No doubt about it, the spectre of the shuffling, rotted corpse of the living dead, the zombie, has been a favorite bogeyman of the fright film since the early Thirties. More recently, zombies have been the subject of some of the most significant horror films of all time. The reason? It's simple, says Nick Burton. For, you see, it's a case of...
By Nick Burton
Everyone loves zombies, or at least they ought to love them.
Zombies are the best movie monsters because, quite simply, they are us. They are the hulking soulless dead that we either will become when inertia strikes us in the ghastly throes of advanced age , or the mindless mass we can become now when we refuse to better ourselves and adopt the questionable mantle of conformity.
And face it, who doesn't love to see a
viscera-chomping zombie meet its gruesome end in a squib-fest of
blood? After all, the zombie is the horror films’ greatest
target, and zombie extinction it’s finest hour of gratuitous
gore.
Zombie movies basically begin with the wonderful 1932 film White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi, and found it’s next serious incarnation in the Val Lewton-produced I Walked With A Zombie (1943, directed by Jacques Tourneur). But those first movie zombies were fairly benign, more or less content just to skulk and look scary. You’d never see an early zombie having brunch on someone’s intestines back then, nor was the zombie’s role as a cannibal really even an issue until the advent of the modern zombie.
The first modern zombies surfaced in George Romero’s classic 1968 shocker Night Of The Living Dead, the Citizen Kane of zombie films, a brilliant view of society as a slow moving mass of flesh-eating dead. With Dawn Of The Dead in 1979, Romero introduced the urban shopping mall zombies as a metaphor for creeping consumerism, and the film’s ultra-violence paved the way for Lucio Fulci and his feral island zombies (Zombie).
Dawn
was, and I’m sure this may fall under the category of shared
experience, 
my favorite zombie movie,
even more than Night.
Its portrayal of zombies as a cross section of humanity plagued
by a desire to consume and eat seemed to me a perfect metaphor
for the times, and now seems even more timely. The notion of
"zombieism" (is there such a word?) as a disease also
struck a chord with me, as if conformity itself was something to
avoid, something that spawned in our nation’s malls.
The impact of Zombie however, for me, was more aesthetic. Fulci’s zombies were more like animals, and in many respects, scarier. There is something unsettling about them, as if they could sprout up from the ground anywhere, like satanic crabgrass.
If you’re a zombie fan at all ,
you’ve doubtless kept a mental body count during films like Dawn
Of The Dead and Zombie,
the most notorious zombie films, and perhaps the best two zombie
films ( this is of course open wide to discussion ) . But while
Fulci’s film is often seen by its detractors as recycled
Romero, its adherent s praise as being a peerless gore fest on
its own merits. In the end it scarcely matters, but both films do
have a pure horror film aesthetic that manifests itself by the
presence of the walking dead, a kind of zombie cool that is
ultimately an ineffable commodity that most genre films only
aspire to.
So, as a kind of concession to zombie mania, and as an attempt to get HORROR-WOOD readers fired up about an Romero /Fulci "zombie-off," here’s a Redux of the zombie comparison.
ROMERO: Dawn
OF The Dead was Romero’s sequel to Night
Of, taking up on a more apocalyptic zombie
attack than previous, as a small band of survivors defend a
deserted mall. Romero’s zombies are the more human. In fact,
what makes Romero’s films go great is that the zombies are
often recognizable types, i.e., the nurse and Hari Krishna
zombies in Dawn, or even
the generic mall zombie. The Romero zombie 
seems
to be a sad , unwilling zombie trying to find out what is going
on around him , which makes his demise a not all together a good
thing. It is with mixed feelings we watch the zombies that look
like our brothers or cousins heads burst open like watermelons.
Romero’s zombies are often really only blue-faced lost souls
, but they also serve as a sociological metaphor for the teeming
and mindless consumer society we live in, and in Romero’s
case, the zombies are consumers in a quite literal sense, but
Romero’s zombies aren’t particularly feral; the seem
more like hungry dogs more than creatures invested with any
conscious malice. Romero’s zombies exist solely to eat.
FULCI: Zombie
tells the story of a zombie plague on an island, (and features, 
among other things, an
underwater zombie!.) Fulci s zombies are the real monsters. They
spring up from their conquistador graves, faces full of earth
worms, like malevolent weeds. These are the white-faced zombies
of hell, rather than the suburban zombies of Pittsburgh. And
while I don’t think that Lucio Fulci or screen writer Elisa
Briganti wanted their zombies to be a metaphor for the inherent
evils of Spanish Imperialism, Fulci’s zombies don't need
such political pretexts to justify them . Like the shark in the
film’s most jaw-dropping sequence, Fulci’s island
zombies move forward in a slower hulk than their mall
counterparts with only the intent to eat. And while the hospital
zombies do indeed look like Romero’s in their early state of
zombie-hood, the Fulci zombie for the most part looks evil . And
scary.
What conclusions are to be drawn here? Well, none really, but it gives you the excuse to run both films again, and both finally exist in full versions. The Anchor Bay release of Zombie is finally here (and, thankfully, letterboxed too!) at last. So get to your local mall, find the vids, get a pizza and rip into it like it was a biker’s arm on a blood pressure machine, and fire these films up and see if you don’t have a greater zombie appreciation.
Article (c) Nick Burton
"Ghoul" idea, Nick! Let's all warm up the VCRs and pop in those two nice 'n' gooey zombie flicks and have a zombie block party. Of course, some of your guests may ask that their meat not be cooked...In the meantime, click here to download a nifty little "zombie" program just for fun (advertising alert!).
