Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies

by Mogk, Matt

  Legendary author Stephen King was a junior in college when the film premiered, and he has said that it turned him to jelly. Director of the Evil Dead and Spider-Man franchises Sam Raimi credits Night of the Living Dead as being the first film to have a profound impact on him:

  I was probably about ten years old and my sister snuck me into the theater under her coat, if you can believe that. It was a crime that she committed against me, watching that film. I was too young. And it blew my mind, the terror. I could not believe it. I was so terrified watching that film.65

  In his late twenties, Wes Craven had never seen a horror movie before and had no interest in the genre. A friend dragged him to Romero’s Night, and it shook him to the core: “I was hooked, and it was George’s fault.”66 Craven would later go on to direct dozens of iconic modern horror films, including The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the wildly popular Scream franchise, to name a few.

  ZOMBIE MOVIE HIGHLIGHTS

  As we’ve seen, George Romero quite literally invented the modern zombie with his 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead. Since then, hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands, of zombie films and videos have been made by backyard filmmakers and big-name directors in the United States and elsewhere, taking Romero’s flesh eater in new and creepy directions. Though covering them all would require a book in itself, here are a few highlights of some important historical moments in zombie movie history, post-Night.

  ZOMBIE (1979)

  In 1979, the late Italian horror director Lucio Fulci released Zombie. Fulci is widely referred to as the Godfather of Gore, and he didn’t hold back in this film. Italian zombie movies are known to be more bloody and gross than their American counterparts. In keeping with this reputation, Zombie includes tight shots of a woman getting her eye gruesomely poked out with a stick.

  But the most famous scene in the film follows a topless female scuba diver as she’s threatened by a shark until a zombie emerges from an underwater reef to attack her as well. The zombie then does battle with the shark, which rips off the zombie’s arm and swims away after suffering a bite. In zombie circles, this scene is so famous that it has led to people using the name “Zombie vs. Shark” for everything from Web sites to rock bands. A clip of the scene was also featured in a 2010 national television ad for Windows 7, Microsoft’s new operating system. Dozens of Italian zombie splatterfests would follow in the eighties and nineties, but Fulci’s Zombie is the film that kicked off the “spaghetti undead” craze.

  RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985)

  In 1985, writer-director Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead premiered to mixed reviews and midlevel success, but it has since become arguably the second-most influential film in zombie culture behind Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

  O’Bannon’s film takes Romero’s theme and moves it into spoof territory, as a pair of bumbling medical-supply workers accidentally release a secret government toxin on a bunch of cadavers in their warehouse. The cadavers start jumping around, so the workers cut them up and burn the evidence, sending infected smoke out the chimney and into the atmosphere. Enter a rainstorm.

  Ashes soon fall back to earth, making the dead in the nearby cemetery rise from their graves and seek out living humans. But instead of eating human flesh, the zombies in Return only want brains. This was the first time in film history that any zombie had eaten brains, said “brains,” or expressed any interest in brains at all. Today the Return of the Living Dead franchise remains the only major film series to include zombies that eat brains. Nevertheless, at every zombie walk and at other zombie-themed events, you will see people chanting that they want brains. This illogically comical notion caught on and will now forever be associated with the modern zombie. We have O’Bannon to thank for that.

  RAIDERS OF THE LIVING DEAD (1986)

  It’s hard for me to name the worst zombie movie of all time. Ultimately, that’s a question of personal taste. But one year after Return of the Living Dead premiered, a film that’s on my short list was released: Raiders of the Living Dead (1986). Starring Scott Schwartz of The Toy and featuring homemade laser guns and public-domain Three Stooges footage, this stinker follows the confused investigations of a hack reporter and his accidental teen sidekick as they try to figure out why dead bodies are roaming their quiet suburban neighborhood. But even that basic description gives the haphazard events that unfold on-screen too much credit. With a poster stolen from Star Wars, a title stolen from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and a plot stolen from the mind of a two-year-old, the film is almost unwatchable.

  Interestingly, writer-director Samuel Sherman’s next film was the 1987 documentary Drive-In Madness, which looks at drive-in movie culture and features an interview with George Romero. I wonder if Romero knew that Sherman had just dealt a blow to the subgenre he so brilliantly created. Raiders of the Living Dead writer Brett Piper would not surprisingly go on to pen even worse schlock, including A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (1990).

  Raiders of the Living Dead (1986)

  JONATHAN:

  This Randall is no loony and my grandfather takes him very seriously.

  MICHELLE:

  About what?

  JONATHAN:

  About being attacked by zombies.

  MICHELLE:

  Zombies! You’re not making this up?

  JONATHAN:

  Uh uh.

  28 DAYS LATER (2002)

  In the 1990s, zombie video games took over for film as the driver of undead representations in visual media. It wasn’t until 2002, with director Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, that the subgenre got its next breath of life.

  The movie opens as a confused bike messenger wakes from a long coma to find the hospital empty and the streets of London deserted. He is soon chased by raving maniacs that lead him to join forces with a small band of survivors who desperately search for hope and safety in a world gone mad.

