In Night of the Living Dead, George Romero made a film on a small budget and started a tradition in the horror movie genre that still holds true today. People love to kill people. Especially people that are already dead. If the situation was perfect and you were holed up in a farmhouse surrounded by the walking dead with lots of guns and ammo, face it, it would be kinda fun. Notice I said "if the situation was perfect". Most of the time you are not prepared for such a situation. Therefor these films all have one thing in common. An air of desperation. Do you have enough bullets to take down all of them? If not, do you make sure to save one for yourself? Scholar Kim Paffrenroth notes that "more than any other monster, zombies are fully and literally apocalyptic ... they signal the end of the world as we have known it."
Though it is not known when exactly the term "zombie" became associated with Romero's specific depiction, it should be noted that Night made no reference to the creatures as "zombies". In the film they are referred as "ghouls" on the TV news reports. However, the word "Zombie" is used continually by Romero in his 1978 script for Dawn of the Dead, including once in dialog. This retroactively fits the creatures with an invisible Haitian/African prehistory, formally introducing the zombie as a new archetype. The mid-1980s produced few zombie films of note, the Evil Dead series, while zombie-influenced and notable on their own, are not really zombie films. 1985's Re-Animator, loosely based on the Lovecraft story, stood out in the genre, achieving nearly unanimous critical acclaim and becoming a modest success. Lovecraft's influence is kept well and is notable here. The zombies in the film are consistent with other zombie films of the period, and it may escape some that they are nearly unchanged from the 1921 story. The 1988 Wes Craven film The Serpent and the Rainbow, based on the non-fiction book by Wade Davis, attempted to re-connect the zombie genre with the Voodoo roots that inspired it. The film poses both supernatural and scientific possibilities for "zombification" and other aspects of Voodoo. The film is notable as perhaps the only Voodoo-themed zombie film of recent times. Quite a good one as well, I might add.
The turn of the millennium coincided with a decade of box office successes in which the zombie sub-genre experienced a resurgence: the Resident Evil movies in 2002 and 2004, the Dawn of the Dead remake (2004), the British films 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later (2002, 2007) and the homage/parody Shaun of the Dead (2004). The new interest allowed Romero to create the fourth entry in his zombie series: Land of the Dead, released in the summer of 2005. Romero has recently returned to the beginning of the series with the film Diary of the Dead. The film will take place on the same night as the original Night of the Living Dead.
The depiction of zombies as biologically infected people has become increasingly popular, likely due to the 28 Days Later (I only saw the first one and liked it, have yet to see the sequel) and Resident Evil series (love the games, hate the movies); 2006's Slither (quite good, and really fun to watch) featured zombies infected with alien parasites, and 2007's Planet Terror features a zombie outbreak caused by a biological weapon, and on my list of films to see. The most well-known current work of zombie fiction is 2006's World War Z by Max Brooks, which was an immediate hit upon its release and a New York Times bestseller. Brooks had previously authored the cult hit The Zombie Survival Guide, an exhaustively researched, zombie-themed parody of pop-fiction survival guides.
Just in case the folk tales are true, I know you are wondering how you know a zombie when you see one? Well, we have to look at the core traits. Though many exceptions exist (including, the non-dead, biologically-infected zombies seen in many current productions), zombies tend to share some of the following characteristics. To be aware is to be alive. Take note that zombies are:
Mobile but technically dead, with a lack of heartbeat or other vital signs
Often marked by an undead, decaying state, with discolored skin and eyes
Non-communicative, groaning and howling instead of speaking
Diminished in intelligence, with a resulting inability to reason, strategize or use tools
Diminished in emotional response, with no empathy or mercy toward victims
Consumed with ravenous hunger for human flesh, sometimes vocalized
Afflicted with diminished senses, but still sensing prey by motion or sound or other means
Clumsy, violent and ungainly, either shambling slowly or running frenzied
Vulnerable to destruction of the brain, which kills them. Removal of the head kills the body but the head remains active.
Unresponsive to any other kinds of injuries, even normally fatal ones
Zombie 'infection' usually portrayed as contagious, i.e. through a bite or claw mark
Does not attack other zombies, leading to overwhelming numbers and swarms of zombies
"Send more cops."
1 comment:
Ahhh. . ."Send more cops". One of my favourite lines from a horror film!
You're right: the term "zombie" is used willy-nilly in horror films and not always accurately. I'll tell you my little rule of thumb concerning the terms zombie, walking dead, ghouls etc.
I think the "Romero zombie" is only called a zombie for convenience sake; since they're definitely not zombies technically. As you said, a "zombie" is a word deriving from the voodoo or Voudoun religion so really a zombie is only that form of walking dead connected with voodooism. I don't tend to use the term "Romero zombie" but the term "living dead" from the title of the first film. Although, I am quite willing to refer to them as "zombies" as a sort of shorthand knowing full well its inaccurate.
Speaking of "the walking dead", that's a much more broad term which actually would also include the Frankenstein monster, vampires, mummies and any other form of revenant likely to pop out at you in the dark. Basically, anything that's dead and still boogying down the freeway can be considered "the walking dead".
When it comes to "ghouls", Romero's script was again wrong in "Night of the Living Dead" since they were definitely not ghouls. While ghouls DO eat human flesh, they are without exception living humans who do so; and the "Romero zombies", while demonstrating "ghoulish" behaviour are undoubtedly not living but reanimated corpses chomping down on Aunt Elma.
So that's how I tend to keep the whole mess of creatures straight in my mind. Although obviously, after the vast success of Romero's films, the term "zombie" has loosely come to stand for them all. But who'da thought reanimated corpses would be THIS much trouble to categorize?!?
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