Blog of the Dead

I've been alerted by a Loyal Reader to a similar zombie-themed piece at overthinkingit.com that performs the standard task of contrasting and weighing the merits of zombies in the Romero and Russo traditions. Writer correctly emphasizes that while John Russo owns the rights to the Living Dead series and wrote the book upon which it is nominally based, it was Dan O'Bannon who wrote the screenplay for and directed the uproarious The Return of the Living Dead (1985) and who deserves primary credit for inventing the agile braineater that vies with Romero's shambling flesheater.

However, in the spirit of the writer's own exercise I need clarify that Russo/O'Bannon zombiism is the result not of a biological contagion but a chemical contaminant; of contact with 2-4-5 Trioxin gas, developed by military contract ostensibly for marijuana defoliation. The distinction implies that these zombies might not even constitute a true epidemic in that the dead only rise in regions exposed to Trioxin, geographically limiting the outbreak...nevertheless it could be that zombies leaving the contaminated region might still spread the condition by contact, a possibility the series does not explore. But such analysis is pointless because O'Bannon is a kimono-wearing froot loop who cares naught for the rules and his movie is mostly a spoof of itself.

The most valuable bit of insight put forth at Overthinking It is the theory that, because The Return of the Living Dead is a little-seen cult film and few popular films actually depict zombies calling for brains, the concept of zombies as vocal braineaters was in fact popularized by the "Dial Z for Zombie" segment of the third annual Treehouse of Horror episode in 1992. I am prepared to officially believe this.

The African Queen

Leeches! If there's anything in the world I hate, it's leeches.

Bogart climbs back into the boat squealing like a girl and Katharine Hepburn frantically pulls the leeches off him. Ah, the venerable leech scene. The only jungle movie tradition more sacred is the quicksand scene.

The best line is delivered by the Russian ambassador from Dr. Strangelove, who turns up here as the German ship captain. Bogie and Hepburn are sentenced to hang, and Bogie's last request is that they be married:

By the authority vested in me by Kaiser William II, I pronounce you man and wife. Proceed with the execution.

I had to track this old girl down on VHS. It's a John Huston classic, for which Bogie was awarded his only Oscar, and it has yet to receive an authorized region 1 DVD release. The Onion AV Club helpfully provides a list of 22 other great movies that are shamefully unavailable on DVD.

The jungle adventure romance was revived briefly in the mid-80s by the likes of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Romancing the Stone and Crocodile Dundee. Obviously the less romance and the more chilled monkey brains, the better.

Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle

Dorothy Parker was challenged by one of her peers at the Algonquin Round Table (aka the Vicious Circle) to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence. She replied:

You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

The Round Table is the indirect subject of this spring's HBC film series, and the wonderfully depressed Mrs Parker was the magnetic focus of its activity. Her story as told with befitting melodrama by this 1994 biopic is that of a married woman strung between two married men: The dashing Charles MacArthur and her true love, Robert Benchley. The dynamics of this triangle (the three spouses are kept conveniently elsewhere) are tuned to perfect Dorothy's agony, tightening and stressing the coil that seems to power her creative ability. She and Benchley carry out a chaste and unspoken love affair, confronted in this one-time private exchange:

I have a question to ask. A serious one.
Anything.
Why do you think that we...
Yes?
...you and I...
That would be we.
...have never misbehaved? I'm referring to what we don't do in spite of everything.
What we don't do...Mrs Parker, really.
Tell me. Now.
Well, I suppose we respect each other too much.
You don't respect anyone.
Oh, Mrs Parker, suppose it didn't work.
Suppose it did.

The endless boozy gatherings of the Algonquinites fostered countless anecdotes and works of sparkling wit, but the film's dramatic inspiration is to reveal the suffering within that circle of hell. Here is a tribe of savage intellectuals who need desperately to be together in order to be judgmentally aloof.

Coraline

Henry Selick may be the best stop motion animator in the movies, but that's a bit like being the best cavalryman in the Army. General Bruckheimer has no bloody use for you.

