by Mogk, Matt
4: LIVING ZOMBIES
A lab experiment goes horribly wrong, and a new virus is unleashed on the population, turning those infected into bloodthirsty maniacs driven by pure rage and capable of running at full speed. This is the premise of 28 Days Later, the 2002 hit British film that introduced the most popular advancements in the subgenre of zombie films since George Romero invented the modern zombie in 1968. It also sparked a heated debate among enthusiasts about what exactly constitutes a zombie and how fast is too fast for the ghoulish horde to move.
28 Days Later was groundbreaking as a low-budget horror film because of its immense mainstream success, but its core concept of a communicable rage infection was nothing new. A lesser-known film released seventeen years earlier, Warning Sign, depicts an accident in a secure lab that exposes workers to a deadly toxin that attacks the rage center of their brains, driving them to hunt and kill those not infected. Sound familiar?
The premise of the two films is almost identical, with the main difference being that Warning’s infection is airborne and contained within the boundaries of a secure research facility, while the 28 Days infection is transferred by direct fluid contact to the entire population of Britain.
Warning Sign (1985)
CAL:
Make it simple. What are you saying?
DAN:
It drives people crazy, that’s what I’m saying. Soldiers turn on their comrades. Civilian victims murder their doctors, and then they die. That’s what’s going on in that building right now.
CAL:
I don’t believe it. This is deliberate?
So why did Warning Sign hardly make a splash in the popular evolution of the modern zombie when 28 Days Later completely turned the subgenre on its head?
From an execution standpoint, Warning is a relatively forgettable effort. Hal Barwood, its writer-director, has yet to make another movie. 28 Days, however, was the first big hit in Danny Boyle’s directing career (although his 1996 film, Trainspotting, enjoyed some success at the box office and in critical reviews). He went on to win an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire in 2008. But could there be something more at play? Could the key to the popularity of 28 Days Later and its particular significance to the development of modern zombies lie in its quintessential zombieness?
Unlike those in Warning, the infected hordes in 28 Days behave like rabid animals, unable to speak or reason. They will stop at nothing to accomplish their simple mission of finding and destroying every last surviving human on the planet. Though they don’t eat the living, they do bite, scratch, and claw to transmit their deadly infection, much as conventional modern zombies do. They also lack any sense of individual identity or distinguishing characteristics, leading most to classify the picture as a zombie film despite the fact that no one ever comes back from the dead.
THE “ZOMBIES” OF 28 DAYS
I first met Danny Boyle in the mid-1990s when he gave a talk at New York University in support of his first feature film, Shallow Grave. It’s an indie suspense thriller about greed, madness, and roommates killing each other. The movie develops an impressive sense of tension, so I cornered Boyle after the screening and asked if he’d ever considered making a horror film, more specifically a zombie movie. He emphatically said no, that he had no interest in the zombie subgenre whatsoever. Jump forward eight years, and 28 Days Later was raking in upward of $85 million at the box office, putting Boyle solidly on the map as a bankable director.
But if you ask Boyle today, he will still tell you he’s never made a zombie movie. He doesn’t see the rage-filled humans he created in 28 Days Later as modern zombies. Zombie purists would agree with Boyle, arguing that a zombie that is still alive is not a zombie at all. Technically, they’re correct.
If we look at our three criteria for the modern zombie, the third stipulates that a zombie is a reanimated human corpse. By this standard, the infected freaks of 28 Days Later don’t qualify. Living zombies are by definition not undead. They can be killed by stopping their hearts, and once dead, they do not come back to life as conventional zombies. In this way, they are fundamentally different from Romero’s original vision of the flesh eater raised from the grave to feast on the living. Even the title, 28 Days Later, refers to how long it takes for the rage-filled humans in Boyle’s film to become so starved and dehydrated that they die out. Modern zombies don’t starve, and they don’t become dehydrated in any human sense of the word.
But what Danny Boyle essentially did with 28 Days Later was to create the living zombie—and in doing so, he revolutionized the zombie subgenre, introducing a whole new arena for characterizing zombies and for zombie storytelling.
Like their undead counterparts, living zombies are biologically infected, relentlessly aggressive, and no longer cognizant individuals. If we set the definition of the modern zombie next to a definition of the living zombie, we can see how well the infected of 28 Days qualify and how similar the two types are.
Here is the modern zombie:
The modern zombie is a relentlessly aggressive reanimated human corpse driven by a biological infection.
And here’s the living zombie:
The living zombie is a relentlessly aggressive human driven by a biological infection.
The brilliance—and the original core quality—of Romero’s flesh eaters is that they are grounded in science and reason rather than superstition and myth. The living zombie conforms to this core quality. If the infected maniac lumbering down the street looks like a zombie, bites like a zombie, and is contagious like a zombie, then for all intents and purposes, it’s zombie enough for most.
