Part the Twenty-Third: Zombies Part 1 OR A Guest Writer Helps Me Out
[Today's installment is a guest installment - and thank god! These mid-term essays are getting me way behind on my posting. Look for me to play catch-up this weekend!]
So, zombies. Zombies have pervaded every aspect of our current pop culture, from video games, to movies, to comics, to TV shows, to books, and even dance routines on So You Think You Can Dance. If you’re into zombies, you can see dozens of such movies at the video store or while browsing Netflix. The recent offerings of “The Crazies” or “Zombieland” might fill your needs for zombie cinema. You might listen to Alan Alda read “World War Z” while driving in your car, or check the book out from the library.
As Americans understand them, zombies have come to mean creatures who are the animated bodies of the dead. Unlike vampires or ghouls, however, zombies are fairly mindless, reduced to nothing more than the Id. They are purely instinctual creatures who seek to eat. More specifically, these beings seek to eat human flesh. Burgers and fries won’t cut it.
Like most movie monstrosities, the zombies of today are only distant relatives of their mythological ancestors. Historically, zombies come from the voodoo tradition and refers to a living individual whose soul has been captured by a bokur – sort of voodoo version of a warlock. The result of this terrible magic leaves the victim living, but without free will or personality. It’s easy to see why the idea of a zombie so easily captures our imagination. The voodoo zombie is a person whose very identity, mind, and individuality has been stolen – the one thing we prize so highly in this modern age.
The zombies that we all know and love, however, inherited their ghoulish attributes from the movies. The 1932 movie “White Zombie”, starring Bela Legosi, was the first film to feature zombies as slow, brainless, unrelenting antagonists. Zombies then started to appear more and more in popular culture, appearing other films and horror comics. However, it was Caesar Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” which caused zombies to become truly ensconced as one of America’s favorite movie monsters.
The 1968 horror film broke the mold for horror films in many ways. For one, the movie was filmed in black and white, harkening back to the old creep shows of the 40′s and 50′s. But instead of taking a camp route, the film challenged many of the horror movie tropes of its day, and continues to challenge modern horror conventions. For example, the film’s main character switches in the first quarter of the narrative. It features a strong, intelligent black male as the replacement protagonist. And unlike the horror films of the 50′s, the movie featured scenes of gore, showing zombies gnawing cannibalistically on human flesh. It is also important to note that this is the first time we see the famous zombie apocalypse – a widespread epidemic of the walking dead. Without this film, there might never have been a “Resident Evil” or “Walking Dead” series.
Zombie films enjoyed a redux in the 80′s with the campy “Return of the Dead”. Like many 80′s movies, this film was more of a send up of a famous Hollywood monster, but it kicked off many more zombie parodies, each one seeming to ask, “What’s so scary about a monster than can only shuffle very slowly? We would not see the answer to that question until 2002. The year I declare as being…the Year of the Zombie.
Part 2 to come….