Nevertheless, in the twenty years since James Cameron's Russian water tentacle made stop motion technically obsolete I've learned that how your movies are made matters. It is more fun to watch stuntmen fall off Indy's truck than to see digital orcs fall off the walls of Helm's Deep. The exotic location shoots in The Fall are more thrilling than all the digital vistas in Gladiator. The entire point of Death Proof is that you are watching a real stuntwoman on the hood of a real car driving real fast. That's why it is the best car chase sequence since Terminator 2. And when it comes to animation, stop motion is inherently more delightful than cel, which is inherently more delightful than computer.

I am not a stubborn antiquarian. For all the impossible things made possible CGI should be embraced. But it is a fact that you are more excited when you know what you are watching really happened in front of a camera; a badly-recorded liquor store robbery on COPS is more dramatic than Bad Boys II. Likewise it is more exciting to see puppets and miniatures and physical models brought to life than computer graphics. Jabba the Puppet on his dais is infinitely better than Jabba the Digital scooching around Docking Bay 94. The Alien Queen is the best visual effects monster ever; Shelob is not half as scary. And it is the level of tactile realness that distinguishes the pleasures of stop motion, cel and computer animation. After seeing Duck Amuck we could always sense the artist's pen breathlessly dashing over the cels. Even better is in stop motion to sense the hands of the creator conducting between the frames, a flurry of fingerprints willing Jack Skellington to dance.

Coraline has its share of delights — the Busby Berkeley mouse circus is classic in every way, and French & Saunders are kinky fun — but Selick is not as good a director as his medium deserves. The movie is towed along as if by Eeyore, and the story is two characters and three plot developments short of a meal. It isn't fair to ask Coraline to be the transcendent film that ushers in a stop motion renaissance, but I can't help wanting it to be. The urgency is this: In September a Tim Burton-produced CGI film titled "9" will be released, created with software that claims to mimic the stilted movements of traditional stop motion. This technique will probaby look good and may very well catch on, but the fingerprints won't be there.

Late Night with Conan O'Brien

Conan's last show was tonight. Andy came back. The White Stripes played We're Going To Be Friends, tearfully. Conan thanked individuals for twenty minutes, including words of reverence for David Letterman. I'm kind of heartbroken.

The Front Page

The crooked mayor and sheriff are in the press room. A reporter walks past and ignoring them picks up the phone to his editor.

Kruger calling. There's a red hot statement from the governor. [Ed. Note: This is a lie.] The governor says the mayor and the sheriff have shown themselves to be a couple of eight-year-olds playing with fire. Quote him as follows: It's a good thing for the city that next Tuesday's election day, as the citizens will be saved the expense of impeaching the mayor and the sheriff. That's all.

The reporter then brushes past on his way out, "Hi, Your Honor," and flips the bird right in the mayor's face, pretending to examine his fingernail. The year is 1931.

This is the earliest incidence of the bird on film known to me. And it's a particularly blatant usage. You could not have gotten away with that after the Hays Code was enforced in mid-1934; there was a specific rule disallowing the ridicule of law enforcement officials. The pre-Code early sound years in Hollywood were the Wild West.

Monkey Business

Plot of a Marx Brothers movie: The brothers turn up in polite society and fuck with everyone. The End.

Admire the purity of that. It is different from simply wanting to make you laugh...at once more primitive and more shrewd. The Marx Brothers want anarchy.

The Three Stooges go for laughs. Buster Keaton and the Keystone Cops go for laughs and thrills. Chaplin goes for laughs and pathos. Each is lovable in their own way, for their buffoonery, daring, earnestness or innocence. The Marx Brothers are not lovable. They are loud, rude, mocking, aggressive, lecherous, and without any redeeming intentions except to steal your food and ruin your day. Harpo in particular is a real asshole.