At this point, thanks to Boyle’s blockbuster innovation, living zombies are firmly ensconced in the zombie film subgenre. The 2009 film Zombieland, for example, introduced a raving horde that appears ambiguously living, or perhaps ambiguously dead. The movie seems to intentionally gloss over the monsters’ life status, making it less relevant. Zombieland’s creatures are identified by name as zombies, are ravenously hungry for human flesh, and have a pale, corpselike appearance. Many film scholars and fans alike believe them to be undead, but the only character to turn from human to flesh eater does so off-camera, making it unclear whether she died and came back to life or just went violently insane.
To get the final word, I spoke with the film’s writing team of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who confirmed that their zombies are indeed alive. They need to eat and drink water and can be killed like any other living person. Gone is the requisite focus on destroying the zombie brain to kill it, and gone is the concept of the dead rising. But almost anyone will tell you that Zombieland is a zombie movie. With a name like that, how could it not be?
Like rabid sickos, these zombies are living humans infected with a virus—but the zombie infection is incurable, and it transforms its victims into the same mindless, soulless creatures seen in zombie movies of decades past.
—Zombie Movies (2008), Glenn Kay
FAST VS. SLOW
The most striking difference between Romero’s flesh eaters and Boyle’s rage-filled maniacs is not their status as living or dead but their speed. Before 28 Days Later, zombies had always been shambling and stiff. Sure, they’d speed up a bit when they were within striking distance of a meal, but for the most part, they walked at a snail’s pace. Because Boyle kept his zombies alive, he was able to logically make them sprint, adding the advantage of speed to their traditional attributes of being relentlessly aggressive and highly contagious.
Some argue that speeding up the ghouls takes away from the classic gnawing anticipation of a shambling horde that can’t win any footraces but always gets you in the end. True or not, the concept of fast zombies was such a hit that when it came time for a big-budget remake of Romero’s classic Dawn of the Dead in 2004, the zombies were virtual track stars. But this time, they were also undead, so their speed couldn’t be explained away by arguing that they were in some way still human. Zombie traditionalists who reluctantly accepted Boyle’s contribu
tion to the subgenre were up in arms when the actual dead ran, including Romero himself.
“They can’t run! That’s the other thing I insist on. 28 Days Later I can forgive, because they’re not dead; they’re infected with some kind of a virus, so they’re still human, therefore they are still capable of moving fast. That Dawn of the Dead remake, Christ, what did they do, get up from the dead and immediately take up a membership at a gym?”13
Simon Pegg is the writer and star of 2003’s hit British zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead and a vocal advocate for the slow, shambling zombie over its faster counterpart seen in many recent movies. In a 2008 opinion piece published in the UK national newspaper The Guardian, Pegg strongly argues against sprinting zombies:
A biological agent, I’ll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It’s hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.
Ironically, Pegg himself may have played a pivotal role in the rise of the fast zombie in cinema by poking fun at how easy their slower cousins are to avoid and annihilate in Shaun of the Dead. Director Zack Snyder said that he chose to make his ghouls run in the Dawn of the Dead remake, released one year after Shaun, not because of the infected in 28 Days Later but because it’s not so easy to make fun of a faster ghoul.
Whatever your preference, it’s clear that both the slow and the fast zombie, both living and undead, are here to stay. As a traditionalist, I find it a challenge to accept. But diversity is usually a very good thing—or in this case, a very deadly thing. They walk, they run. They’re alive, they’re dead.
They’re all after you just the same.
KNOW YOUR ZOMBIES: THE PRIEST
28 Days Later (2002)
Jim wakes up in an abandoned hospital, walks outside, and finds London mysteriously empty. He wanders the streets, searching for answers. In the graffiti-marked halls of a local church Jim finds a seemingly helpful priest who turns out to be a raving maniac. He quickly learns that in a zombie plague nowhere is safe.
With the Priest, 28 Days Later ushered in the new era of living zombies, the biggest innovation in the zombie subgenre since Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
ILLUSTRATION BY JORELL RIVERA
5: VAMPIRES
As we’ve seen, vampires are so closely related to the modern zombie that they deserve their own chapter. After all, the modern zombie evolved from the vampire, and both share several defining characteristics: they are undead, they bite, and they consume humans in one way or another.
The obvious reason vampires aren’t zombies is that, well, they’re vampires. Principally, this means that they are not generally understood to be scientific or biological in nature. They have supernatural strength and speed, and according to various traditions, they can shape-shift into any number of other creatures. They can live forever, never decaying or growing old, and are nearly invincible as long as they avoid sunlight and never skip naptime. Scientifically speaking, vampires don’t make a whole lot of sense.
Contemporary vampire writers have tried to pull the vampire into the modern age with various updates, including making them cool high school kids who sparkle or making them more like zombies, meaning more scientifically based. In I Am Legend, Richard Matheson provided biological explanations for his vampires. Remnants of Matheson’s efforts to give vampires a scientific rationale can be seen in Will Smith’s 2007 blockbuster adaptation of the book. In fact, Legend’s filmmakers intentionally tried to cash in on the popularity of zombies by giving vampires some of their qualities. But make no mistake, it’s not a zombie movie.
