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The undead are on the march again (this month the remake of a definitive
horror classic, Dawn of the Dead is scheduled for release) and it is only a matter
of time before they overrun our cities and start eating our friends!
As
N&W's resident zombie fighter, it's my responsibility to provide the information that
will help you survive the living dead apocalypse and keep you from becoming zombie chow.
These films may not make you a zombie master, but should the undead ever rise from their
graves and feast on the flesh of they living, they may just save your
life.
White
Zombie (1932)
White Zombie, the founding father of the
old school zombie sub-genre, stars Bela Lugosi as the diabolically bug-eyed "Murder"
Legendre, who runs a sugar mill and supplements his income working as a zombie master. He
uses a mind-controlling potion rendering his victims into soulless, culture-less, labor
automatons.
An equal opportunity exploiter, Legendre diversifies into the
mystical pimp racket, turning a young, beautiful bride-to-be, Madeline Parker (Madge
Bellamy) into a subservient-Stepfordian-undead-belle for the benefit of wealthy
plantation owner Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer). When Beaumont gets bored with his
less-than-lively love life, Legendre turns him into one of his worker drones. The film
sets off a creepy vibe (especially for the '30s era of horror) with some innovative
camera work that smacks of surrealistic German expressionism.
Night of the
Living Dead (1968)
NOTLD has been dubbed the Citizen
Kane of the zombie genre, redefining the living dead from mystical muppets of Voodoo
marionettes, to grotesquely flesh crazed fiends, devouring every warm body in their path.
Not only does it capture a psychological portrait of claustrophobia, trapping its small
group of survivors in a farmhouse while madness ravishes the world outside, but it's
most haunting quality is the bleak reality it represents. Ben (Duane Jones), the
courageously resourceful African-American lead, is put in a power struggle against Harry
Cooper (Karl Hardman), who is motivated by implicit racism and fear.
The
rest of the characters, however, zombies included, are almost secondary to the struggle
within the house. This emphasizes the film's most prominent theme, related as much to
the Vietnam War as it does to Civil Rights: rather than in engaging in the struggles
going on in the world, we are at each other's throats, destroying
ourselves.
Dawn of the
Dead (1978)
Romero's sequel to Night is simultaneously
a horror film, an action movie, and a sweeping allegorical satire regarding capitalism at
its worst. Two SWAT officers: Peter (Ken Foree) & Roger (Scott Reiniger), a news
reporter, Francine (Gaylen Ross), and her "fly boy" beau helicopter pilot (and all around
cool-guy wanna-be) Stephen (David Emge) barricade themselves in a mall to fight off
zombies. After death, the Mecca of consumerism still lures customers to amble around and
shop after they drop; even the characters become seduced by unnecessary goods and high
fashion, literally trapped in the mall while symbolically trapped by consumerism,
eventually defending "their" wares against a marauding motorcycle
gang.
Evil
Dead (1981)
Stop me if you heard this one: five college kids
rent a cabin in the woods that unbeknownst to them harbors an ancient evil; one by one it
turns them into demonic zombie fiends! Sam Rami's seriously terrifying student film is
something of a meditation on what would happen if horror novelist HP Lovecraft had penned
an '80s slasher film. It produced not one, but three cult classics and introduced the
ultimate zombie fighting superhero; the trash talking, chainsaw fisted, Ash (Bruce
Campbell). This first installment of the series is the scariest of the trio and paves
the way for the zany self-reflective sequel, Evil Dead 2, (where he acquires the
chainsaw) & Army of Darkness (which has him kicking demonite ass back to the dark
ages.)
Day of the
Dead (1985)
The follow-up sequel to Dawn, Day
takes place in a military bunker after the world has been overrun with zombies. An
outcropping of survivors-scientists and soldiers, take their last stand, far outnumbered
by the undead ("400,000 to 1"; I didn't count, you just have to rely on the character's
tally).