A Marx Brothers comedy blitz entails a battery of sight gags, pun-infested wordplay and the inevitable perplexing harp interlude. Groucho has an inexplicable greasepaint mustache, Harpo is inexplicably mute, Chico is inexplicably Italian and Zeppo is inexplicably ordinary. It is utter chaos, neither consistently funny nor consistently nasty, building toward nothing but more chaos. All the brothers are rascals but only Harpo regularly crosses the line between being funny and being a dick. You sense a certain mean-spiritedness behind the clownish pantomime, the way children are cruel. Harpo's antics might at first seem excessive, but in fact he is the essential ingredient in the Marx cocktail of playfulness and hostility. Without him there is merely comedy, but with him the Brothers are a subversive, amoral hedonistic threat. Funny-be-damned.

Consider the fact that Rob Zombie's family of degenerate mass murderers in House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects take as aliases the various names of Groucho Marx characters.

Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France

Trailer

Metalocalypse, Season 2

How does a show consistently ramp up from a cold start to a 1000-BPM spit-take-inducing psychotically gruesome climax in about 11 minutes?

You could read about the show's premise elsewhere, but I'll repeat it here because it's fun to tell. ...Imagine a world in which the dominant cultural force is an international death metal band called Dethklok — a band one thousand times more popular than the Beatles have ever been, with a following so fanatical that mass suicide routinely accompanies news of a delayed album release, and so impossibly wealthy that the band itself constitutes the seventh largest economy on Earth. But the band members are petulant bickering half-wits. Like if Spinal Tap were trillionaires. Mutilation, dismemberment and slaughter follow them everywhere, due most often to gross negligence in concocting highly dangerous stage show gimmicks. A shadowy organization of world leaders monitors the band's activities and attempts to curb their growing influence over commerce and politics, but is largely helpless in the face of Dethklok's private paramilitary force/roadies, the Klokateers, and the band's ruthlessly protective legal management. Oh, and the clueless band members seem to be unwittingly bringing about a prophesied end of days, an "apocalypse of metal".

This is the best thing on Adult Swim, and I say that believing that Adult Swim is consistently the best block of programming on television. Metalocalypse is unavoidably a send-up of the violent imagery particular to death metal, but is brilliant in the way the blood and dragons serve as dressing for wry satire of celebrity-driven media and dogmatic fanboy subcultures. And it isn't just sardonic gag-mongering like Family Guy or Aqua Teen: There is genuine love for the music and the goofy douchebags who play it. The dramatic season finale moved me to tears, moments before it moved me to puke.

BioShock

Who is Andrew Ryan?

This concept is too good for an FPS. It deserves an RPG. Game is based on the social science fiction of Ayn Rand and set in a breathtaking retro-futuristic art deco Atlantis built on the ocean floor in 1946...an undersea Galt's Gulch.

I read Atlas Shrugged at exactly the wrong time in my life. It was the summer before I left for college and I was feeling like the king of my hometown, arrogant and victorious, able and deserving to conquer the world. Then that book was put in my hands (by someone even more naïve than myself) and my ego fed like a hog at slop. It has taken years and cost every ounce of my inflated self-confidence to undo the damage.

So imagine my excitement to find, in of all places a video game, an instance of Rand's model society — unchecked capitalism, fierce individualism, survival-of-the-fittest rejection of charity and altruism — devolved into a dystopia. Heady stuff for a shooter. And that's the problem, because it's hard to engage the dialectic when your job is to kill most everyone you see. The backstory is told solely through found audio recordings and one-way radio transmissions that do little to involve the player in the ethical dilemma.

In an RPG, on the other hand, your job is to talk to most everyone you see. That's the optimal way to explore big ideas in a game: Talk it out and develop relationships with NPCs, make choices that affect the world, observe the consequences and refine your choices. BioShock's gameplay fails to live up to its brilliant premise. But I'm still marveling at the art design.

Bivouac

This Jawbreaker album takes me back. Their 1992 release is a perfect sonic time capsule from those salad days of lumberjack flannel and street hockey. I can only listen to Siamese Dream and Incesticide so often, but Jawbreaker's pre-Dookie grungepunk sound comes as a fresh dip in familiar waters. Recommended to anyone who ever gave me a lift from the high school parking lot.

More of the Dead

Will Rogers said, "I never yet met a man that I didn't like." Hogwash. If that were really true, then Will Rogers was an idiot.