Like vampires of old, the creatures that infect Smith’s I Am Legend can leap over cars in a single bound. They magically climb on ceilings, they can scheme and strategize, and they sleep the days away in creepy clusters like bats. The plot pretends to hinge on a biological plague that can be cured someday, but repeated lapses in logic show a certain lack of respect for that premise.
Last Man on Earth (1964)
ROBERT:
You’d prefer us to believe in vampires?
BEN:
If they exist, yes. There are stories being told, Bob.
ROBERT:
By people who are out of their minds with fear.
BEN:
But there are too many to be coincidental, stories about people who have died and come back.
ROBERT:
They’re just stories!
This tendency to blur the lines between vampire and zombie—to associate the two in confused ways or borrow from zombies to enhance vampires—is actually widespread. Ultimately, the connection between ancient vampire traditions and the modern zombie is tenuous at best. But several well-known examples are worth mentioning, if for no other reason than to show the distinct differences between the modern zombie and the vampire. Here is a brief tour of the most prominent vampire traditions that pop up in zombie books.
THE NACHZEHRER
According to Germanic lore, the Nachzehrer occupies the corpse of a person who died in extreme circumstances, such as suicide, murder, or violent accident. In the case of a deadly infectious disease passing through the region, the first person to die of the illness was thought likely to turn into a Nachzehrer.
Similar to the modern zombie, Nachzehrers do eat human flesh, but they don’t restrict their diet to the living. They were thought to chew their own hands, legs, and clothing while still inside the grave. After crawling out, they would eat the bodies of the other dead in the cemetery, giving them a superior ick factor but little cultural cachet.
The Nachzehrer does not just attack the living. Instead, just as he gnaws off his own dead flesh, he also eats from the clothing and the flesh of neighboring corpses.
—Der Werwolf (1862), Wilhelm Hertz
Unlike zombies, Nachzehrers don’t spread their affliction to others through a bite or fluid transfer. The legends of the Nachzehrers are essentially the German version of the vampire legends of Eastern Europe. Like vampires, Nachzehrers were believed to return from the grave with the specific goal of attacking family members and other friends and acquaintances.
THE REVENANT
A revenant can be a variety of entities, from something as ethereal as a ghost to the physical presence of the walking corpse. Either way, its mission is to torment the living, but revenants usually have specific targets in mind: people they knew when they were living. As vampire expert Scott Bowen explains, the revenant is a creature that reflects the conflicts or losses of particular human relationships:
This likely arises out of the psychological trauma caused by the death of a close relative. One of Tolstoy’s two famous vampire stories is about a father returning home to his family from war as a vampire.
Bowen adds that a person who died in dire circumstances, such as from a terrible disease or some violent act, increases the family’s suffering. This grief and trauma ultimately gets expressed as a cultural fear that the victim will rise from the dead.
Revenants prey on humans, but this could mean any range of behaviors from blood drinking or eating flesh to simply causing stress through perpetual haunting. Bowen notes that the term revenant occurs often in the context of vampire stories throughout that creature’s long literary history. The two are apparently very closely related.
THE CHINESE VAMPIRE
The Chiang-Shih is a legendary Chinese creature with striking similarities to our modern understanding of the vampire. Much like the Nachzehrer, the Chinese vampire was a human who died violently. Suicides, murder victims, drowning victims, and the hanged were believed to be transformed easily if left unburied.
The Chiang-Shih is nocturnal and very violent, often ripping apart its victims and pulling off their heads and limbs. It also possesses a strong sexual drive and often attacks women, raping and killing them. Repeated attacks on humans build up the strength of the Chiang-Shih until it is able to shape-shift into a wolf or a flying beast.
Finally, like both the Na
chzehrer and the revenant, the Chiang-Shih is a single entity. It doesn’t travel in groups or carry a contagious pathogen that can be passed to its innocent victims.
6: BEER-GOGGLE ZOMBIES
There is no greater testimony to the zombie’s popularity than the spectacular overuse of the word in the last thirty years. Zombie has been used to refer to so many different kinds of entities and social dynamics that it is now hard to rein it in with any specificity. By one expert’s account, for example, anyone who has died and been brought back to life is a zombie. This means that people who flatline on the operating table before being revived are doomed to be zombies for the rest of their lives.
Movie critics aren’t any better at using zombie responsibly. One critic cited Johnny Depp as starring in the top-grossing zombie movie of all time, 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The film raked in more than $650 million worldwide and has spawned a number of highly profitable sequels. The only problem is that Pirates clearly isn’t a zombie movie, as any five-year-old who’s seen it can tell you. There is not a single creature in it that remotely approximates a zombie in any way, shape, or form. Meaningless generalizations like this would make me want to pull my hair out, if only I had any.
What I like to call beer-goggle zombies are creatures that are not related to the modern zombie, but if you’re really drunk and you can’t fully form a logical train of thought, then you might be tempted to think they are zombies.