  Though both Boyle and George Romero rightly agree that the rage-filled humans in 28 Days aren’t technically zombies, the film was wildly successful, and fans across the globe saw it as the next great innovation in the zombie subgenre. Shot on digital video and made for just $8 million, 28 Days Later grossed an estimated $90 million worldwide and will forever be known as the film that brought us fast zombies.

  SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004)

  The 2000s have been boom years for zombie films, such as Shaun of the Dead in 2004—a comedy send-up hybrid of Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead and O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead—which made fun of zombies a bit but still held on to traditional elements. While Romero was critical of Return of the Living Dead in the 1980s, saying that making fun of the monster ruins its potential to horrify, he embraced Shaun of the Dead and has since included writer Simon Pegg and director Edgar Wright in cameos in his own zombie movies.

  Shaun of the Dead tells the story of two underachieving best friends who are forced to become unlikely heroes when England is overrun by flesh-eating zombies. While 28 Days Later presents the grim reality of a catastrophic zombie outbreak in gritty super-speed, Shaun slows the action down and proves that even though it’s the end of the world you can still have a bit of fun.

  REC (2007)

  Picking up where Danny Boyle’s infected left off, Spanish director Paco Plaza gave us what at first appears to be a new and deadly form of rabies in REC (2007). As the terrifying story unfolds, we learn that something much more sinister is at work.

  The film follows a standard living zombie model, but what makes it unique is that the creatures come into existence as a result of a misguided attempt to cure demonic possession by indentifying the offending substance in a little girl’s infected blood. A secret experiment in the penthouse of a Barcelona apartment building goes horribly wrong, unleashing a new virus on the unsuspecting residents. Those infected quickly turn into bloodthirsty maniacs filled with pure rage, while authorities outside seal the building off to prevent the mysterious sickness from spr
eading.

  REC got a shot-for-shot remake in the 2008 American film Quarantine, and both have spawned multiple sequels.

  ZOMBIELAND (2009)

  Considered one of the most profitable zombie movies ever made, Zombieland tells the story of four survivors of a catastrophic zombie plague making their way across the American Southwest. It’s a wild romp often called America’s answer to Shaun of the Dead, and its huge success at the box office has been instrumental in the rise of the modern zombie in recent years.

  What’s most interesting about Zombieland isn’t the money it raked in but the fact that the flesh-eating creatures it presents aren’t dead. While 28 Days Later introduced a living, fast zombie to the world several years earlier and the Dawn of the Dead remake allowed their undead flesh eaters to run in 2004, Zombieland is the first movie to ignore the distinction between living and dead zombies. It instead makes a strong argument that it doesn’t matter if the raving horde chasing you is alive or not. If they inhabit human bodies, want to eat you, and will stop at nothing to accomplish that goal, they are zombies.

  THE CLASSIC ZOMBIE OPEN

  An “open” in film-speak is the beginning sequence of a film. Zombie opens reveal that as misunderstood as the modern zombie is in certain living circles, the people who know the absolute least about the undead are the characters in zombie movies themselves. Most of the time, that fact spells disaster for them.

  Characters in zombie movies simply don’t watch zombie movies. In fact, if you were to ask almost any character at the start of almost any zombie movie of the last fifty years to define a zombie, he or she would have no idea what you were talking about. A zom-what? Never heard of that. To be fair, this isn’t a convention of zombie movies alone. Characters across all film genres suffer from a complete lack of cinematic reference, as if they’d never seen a single movie in their entire lives.

  This may not seem so strange at first, but imagine if your average teen in a contemporary comedy didn’t know what Twitter was or had never even heard of the Internet. Imagine an action hero who couldn’t warn his girlfriend about the bomb in her trunk because he had no idea what a cell phone was, much less how to use one. Audiences would throw up their hands in disgust.

  Plausibility is a key element to the success of any movie. Without it, viewers are jarred from the action and emotion on-screen, and the picture dies a speedy death. That’s why filmmakers go to such great lengths to reflect contemporary culture accurately in their work. They make sure the right cars are used, the right slang, the right clothing. Budget allowing, they employ an entire army of professionals devoted to props, sets, and costumes, all with the sole purpose of making the movie look and feel as realistic as possible. But with rare exception, this same standard doesn’t hold true when it comes to film references, especially in horror films. And it certainly doesn’t hold true in zombie movies.

  Zombie movies typically open with the world in an ignorantly blissful state, but soon enough, the dead rise and start eating the living. An obligatory period of confusion and panic sets in, as the public struggles to overcome its utter naïveté about the threat it’s facing. The characters have no idea what is coming at them, so they are forced gradually to figure out the rules these new creatures follow. They don’t stay down when you shoot them! Aim for the head! Why is Mom eating the cat?

  Each new movie starts from zero, with no collective knowledge, and then quickly works its way up the information ladder until any remaining survivors are well aware of what it takes to stay alive and are determined to make that happen.