Again, all the characters are representative of different facets
of the issues Romero is tackling. The film centers more on the conflict between humanity
and bureaucracy. The scientists want to reverse the zombification process but lack the
resources. The soldiers just want to shoot 'em all but lack the manpower, and because
neither can achieve their objective, they squabble back and forth and fight with each
other. Again, the zombies are in the background clamoring to eat up the pieces left
behind.
Due to cuts in the production budget, Romero had to remove several
ideas from the original script, including a sub-plot involving military engineered
super-soldier-robo zombies, created to fight run-of-the-mill (pun intended) flesh eating
zombies. (How cool is that?) The idea didn't go completely unused, however; its concept
inspired the third installment of NOTLD co-creator John Russo's Return of the
Living Dead franchise, a bizarre tale of undying love, S&M and high tech zombie
warfare.
Return of the
Living Dead (1985)
John Russo, NOTLD co-creator,
scripted his own spoof sequel of the classic zombie film. While Romero's zombies went
shopping and enlisted in the military, Russo's undead rose from their graves to party.
ROTLD boasts an ultra - '80s - punk vibe: "What do you think this is? A costume.
This is a way of life," complete with music by The Cramps & The Damned, and unstoppable
zombies slogging out of the pages of old EC comics (think: Tales From the Crypt).
The script is influenced not only by its pseudo-prequel, but also Stanley Kubrick's
satirical cold war comedy, Dr. Strangelove.
The film takes the
premise that Night of the Living Dead was an exaggeration of a real event, caused
by a military experiment with the corpse re-animating biological weapon (trioxin 245). In
an effort to cover up the incident, the military concealed the zombies in containers,
which were accidentally shipped to a medical facility. One of the containers
inadvertently bursts, releasing not only the zombie inside, but also enough gas to
resurrect all the corpses in the area. Originally, Romero had planned on producing the
film, but Laurel Entertainment (afraid his involvement would confuse zombie fans) asked
him not to - their efforts didn't do any good though. Mention "zombie" at a party and
someone is bound to moan "brains" in response.
The Serpent &
the Rainbow (1988)
A Harvard educated zombie fighter, Dennis
Allen (Bill Pullman), is an
Ethno-botanist who journeys to Haiti, amidst social and
political turmoil, to track down the legendary zombie potion on behalf of a
pharmaceutical company that believes it could be an effective anesthetic. Directed by Wes
"Freddy Kruger creator" Craven, The Serpent & the Rainbow is based on a book by
the same name inspired by the real life adventures of Wade Davis. Think: Indiana
Jones meets I walked with a zombie, with Craven's patented surrealistic dream
quality; it's also the only horror film centered on a National Geographic
explorer-in-residence.
Cemetery Man / Dellamorte
Dellamore (1994)
Cemetery Man is a surrealistically
strange, bizarrely twisted, extremely confusing philosophical exploration of love, life,
death and the existential relationship between them - with zombies. Francesco Dellamorte
(Rupert Everett) is a cemetery groundskeeper for a sleepy Northern Italian village, but
this "dead end" job turns out to be quite the "undertaking" given that the dead rise
seven days after they are buried. He falls in love with a woman known only as She (Anna
Falchi) who is bitten by a zombie, killed, and then in dream-like fashion returns to him
as other characters. (You know those dreams where somebody is themselves and then someone
else, who’s not really them? Well it's like that.) As he tries to solve the mysterious
connections between love and death, he fights a re-animated Boy Scout troop, talks to the
grim reaper, and goes on a killing spree. It's all very romantic.
28 Days
Later (2002) (read the
review)
There are few things scarier than re-animated rotting corpses
hungry for human flesh - and re-animated rotting corpses hungry for human flesh that move
really fast is one of them. An epidemic sweeps through London turning most of the
population into slobbering, disjointed, hyper-exaggerated, arm-flaying, body-spazzing
zombies (in short, ghoulish renditions of Joe Cocker). Jim (Cillian Murphy), Selena
(Naomie Harris), Frank (Brendan Gleeson), and Hannah (Megan Burns) compose a makeshift
family of survivors struggling in the apocalyptic aftermath of zombiedom.
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