Zombies: The Recent Dead (2 page)

We still have fiction and based on the “traditional zombie”—some fine examples are contained in this volume. But the currently prevalent “Romero” archetype assumed the name “zombie,” become disassociated from Voudou, and has taken on an undeath of its own.

The “new zombies” have little in common with the controlled, non- cannibalistic “old zombies.” Traditional zombies were enslaved victims; contemporary zombies are uncontrollable flesh-eating monsters.

Not that the stories about either variety are
really
about zombies . . .

Paula Guran

June 2010

When the film opened, it was met by outraged attacks against its motives, its competence of execution, and the unabashed saturation of gore. It was dismissed by critics, flagellated by concerned commentators who viewed it as a prime example of the pornography of violence, and cited as a contributing factor to everything from crime in the streets to the corruption of the morals of American youth.

—George A. Romero, from the Introduction to

Night of the Living Dead
by John Russo (1974)

Once upon a time, an independent Pittsburgh filmmaker and commercial cinematographer named George A. Romero conceived of a low-budget movie about corpses that reanimate and attempt to eat everyone still alive. Supposedly activated by a space virus (possibly the product of governmental experimentation gone horribly wrong), these walking dead laid siege to the living, killing and infecting them with the virus so they, in turn, became new walking, flesh-hungry zombies.

Romero originally wrote out his concept as a prose piece titled “Anubis” (after the Egyptian god of the dead) and presented it to his partners in his company, Image Ten. The topic of an independently financed movie had been tabled and hashed around by others in the company, becoming a sort of community casserole of gags, ideas, and set-pieces which one of the partners, John Russo, eventually completed as a feature screenplay.

Miles of copy have been written about the Romero “zombie trilogy” in the years since 1968, when
Night of the Living Dead
—originally titled
Night of the Flesh Eaters
—first became notorious for depicting naked corpses on the hoof, greedily devouring, on camera, “stunt guts” (animal entrails standing in for human tripe). This poverty-budgeted black-and-white quickie offended nearly everybody and established what was then an important new foothold for graphic special effects in film: no movie since
Psycho
and
Peeping Tom
had demonstrated such an ability to grab its audience by the genitals and honk. It also kicked off Romero’s career as a “real” moviemaker and, in due course, between other projects, he presented the world with the second and third acts of his zombie saga,
Dawn of the Dead
(1979) and
Day of the Dead
(1985).
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Where
Night
laid down the rules of game play,
Dawn
eagerly exploited them to become
the
exploding head movie of the seventies. By deftly setting its action in an iconographic (and characteristically characterless) suburban shopping mall, its theme of identity loss through the consumer ethic resonated heavily with another basic American fear: victimization by the masses, the Wad. Thus,
Dawn
became not only an ass-kicking zombie movie splashed out in lurid anatomical primary colors, but also an incisive observation on the burial of the individual by the herd.

“When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth,” intones Ken Foree in
Dawn
. The grand joke of the film is that most of the zombies he must battle were “dead” even before they died—they were dead inside, finding solace only as a consumer mob. He points out why the zombies are magnetized tropistically back to the mall: “This place was important in their lives.” It is a conclusion not only simple but elemental: Now they only exist to consume, the shifted priority being now they only exist to consume you. Instead of being swallowed up by a mercantile culture, they now do the swallowing. Being dead gives them a more unified purpose; they exist to do what viruses do—perpetuate themselves (even as that pointedly nonspecific virus from Out There that started it all did).

Dawn
also depicted its zombies as a nascent new class, below peons, below derelicts (who were at least nominally human), below even the brain-dead (who at least didn’t try to gobble you up). Yet it is clear that by the timeframe of the second movie, the walking dead are slowly learning basic tool use and retaining some functional memory.

Then came “Anubis,” Phase Three.

Romero conceived a spectacular conclusion for his zombie trilogy, set in a terminal environment in which the living dead have actually become part of a New World Order. In
Night
, the phenomenon was freshly rooted; by
Dawn
, this dark new “race” was clearly giving humankind stiff competition, so to speak. By the final third of this triathlon, the seesaw has definitely tipped in favor of the virus and its constituents. As Paul R. Gagne summed it up in
The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh
:

In the third and final stage of “Anubis,” Romero’s original story on which the trilogy was based, an army of the living dead chases a solitary human figure over a hill . . . [this] treatment took the zombie “revolution” to the point where the living dead have basically replaced humanity and have gained enough of a rudimentary intelligence to be able to perform a few basic tasks. At the same time, an elite, dictatorial politburo of humans has found that the zombies can be
trained
, and are exploiting them as slaves. (Prior to the film being made, it was often facetiously referred to as
Zombies in the White House
.)
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The hitch, of course, is that they have to be
fed
in order to be controlled (something alluded to in
Dawn
), and we all know what zombies like to eat.

Prior to filming,
Day of the Dead
hit a speed bump of surpassing mundanity—United Film Distributors, Romero’s backers, refused to pony up the $6.5 million required for this biggest of the filmed trio unless an “R” rating could be guaranteed. Since
Dawn
had been a success arguably because of its lack of a rating rather than in spite of one,
Day
had to hew to a similar graphic, gory mark
just for starters.

