. I used to watch "Night" almost every night as I went to bed... it became my equivalent of chilling out to "Dark Side of the Moon" to relax (I did that too, by the way). Something about these movies spoke to me on a fundamental, visceral level.
I can't really separate the two (hence the dual entry). "Night" is the undisputed the classic, the Patient Zero for the whole genre. But "Dawn" is, overall, probably the better movie. Its world is more sharply defined, its characters richer, its thematic concerns much more sophisticated.
What floored me about "Night" the first time I saw it was how well written it is. For a drive-in movie, it almost comes off like a piece of theater. Just check out this scene at about 20 minutes and 40 seconds into the movie.
After a long sequence where Ben and Barbara board up the farm house, Ben launches into a long monologue about his first experience with the zombies and how he learned — after watching a truck explode in flames — that they are afraid of fire. We hear the tremor in his voice and can see the pain of what he saw written all over his face. Seconds after he is finished, Barbara — in her stilted, post-shock delivery — tells him the story of how she and her brother were attacked at the cemetery. As she slips deeper and deeper into the story, she begins reliving it as someone who has experienced PTSD might relieve a traumatic experience. She eventually works herself into hysterics, and the scene culminates in a vicious punch from Ben to knock her out (a moment which, to a 1960s audience, would have been utterly shocking in its racial implications).
The entire sequence goes on for about seven minutes — which, in a movie with a 95-minute running time — is a lot of narrative real estate to use up. You simply don't see stuff like this in most horror movies, particularly those created for the drive-in circuit.
Indeed, most of "Night" is comprised of conversations — often shouted — between the various characters. The zombies themselves become almost incidental as Ben's conflict with Mr. Cooper escalates. And it is that conflict that drives the ultimate tragedy of the conclusion.
"Dawn" does largely the same thing, but on a much bigger scale. Both films (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, their 1985 followup "Day of the Dead") are concerned with an almost neo-realist sense of verisimilitude (the goofy music notwithstanding). This isn't the gritty, almost doc-style realism of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." Both "Night" and "Dawn" are elegaic, almost lyrical in style.
Critics who sing the praises of "Dawn" tend to focus on the 1970s consumerist satire. That element is there, of course, but it seems to me that it is brought up so often because it gives the snoots a way to justify their appreciation for the film. They can't just like a horror movie. It has to be a commentary about something.
"Dawn" is certainly that (the way "Night" is an almost accidental commentary on the Civil Rights movement), but at its heart I believe it's meant to be a character piece, concerned more with the connections people attempt to forge in an extreme crisis. The humor, as it is, is fairly sparse. The moments that resonate the most are these:
It's these genuine human interactions that, I'm afraid, most of the current crop of zombie stories miss altogether. This is what makes "The Walking Dead" and Brooks's "World War Z" (and even "Shaun of the Dead," in its way) stand head-and-shoulders above the rest. They get it in a way that "Fido" or "Zombieland" or "Warm Bodies" simply cannot.
I'm afraid the zombie is basically done as a legit source of existential dread. They've become neutered, made goofy by a pop culture obsessed with irony. Even Romero's recent crop of films have slipped into a nearly grotesque self parody of what he used to do.
But "Night" and "Dawn" remain classics. Untouched.
Cut through the noise and go back to the source.
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