As for the other half of the question, well, that’s going to be a bit harder.
The earliest, chronologically, movie that I saw that touched on the modern idea of zombies was Plan 9 From Outer Space, wherein, aliens decided to take over the world by reanimating a couple of dead people in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t really work all that well. While there wasn’t much by way of people eating and they were more the skulking and carrying off women that fainted from fright type of reanimated corpses still they were still reanimated corpses, nonetheless.
It wasn’t until Romero made a little movie called Night of the Living Dead that the modern zombie was given birth. Night is kind of a Portrait of Dorian Gray type of movie were every year the picture ages a bit more horribly until, eventually, it becomes unwatchable. On the off chance that Romero sees this, can you please go back and take that goddamned cricket out of the soundtrack? Please? A cricket really isn’t the ambient sound one needs in a movie where very little happens. While Night was profitable, its influence led small studios to just make low budget horror movies. There’s a pretty good chance we’d never have a Chain Saw Massacre or a Halloween without it.
In 1978 Romero made the greatest zombie movie that had the worst repercussions of all time. Dawn of the Dead was epic. While I could never work out who built the mall what with all the zombies that had been roaming about biting people since 1968, still it was epic. The major problem with Dawn is that it showed every Italian with a camera, a few rolls of film, some fake blood, sausage links and those cheap Halloween kits that they could also make a zombie movie. They were even cost effective, zombies don’t talk and extras who don’t talk make very little money. It seemed at the time there was a cheap zombie movie released weekly each promising to show the audience some fucked up shit. What audiences mostly got was bad dubbing and one or two zombies killing folks with terrible F/X. This is considered the Golden Age of Zombies. Golden Age of Mostly Shit, if you ask me. Over the years there has been the occasional good zombie movie (Return of the Living Dead being about the best of the lot). The best and worst things to happen to zombies were yet to come.
Back in the 60s while hippies were convincing themselves that drugs and fucking were changing the world for the better, some nerds created the Internet and actually managed to change the world on nothing but Mountain Dew and furious masturbation. The commoditization of the internet and Hollywood’s increasing fears of losing money by actually making movies formed a perfect storm for the current zombie renaissance.
Zombies, in modern culture, are an odd thing. They seem to be liked or loved by all walks of life. People who don’t even like horror, namely people who see the current crop of PG-13 J horror remakes and found footage nonsense, will squeal like little girls with a new unicorn pony at the very mention of them. But why? Zombies aren’t terribly interesting in and of themselves. They are walking bodies that eat people. They have no personality or discernable goals, regardless of how hard Romero has tried to shoehorn some in over the past few years.
My pet theory is that zombies represent our fascination with viruses and how they spread. In most movies that have bothered with an explanation of them zombies are caused by a virus. Zombies present a macroscopic view of the microscopic process of viral spread and reproduction. A person is infected and its only real desire is to bite others to spread it around. I realize that most movies have them tear folks apart and eat them but to what purpose? Their internal organs no longer work and they have no real need for sustenance. Think of it as the virus controlling the person who is limited to basic brain functions and you probably come pretty close to the truth of it.
My 2 cents, anyways. I hear that other like them because “they r kool and shit lol”.
The movies I watched this week just happen to have zombies and one of the two actually gave the zombies a bit of motivation. I’m, of course, talking about Dead Snow and The Horde.
Dead Snow involves a bunch of Swedes—They’re Norwegian, MacReady—heading to a cabin in some out of the way place and having bad shit happen to them.
The movie starts with a girl running from something as ironic classical music plays in the background. Oh Edvard Grieg how far you’ve come. She is promptly killed and we head into what looks suspiciously like the opening to The Shining. We meet our soon to be dead folks as they talk about seemingly inconsequential things like avalanches and one of the guys being a med student who is disgusted by blood. Both topics come into play later although the avalanche thing is used by a person in the other car. Guess she has great hearing or something.
They arrive at the cabin and have some fun in the snow and play twister and listen to terrible Norwegian music. Shortly after they are visited by Old Man Exposition who insults the coffee, steals a beer, lights up a smoke and provides pages of back story. Some Nazis in the area generally acted like assholes and were chased off by the local villagers. After he explains everything he buggers off back to his tent and gets killed.
We continue with the slow build up which is code for shit fails to happen. Two people fuck in an outhouse which is possibly the least sexy place one could possibly fuck. If you’ve never been to a particularly rural place and have no idea what an outhouse is just replace it with a port-a-potty that’s been in use for a week and the honey wagon hasn’t been around to pump out the shit.
While those guys are having at it, the folks inside find a small chest of gold and have fun with it. The movie then becomes Leprechaun.
The Nazi zombies in the movie aren’t traditional zombies. I’ve seen slow and fast zombies, this is the first movie with supersonic zombies. I thought for a while that it would paint itself in the same corner as Alien3 where any chase scene becomes pointless because no one can outrun them. Thankfully, the Nazi zombies suffer from Phantom Menace disease and can only run fast when the plot demands it. It’s never explained why they want the gold back. I can’t imagine them moseying into town to buy anything.
Well the zombies attack folks to regain their pot o’ gold. There’s blood and gore and whatnot. People die. Nazi zombies re-die. The last 20 minutes or so finally manage to entertain despite the relentless silliness of it all.
If you haven’t watched it I recommend it. Just be ready to fast forward a bit.
The Horde is a French zombie movie where zombies happen to attack a tenement building while some cops try to kill some other people for some reason or the other. It’s French so I’m guessing existentialism or a disregard for Jerry Lewis enters into it somewhere.
We open on a funeral for someone. I’m guessing he was important ‘cause some friends of his decide to go kill the guy who killed him. I guess you could say they form an Alliance and are in Thrall to one another. A Stormwind seems to blow in the Forsaken zombies. Yes, I played WoW. Now shut the fuck up about it.
The four cops decide to storm the tenement building where the Nigerians who killed funeral guy live. They do so in that really conspicuous way that little kids play spy. While sneaking about the maintenance guy gets the drop on them. So yeah they really really suck at being sneaky. The Nigerians take a break from sending spam emails and shoot at the cops who get snuck up on a second time by maintenance guy.
So the Nigerians capture the cops and shoot some unrelated guy to prove that they are BAMFs. Then kill one of the cops to reiterate their BAMFness. Then Hell breaks loose.
Zombies converge on the building for no apparent reason and the first guy the Nigerians killed starts beating on the door. They, of course, open the door and proceed to empty all their bullets into his chest. This, unsurprisingly, proves ineffective so a couple of lackeys decide to go hand to hand, also ineffective. The main Nigerian wanders over and shoots the guy in the head finally putting him down. No one really learns from this though. Throughout the movie approximately 4,000 shots are fired. Maybe 2 are head shots. Well there is the scene where one of the cops sacrifices himself and goes on a head shot rampage but by that point it really doesn’t matter.
The escape from the building is full of nonsense. There’s more hand to hand fighting, an old crazy racist French guy, a few guys seriously considering fucking a zombie chick and the introduction of a concept wherein zombies store food for later. It’s all patently ridiculous in its blatant attempts at “coolness”.
Should you watch this one? No. But you crazy kids love your zombies and probably will anyways.
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