“For me, the Grand Guignol is part of these films, part of their character,” Romero remarked to
Fangoria
Magazine
in 1985. Accordingly,
Day of the Dead
was scaled down to accommodate a $3.5 million budget, and as a result was not quite the vast final curtain Romero had hoped for. On its own terms, however, it is quite stark, bleak, and depressing in its chronicle of a tiny band of surviving humans fighting legions of zombies (as well as each other) within the confines of an underground missile facility. The film successfully conveys the impression that these characters are perhaps the only “real” humans left
in the whole world
 . . . and for that reason alone it remains essential viewing for the zombie enthusiast.

Originally, Romero’s zombies were the product of white pancake and dark eye shadow, deriving from such cinematic precedents as the ghosts in the black-and-white cult classic
Carnival of Souls
(1962) and the titular walking corpses in Hammer Films’
Plague of the Zombies
(1966), in which the dead are resurrected as slave workers for a tin mine via more time-honored Voudou methods, hence “zombis.” Once the zombie archetype had been revitalized by
Night of the Living Dead
, it crashed face-first into the prosthetic innovations of
Dawn of the Dead
 . . . and a new zombie mythology had grabbed hold of popular consciousness. Horror writers new and old were taken with this retrofit of the traditional—the first “new” monster since that nice Norman Bates proved that even the boy-next-door could kill you without preamble. Romero’s zombies are both a logical extension of Norman and a trump on him, upping his ante.

They are also one of the first monster archetypes to spring from cinematic rather than literary roots, along with the giant Japanese city-stompers and the
Creature from the Black Lagoon
. Living dinosaurs had been a staple of literary horror since Arthur Conan Doyle’s
The Lost World
(and later became just as fundamental to the science fiction juveniles of the 1950s);
King Kong
was just another dinosaur in spirit, and anyway, Bela Lugosi in
White Zombie
had beat Kong into the movie houses by one year.

As Hugh Lamb pointed out:

The zombie . . . embodies aspects of most of the stock horror types—the use of magic and witchcraft, the dead revived (
Dracula
), the lurching monster (
Frankenstein
), and mastery over the soul that goes even beyond death. Yet for all this, the zombie has no literary roots whatsoever . . . it lacks any basic work of fiction to draw from. Voodoo zombie tales are rare. One fairly successful story is “Ballet Negre” (1965) by Charles Birkin, in which a troupe of Haitian dancers turn out to be zombies.

Romero’s science-fictional rationale for the revivification of corpses—never meant to bear intensive scrutiny, but merely provided as a neat one-liner to kick off the entire phenomenon—has its antecedent in a zombie tale written by Richard Matheson in 1955, “Dance of the Dead,” in which a biowar germ takes the blame for making stiffs jump up and jitterbug. One of the most unusual zombies in all of literature is found in Gordon Honeycombe’s 1969 novel
Neither the Sea Nor the Sand
, in which love is the motivational power that keeps the dead moving (the film version followed in 1972). To travel even further back along the timeline, there’s Tiffany Thayer’s
Dr. Arnoldi
, a 1934 novel in which death just plain stops; nobody dies anymore for any reason, and the world begins to choke on the living. It includes one scene where a condemned man is electrocuted numerous times before his executioners give up and shove him into a giant meat grinder . . . and when the burger plops out, it’s still squirming around!
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But it was the “Romero zombies”—scoffed at by purists as more properly ghouls or ghosts or cannibals or some weird potpourri of all three—that captivated idle young minds aplenty, and the influence on writers of Romero’s zombie triptych was seen in its most concentrated form in the late 1980s to early 90s. In the U.S., Bantam Books issued
Book of the Dead
, an anthology of original zombie stories edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector in 1989. Its sequel,
Still Dead
, was published in 1991.
The Mammoth Book of Zombies
, edited by Stephen Jones, followed in 1993. Byron Preiss and John Betancourt’s
The Ultimate Zombie
(Byron Priess Visual Publications) was also published that year. Clearly, everyone from Stephen King to Clive Barker to Anne Rice had something to say about the walking dead, and when they said it, they influenced other writers. This zombie “virus,” it was clear, could infect in more ways than one.

“Zombie fiction” had become a subgenre.

So, how does one introduce the topic of social-archetype walking cadavers in the midst of the biggest carnevale ever? Ira Beaudine’s best buddy summed it up one way in
Midnight Graffiti #2
(Fall 1988):

According to Romero, twilight brought the virus Earthward, and afore decent folks coulds witch from wrestlin to news, dead people wa sup and walkin almost as good as their survivin relatives. Problem was, what they call “peaceful co-existance” was out from the git. Y’see, we liked shootin ’em almost as much as they liked eatin us. Ira Beaudine said it best: “Why, hell, what you got here is your ee-volution inaction. These dead peckerwoods is like new, improved human beans. They’re sposta replace us, see? ’Cos this ole world just ain’t fit for old puds like you ’n me no more.”

Now, personally, I think the only way Ira would ever git stiff was by liquorin up. Bu the fact was, dead folks was marchin and eatin and marchin some more, and pretty soon they began to outnumber the rest of us. So just incase we hafta wave bye-bye altogether, somebody should set down a chronicle . . . .in case some ’o them space aliens land and want to find out what the fuck transpired here, pardon my Frog.