Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies (29 page)

Shaun of the Dead
tells the story of two underachieving best friends who are forced to become unlikely heroes when England is overrun by flesh-eating zombies. While
28 Days Later
presents the grim reality of a catastrophic zombie outbreak in gritty super-speed,
Shaun
slows the action down and proves that even though it’s the end of the world you can still have a bit of fun.

Picking up where Danny Boyle’s infected left off, Spanish director Paco Plaza gave us what at first appears to be a new and deadly form of rabies in
REC
(2007). As the terrifying story unfolds, we learn that something much more sinister is at work.

The film follows a standard living zombie model, but what makes it unique is that the creatures come into existence as a result of a misguided attempt to cure demonic possession by indentifying the offending substance in a little girl’s infected blood. A secret experiment in the penthouse of a Barcelona apartment building goes horribly wrong, unleashing a new virus on the unsuspecting residents. Those infected quickly turn into bloodthirsty maniacs filled with pure rage, while authorities outside seal the building off to prevent the mysterious sickness from spreading.

REC
got a shot-for-shot remake in the 2008 American film
Quarantine
, and both have spawned multiple sequels.

Considered one of the most profitable zombie movies ever made,
Zombieland
tells the story of four survivors of a catastrophic zombie plague making their way across the American Southwest. It’s a wild romp often called America’s answer to
Shaun of the Dead
, and its huge success at the box office has been instrumental in the rise of the modern zombie in recent years.

What’s most interesting about
Zombieland
isn’t the money it raked in but the fact that the flesh-eating creatures it presents aren’t dead. While
28 Days Later
introduced a living, fast zombie to the world several years earlier and the
Dawn of the Dead
remake allowed their undead flesh eaters to run in 2004,
Zombieland
is the first movie to ignore the distinction between living and dead zombies. It instead makes a strong argument that it doesn’t matter if the raving horde chasing you is alive or not. If they inhabit human bodies, want to eat you, and will stop at nothing to accomplish that goal, they are zombies.

An “open” in film-speak is the beginning sequence of a film. Zombie opens reveal that as misunderstood as the modern zombie is in certain living circles, the people who know the absolute least about the undead are the characters in zombie movies themselves. Most of the time, that fact spells disaster for them.

Characters in zombie movies simply don’t watch zombie movies. In fact, if you were to ask almost any character at
the start of almost any zombie movie of the last fifty years to define a zombie, he or she would have no idea what you were talking about.
A zom-what? Never heard of that.
To be fair, this isn’t a convention of zombie movies alone. Characters across all film genres suffer from a complete lack of cinematic reference, as if they’d never seen a single movie in their entire lives.

This may not seem so strange at first, but imagine if your average teen in a contemporary comedy didn’t know what Twitter was or had never even heard of the Internet. Imagine an action hero who couldn’t warn his girlfriend about the bomb in her trunk because he had no idea what a cell phone was, much less how to use one. Audiences would throw up their hands in disgust.

Plausibility is a key element to the success of any movie. Without it, viewers are jarred from the action and emotion on-screen, and the picture dies a speedy death. That’s why filmmakers go to such great lengths to reflect contemporary culture accurately in their work. They make sure the right cars are used, the right slang, the right clothing. Budget allowing, they employ an entire army of professionals devoted to props, sets, and costumes, all with the sole purpose of making the movie look and feel as realistic as possible. But with rare exception, this same standard doesn’t hold true when it comes to film references, especially in horror films. And it certainly doesn’t hold true in zombie movies.

Zombie movies typically open with the world in an ignorantly blissful state, but soon enough, the dead rise and start eating the living. An obligatory period of confusion and panic sets in, as the public struggles to overcome its utter naïveté about the threat it’s facing. The characters have no idea what is
coming at them, so they are forced gradually to figure out the rules these new creatures follow.
They don’t stay down when you shoot them! Aim for the head! Why is Mom eating the cat?

Each new movie starts from zero, with no collective knowledge, and then quickly works its way up the information ladder until any remaining survivors are well aware of what it takes to stay alive and are determined to make that happen.

