As Brad Pitt’s $200 million (Dh734 million) blockbuster World War Z lurches into cinemas in the UAE on Thursday, Anne Billson traces the rise of zombies, from the margins to the multiplex
Welcome to the zombie apocalypse, starring Brad Pitt. “We’ve lost the East Coast. Moscow’s still dark. Life as we know it will come to an end in 90 days.” After rewrites and reshoots and overruns and Vanity Fair exposes, Marc Forster’s World War Z, an adaptation of Max Brooks’s bestselling 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, is set to invade cinemas across the globe. With an estimated $200 million budget, it’s the most expensive zombie movie ever made.
Zombies were once confined to geek pursuits: horror videos, computer games and comic books. But not any more. They had already stormed the mainstream when, in 2009, Time magazine dubbed them the “Official Monster of the Recession” and knockabout romps like Zombieland played to audiences who would never have dreamt of going to see a horror film back in 1983, when zombies figured prominently on the DPP’s list of “video nasties” prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. Yet now they’re on prime-time television.
The American drama The Walking Dead returns to Channel 5 for a fourth series later this year. BBC Three’s metaphor-heavy In the Flesh is coming back for a second series, and Les Revenants, a creepy French spin-off from a 2004 film of the same name, has just begun on Channel 4 as The Returned. Wikipedia lists 54 zombie films released in 2012; among them Warm Bodies (a rom-com in which the male love interest is a zombie), Abraham Lincoln vs Zombies (not to be confused with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter), and the endearingly stupid Rise of the Zombies. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, adapted from Seth Grahame-Smith’s bestselling mash-up, is currently in pre-production.
But zombies are not confined to our screens. Zombie walks, in which people dress as zombies and stagger around to raise money for charity, are now part of the fundraising landscape. Last month, The Economist ran an article titled Zombies at the Gates in which it identified one of the problems of the downturn as “zombie firms”. The latest issue of Philosophy Now addresses such topics as “Is it wrong to kill a zombie merely because it will otherwise eat your flesh?” and “Do zombies dream of a meaning of life?”
In George A Romero’s 1978 horror classic Dawn of the Dead, a human survivor looks at zombies lurching around an out-of-town shopping mall, and asks, “What are they doing? Why do they come here?” to which a fellow survivor replies, “It’s a kind of instinct, memory. What they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” But nowadays, it seems, the zombies are more interested in buying sneakers and mobile phones than in eating people’s brains; Sears, Toshiba, Honda, FedEx, Converse, Toyota, Eastpak, Axe, Vodacom, giffgaff and the American Centre for Disease Control have all used zombies in their publicity campaigns.
It’s as though the satirical subtext of Romero’s film has taken over. The word “zombie” is thought to have its roots in nzambi, a Congolese word for the almighty, and zombies have their origins in the West-African religion of vodun or vodou, which migrated with enslaved Africans to the Caribbean, where the term was used to describe someone put into a trance-like state.
The first full-length zombie film was Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932), in which Bela Lugosi plays a Haitian voodoo master who staffs his sugar cane mill with zombies, and uses a potion to force a young American bride to do his bidding. A decade later, for Val Lewton’s eerie 1943 production of I Walked with a Zombie, directed by Jacques Tourneur, screenwriters Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray updated the plot of Jane Eyre and transposed it to the West Indies, thus demonstrating that mash-ups of 19th-century English literature and zombies didn’t begin with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
Come the Sixties, zombies were still being exploited as cheap labour, this time in Cornish tin-mines, in Hammer’s Plague of the Zombies (1966), celebrated for its creepy dream sequence of the living dead rising out of their crumbling graves. But it was Romero’s Night of the Living Dead that rewrote the rules and laid the foundations for all the zombie films that have been made since.
Cobbled together for an estimated $114,000 (you could make 1,754 Night of the Living Deads on a World War Z budget) Romero’s black-and-white shocker features a small bunch of people besieged in an isolated farmhouse by the living dead, who attack and eat anyone they can get their hands on. They move slowly, but they are legion; they keep on coming, an implacable force of nature. The z-word is never used, and beyond passing mention of a crashed satellite, no explanation is given for the reanimated corpses. But we learn how they can be destroyed. “If you have a gun, shoot ‘em in the head,” says a sheriff leading a posse of zombie-killers in a search-and-destroy mission that reminded some viewers of the American military presence in Vietnam. “That’s a sure way to kill ‘em. If you don’t, get yourself a club or a torch. Beat ‘em or burn ‘em. They go up pretty easy.”
While the success of Easy Rider was turning Hollywood’s traditional studio system on its head, Romero’s film delivered the coup de grace to the sort of traditional horror movies set comfortably in the past, which invariably ended with evil destroyed and the status quo restored. On its initial release in 1968, Night of the Living Dead passed virtually unnoticed by the mainstream media, but its reputation gradually spread by word of mouth, the film’s take-no-prisoners approach striking a chord with audiences already unsettled by social revolt and political upheaval. It would go on to inspire a generation of horror film-makers.
But it wasn’t until 1978, when Romero elaborated on his themes in Dawn of the Dead, that the zombie floodgates opened. Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci led his countrymen with a clutch of zombie splatterfests, including two unofficial sequels to Dawn of the Dead. Throughout the Eighties, zombies combined with slapstick (or “splatstick”) in the gross-out horror comedy of Re-Animator, Evil Dead II and Return of the Living Dead, in which zombies demanded “Braaains!” and “More braaains!” As zombies have proliferated, so the ground-rules established in Night of the Living Dead have pretty much remained intact — with one exception.
In 2002, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later replaced Romero’s shambling hordes with zombies who sprinted like Usain Bolt — and incidentally triggered much pointless fanboy bickering about whether they should be classed as zombies at all, since technically they’re not dead but infected by a virus. While the vampire is the aristocrat of the undead, zombies are the proletariat — faceless, shambolic masses that embody so many of our modern fears. They’re metaphors for poverty, immigration or disease of the week — anything that threatens to upset our well-ordered lives. They represent any segment of society that can be depersonalised for social or political reasons.
Once upon a time they were a symbol of the dreaded underclass, though the recession is a reminder that many of us are now only a payslip away of being relegated to that same underclass. The zombies used to be “them”, but nowadays they’re as likely to be “us”.
Whether or not any of this comes across in World War Z remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure — the film will make zombie mayhem palatable for a mass audience. With a budget of $200 million, it can’t afford not to, to the despair of diehard horror fans.
Kim Newman, author of Nightmare Movies, says, “It’s especially odd that Night of the Living Dead — a transgressive, game-changing, far-from-Hollywood film that inspired a whole generation of film-makers to make challenging, socially engaged, shocking horror films — now inspires Hollywood to make the same film over and over, and then do it on TV as The Walking Dead or tart it up as genial comedy Zombieland or this big-budget footnote.
To me, it’s a shame that the film that brought bite and meaning to horror has led to work so denuded of these qualities.” More hearteningly, at the other end of the scale, you can still find the odd low-budget gem. For the price of World War Z, you could make 33,333 films like the award-winning The Battery — put together for $6,000, though so classily shot you’d never guess it. While it’s nowhere near as scary as, say, Night of the Living Dead, it’s a fantastic character study, and reminds you what many of Romero’s imitators forget — that the best zombie films are more about humans than zombies.