  The hit British zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead (2004) is the perfect example of this ignorance to zombies. Best friends and epic slackers Ed and Shaun stumble home from a drunken night at the pub to continue the party in their tiny living room. In the wee hours, their responsible roommate, Pete, who went to bed hours earlier, storms in to complain about the loud music and singing. He’s got a job. He’s got a life. He’s not a loser, and he wants to get some sleep!

  In the ensuing argument, it’s revealed that Pete has a bandage over his right hand. It’s a bite. Pete brushes it off as nothing. The discussion moves on, and that’s the last we hear of it. Of course, as viewers with at least a smidgen of cultural knowledge about the modern zombie, we know that Pete’s bite means he’s probably infected, destined to die and be reanimated as a flesh-hungry monster bent on eating Ed and Shaun for breakfast. Sure enough, the next morning, zombie hilarity ensues.

  Shaun of the Dead (2004)

  ED:

  What’s up with your hand, man?

  PETE:

  I got mugged on the way home from work.

  ED:

  By who?

  PETE:

  I don’t know. Some crackheads or something. One of them bit me.

  ED:

  Why did they bite you?

  PETE:

  I don’t know! I didn’t stop to ask them!

  The insertion of this plot device—characters who know nothing of zombies at all living in a film world that has never heard of them—in a savvy comedy like Shaun of the Dead shows that it’s so commonly used in zombie movies and so absurd that it’s a ready-made gag. Another zombie romp, Zombieland (2009), uses the same open to the zombie world, but instead of a roommate who is bitten by a crackhead, it’s a beautiful neighbor girl who is bitten by a homeless man.

  An alternate approach to the classic zombie open is to skip over the obligatory initial confusion by having your hero sleep through the mayhem and wake up only after the world has settled into its new undead state. Other characters can then quickly fill him in on the situation and rules for survival, speeding up the airtime it takes everyone to figure out what these creatures are. I call this the Van Winkle Technique, and it has been used in popular modern zombie franchises such as 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead.

  A BUCKET OF BLOOD AND FIVE FRIENDS

  In addition to the many actors who got their breaks in the broader horror genre, several big-name directors have launched careers with zombie movies and then gone on to great critical acclaim with more mainstream projects. The success of these early films allowed their careers to move forward and put them in a position to become household names.

  Danny Boyle won an Oscar for Best Director for his work on Slumdog Millionaire six years after solidifying his spot on the entertainment map with 2002’s 28 Days Later. In 2003, Peter Jackson got his directing Oscar for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, but zombie fans knew him first for his 1992 romp, Dead Alive, about a weak-willed son who tries desperately to keep things together after his mother is turned into a raving undead beast. Jackson’s second film, 1994’s Heavenly Creatures, starred Kate Winslet in her first film role and garnered Jackson an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay.

  Zombie movies are perfect launchpads because they’re so inexpensive to produce. I always say that anybody with a bucket of fake blood and five friends willing to limp around on camera can make a zombie movie. The British zombie film Colin, widely reported to have been made for less than $100, was the surprise hit of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival’s film market. It led to writer-director Marc Price landing several other big-budget deals. Colin tells a simple zombie story from the title character’s point of view as he stumbles home in the midst of a catastrophic outbreak, only to change into a flesh eater himself.

  A couple of years earlier, another feature-length zombie film, Pathogen, gained national attention not so much for its shoestring budget but because it was made by Emily Hagins, a twelve-year-old girl in Austin, Texas. In Pathogen, a group of middle school students must save their town from a mysterious water-borne infection that causes the dead to rise. The film was the subject of a 2009 documentary, Zombie Girl.

  Some critics carp that the low-budget, anybody-can-make-one approach to zombie movies encourages a lot of schlock to hit the screen, making it even more difficult for the genre to get the respect it deserves. A fair point, but I would argue that the lowered bar a
lso allows talented independent filmmakers to jump into the game without dealing with the prohibitive budgets, outsized egos, and mercurial politics of established studios. Having worked in and around Hollywood for a number of years, I can tell you that this is one hell of a plus.

  KNOW YOUR ZOMBIES: HARE KRISHNA

  Dawn of the Dead (1978)

  Romero’s Dawn of the Dead created several iconic zombies, but leading the pack is this bald flesh eater in orange robes. The Hare Krishna zombie stalks an indoor shopping mall looking for victims to convert to his new undead religion, much like he did when he was still alive.

  Though the Hare Krishna zombie doesn’t get a successful kill onscreen, he continues to be popular with merchandisers who’ve adapted him to everything from action figures to lunch boxes.

  ILLUSTRATION BY TERRY CALLEN

  31: ZOMBIES ON THE SMALL SCREEN

  On February 6, 2011, the NFL’s Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers faced off in Super Bowl XLV, widely reported to be the most-watched sports event in U.S. television history, with more than 110 million viewers. To capitalize on the massive audience, broadcaster Fox aired a special episode of its hit musical comedy series Glee immediately following the game. And what plot device did the creators of Glee use to help keep people glued to their seats? Zombies. The rival glee club and football team joined forces and dressed like the undead, culminating in a halftime zombie dance performance that saved the club’s season and helped the football team win their game. Zombies saved the day!