The hit British zombie comedy
Shaun of the Dead
(2004) is the perfect example of this ignorance to zombies. Best friends and epic slackers Ed and Shaun stumble home from a drunken night at the pub to continue the party in their tiny living room. In the wee hours, their responsible roommate, Pete, who went to bed hours earlier, storms in to complain about the loud music and singing. He’s got a job. He’s got a life. He’s not a loser, and he wants to get some sleep!

In the ensuing argument, it’s revealed that Pete has a bandage over his right hand. It’s a bite. Pete brushes it off as nothing. The discussion moves on, and that’s the last we hear of it. Of course, as viewers with at least a smidgen of cultural knowledge about the modern zombie, we know that Pete’s bite means he’s probably infected, destined to die and be reanimated as a flesh-hungry monster bent on eating Ed and Shaun for breakfast. Sure enough, the next morning, zombie hilarity ensues.

The insertion of this plot device—characters who know nothing of zombies at all living in a film world that has never heard of them—in a savvy comedy like
Shaun of the Dead
shows that it’s so commonly used in zombie movies and so absurd that it’s a ready-made gag. Another zombie romp,
Zombieland
(2009), uses the same open to the zombie world, but instead of a roommate who is bitten by a crackhead, it’s a beautiful neighbor girl who is bitten by a homeless man.

An alternate approach to the classic zombie open is to skip over the obligatory initial confusion by having your hero sleep through the mayhem and wake up only after the world has settled into its new undead state. Other characters can then quickly fill him in on the situation and rules for survival, speeding up the airtime it takes everyone to figure out what these creatures are. I call this the Van Winkle Technique, and it has been used in popular modern zombie franchises such as
28 Days Later
and
The Walking Dead.

In addition to the many actors who got their breaks in the broader horror genre, several big-name directors have launched careers with zombie movies and then gone on to great critical acclaim with more mainstream projects. The success of these early films allowed their careers to move forward and put them in a position to become household names.

Danny Boyle won an Oscar for Best Director for his work on
Slumdog Millionaire
six years after solidifying his spot on the entertainment map with 2002’s
28 Days Later
. In 2003, Peter Jackson got his directing Oscar for
The Lord of the Rings:
The Return of the King
, but zombie fans knew him first for his 1992 romp,
Dead Alive
, about a weak-willed son who tries desperately to keep things together after his mother is turned into a raving undead beast. Jackson’s second film, 1994’s
Heavenly Creatures
, starred Kate Winslet in her first film role and garnered Jackson an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay.

Zombie movies are perfect launchpads because they’re so inexpensive to produce. I always say that anybody with a bucket of fake blood and five friends willing to limp around on camera can make a zombie movie. The British zombie film
Colin
, widely reported to have been made for less than $100, was the surprise hit of the 2009 Cannes Film Festival’s film market. It led to writer-director Marc Price landing several other big-budget deals.
Colin
tells a simple zombie story from the title character’s point of view as he stumbles home in the midst of a catastrophic outbreak, only to change into a flesh eater himself.

A couple of years earlier, another feature-length zombie film,
Pathogen
, gained national attention not so much for its shoestring budget but because it was made by Emily Hagins, a twelve-year-old girl in Austin, Texas. In
Pathogen
, a group of middle school students must save their town from a mysterious water-borne infection that causes the dead to rise. The film was the subject of a 2009 documentary,
Zombie Girl
.

Some critics carp that the low-budget, anybody-can-make-one approach to zombie movies encourages a lot of schlock to hit the screen, making it even more difficult for the genre to get the respect it deserves. A fair point, but I would argue that the lowered bar also allows talented independent
filmmakers to jump into the game without dealing with the prohibitive budgets, outsized egos, and mercurial politics of established studios. Having worked in and around Hollywood for a number of years, I can tell you that this is one hell of a plus.

Romero’s
Dawn of the Dead
created several iconic zombies, but leading the pack is this bald flesh eater in orange robes. The Hare Krishna zombie stalks an indoor shopping mall looking for victims to convert to his new undead religion, much like he did when he was still alive.

Though the Hare Krishna zombie doesn’t get a successful kill onscreen, he continues to be popular with merchandisers who’ve adapted him to everything from action figures to lunch boxes.

ILLUSTRATION BY TERRY CALLEN