Zombie CSU (56 page)

“Sadly,” Sampson adds, “Romero was deeply mired in a dismal view of the world at the time and Ben is senselessly and tragically killed at the end of the movie. He’s the strong one, the survivor who overcame predators and outlasted those too weak to follow his lead. He tried his best and deserved to live, but Romero isn’t Disney, and he made another harsh social statement by having Ben gunned down at the end. Romero never said as much, but I remember talking with Duane about this about a year or so before his death,
³
and he admitted that he sometimes viewed that ending as a metaphor for the old racist view that ‘you can’t tell them apart,’ switched from a comment about blacks or Chinese or any ethnic group to zombies. When the redneck hunters arrive in the morning they shoot everyone because in their eyes they all look like zombies.”

The ending of
Night
changed in the remake. In the Tom Savini version, not only does Barbara escape but Ben actually becomes a zombie, succumbing to wounds received in the struggle to stay alive during that hellish night. As times had changed, the theme shifted from racism to sexism, and Barbara emerged as a feminist icon.

I asked Todd to comment on the different take on Ben in the remake. “When I heard that they were doing a remake of
Night of the Living Dead
I went straight over to the production offices and cornered Tom Savini and said: ‘You have to test me for the part of Ben.’ I think he was knocked out by my passion and determination. I
wanted
that role, and I
got
that role. Once we started shooting, though, I didn’t want to do a retake on what Duane Jones did. That was his performance, this was mine and I wanted to give it a new sensibility. Ben was an interesting character to play. He’s a reluctant hero. He didn’t sign up for that crap. We get some hints about what happened to him before he gets to the farmhouse, we know that he feels like he failed his family during the crisis, and that’s why he’s so determined to keep everyone together and safe in the house. He didn’t or couldn’t save his immediate family so he doesn’t want to fail his new ‘family.’ And, let’s face it; somebody had to be a leader.”

“Bad actors read lines,” observes Sampson, “good actors become the character. Duane put a lot of depth and complexity into Ben. He made that character into a man, a human being. Ken Foree did the same with Peter in
Night
, Terry Alexander did with John in
Day
, and Tony Todd did in the underrated remake of
Day
. Strong black men and strong actors, each bringing qualities to the performance that rose above even the quality of the scripts. And each role, each character is a kind of statement of the times. Duane was the black man hated by the pale masses during the 1960s. In the late 1970s Ken Force plays a tough, competent SWAT officer—a sign of forward momentum showing that in just a decade blacks had gotten into the system, were part of it, were
crucial
to it, but were still black men with all of their individual and cultural integrity intact. Then we get to the dispirited 1990s and the character of John. He’s strong and smart and valuable (he can fly the helicopter and none of the military grunts know how), but he’s become disillusioned because becoming part of the system doesn’t mean that the system has evolved or become better. Sometimes the grass on the other side of the fence has just as much crab grass as what’s on your side. And yet Romero gives us more optimistic endings in both
Dawn
and
Day
, in which the races, white and black—seen in the microcosm of Peter and Francine in
Dawn
and John and Sarah
⁴
in
Day
escape together. Male and female, black and white, unified through shared adversity and hopefully with the appropriate cultural lessons learned. The actors all made these characters, these relationships, and these outcomes believable.”

So what makes zombies so fascinating, and why do so many screenwriters and authors turn (and return) to this genre? I posed that question to a number of top writers in the field and got some illuminating responses:

As bestselling author Yvonne Navarro
⁵
sees it, “It’s because to tell a truly frightening story, you need a truly frightening opponent, and zombies really fit that bill. Yeah, you can see them, so it’s not like they’re the big unknown. But it’s that
known
that’s the core of why zombies cause so much terror. First, in most of the stories, they’re everywhere and they multiply faster than you can fight them. They’ll pop out of bushes, closets, sewers, you name it, and there’s no place to hide, day or night. Secondly, they are utterly relentless. Unless you can get a bullet or a machete to that sweet spot at the brain stem, they’ll just keep coming. Finally, the Big Question as to why they make such a popular topic for horror stories: Who wants to be eaten alive?”

Bram Stoker Award-winner Weston Ochse says, “Nothing is more scary than encountering something that can’t be reasoned with. Most of us believe we can talk ourselves our of any situation. Still others believe that they can fight their way out of any situation. Zombies represent something that can’t be talked to and can’t be fought. Cut off an arm? No biggie. I know the movies make it look easy, but the average Jack and Jill wouldn’t know what to do regardless of the all cinematic and literary primers we’ve provided.”

“The visual horror world needed a new archetype,” says Rocky Wood, author of
Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished
.
⁶
“The others having been worn close to the living (or dead) bone. While I like the socio-political angle behind the original upsurge my gut feeling is mindless cannibals with no socially redeeming features whatsoever were always likely to appeal to those who largely consume their horror in the movie theatre or through their video/DVD players.”

“Romero-style zombies are a wonderful combination of fears: death, loved ones turning on us, disfigurement and disease, cannibalism, distorted artificial images of the human form (such as dolls and mannequins), and the notion that there is no afterlife (at least, not a heavenly paradise). As horror archetypes, they provide so much rich material for writers and film-makers,” muses Tim Waggoner, author of
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Protégé
(Black Flame, 2005) and the Blade of the Flame series (Wizards of the Coast). “Zombie storytelling is marvelous because it allows for so much variety. There are so many good ones out there! So many favorite zombies: Bub from the original
Day of the Dead
, the Zombie Master and all his undead minions from Piers Anthony’s
Xanth
books, all the zombies in
Shaun of the Dead
, the bizarre demon-possessed undead in the
Evil Dead
films, Big Daddy from Romero’s
Land of the Dead
, the alien-slug infested zombies in
Night of the Creeps
, Simon Garth from Marvel Comics’
Tales of the Zombie
, the dead characters from
Corpse Bride
, the creepy tall zombie from Val Lewton’s
I Walked with a Zombie
, Bud the Chud from
CHUD 2
, the zombies in Rich Hautala’s novel
Moonwalker
, Brian Keene’s undead in
The Rising
and
City of the Dead
…I could go on and on.”

“The zombie model is incredibly flexible, which is great for writers,” explains journalist Sam Anderson.
⁷
“Zombies don’t have to adapt because they’re already dead, so you can throw them in any situation and let the high jinks ensue. What, you need alien zombies? Alien zombies it is. How about zombie guppies? Those zombie guppies wouldn’t even be relegated to staying in the water. Zombies offer possibilities that few other foils can. When you get the best writers working the most fertile soil—which this genre certainly has—you’re going to get some pretty special outcomes.”