It was foolhardy to claim I'd never seen a bad zombie movie. I might just as well have said, "I am an undiscerning twit." Of course there are boring, clumsy, tedious, lifeless, terrible zombie movies of all kinds. No genre containing more than three movies hasn't been spoiled by opportunists and hacks. For example, Re-Animator is a pretty lousy flick...and they made two sequels.

Nevertheless, I wasn't really talking about zombie movies like Re-Animator. I was talking about modern zombie movies — that is, zombie epidemic movies. And I was making the point that, while every genre contains duds, some genres revolve around a premise and structure that is more robust against the filmmakers' lack of talent. It takes a certain gift to pull off good film noir...all the elements have to come together. On the other hand, the zombie epidemic movie is about as robust as possible. You can fuck up the lighting, the pacing, the dialogue, the character development and still deliver an entertaining product. Case in point: Dawn of the Dead (2004).

So let's talk about this special breed I have called the modern zombie movie. How distinct is it from the "classical" zombie movie, and what is the history of its development? The archetypal example is Night of the Living Dead (1968): The very first movie to feature mindless, aggressive former humans that convert victims to their number, thereby comprising an undirected, self-propagating plague. That's the definition of a zombie epidemic, and it entails the principles that (1) the zombies be mindless, not retaining their former humanity, and not puppets of a controlling intelligence; and (2) that zombiism be contagious, either in the pathological sense or in the sense that victims rise from the dead. Note that this definition does not specify whether the zombies be living or undead, whether they move fast or slow, whether they crave brains, how they can be destroyed, whether the outbreak be global or local, or whether the causing agent be chemical, biological, magical, cosmic, etc. It is permitted that a subset of the population be immune to zombification.

Any zombie movie failing this description may be considered classical (admittedly this is a wide umbrella). Most movies featuring hypnotized slaves, a curse of undeath, or the dead returning for revenge or love fail on both principles. The dead reanimated by science or sorcery rarely involves a contagion element; a true zombie epidemic has the potential to spread without limit. A plague of possession by demons (Evil Dead) or aliens (Slither) fails on the puppetry principle.

The IMDb lists 505 movies tagged with the keyword "zombie". By my estimate only about 10% of these comprise the zombie epidemic subgenre. I submit that this is a complete list of modern zombie movies:

1960s
Night of the Living Dead (1968)

1970s
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Zombi 2 (1979) [Italy]

1980s
Nightmare City (1980) [Italy]
Hell of the Living Dead (1980) [Italy]
Night of the Comet (1984)
Day of the Dead (1985)
The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Night of the Creeps (1986)
Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988)
Zombi 3 (1988) [Italy]
Zombie 4: After Death (1988) [Italy]
C.H.U.D. 2: Bud the C.H.U.D. (1989)
The Dead Next Door (1989)
The Chilling (1989)

1990s
Night of the Living Dead (1990)
Dead Alive (1992) [New Zealand] ... bloodiest movie ever
Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993)
Bio Zombie (1998) [Hong Kong]

2000s
Stacy (2001) [Japan]
Resident Evil (2002)
28 Days Later (2002) [UK]
Undead (2003) [Australia]
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Shaun of the Dead (2004) [UK]
Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)
Hide and Creep (2004)
Dead Meat (2004) [Ireland]
SARS Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis (2004) [Thailand]
Shadows of the Dead (2004)
Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis (2005)
Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave to the Grave (2005)
Land of the Dead (2005)
Day of the Dead 2: Contagium (2005)
Die Zombiejäger (2005) [Sweden]
Evil (2005) [Greece]
Severed (2005) [Canada]
Boy Eats Girl (2005) [Ireland]
Dead Men Walking (2005)
Day X (2005)
Raiders of the Damned (2005)
The Quick and the Undead (2006)
Deadlands: The Rising (2006)
Fido (2006) [Canada]
Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006)
Automaton Transfusion (2006)
City of Rott (2006)
Undead or Alive: A Zombedy (2007)
Dead Moon Rising (2007)
Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)
28 Weeks Later (2007) [UK]
Planet Terror (2007) ... part one of Grindhouse (2007)
REC (2007) [Spain]
Diary of the Dead (2007)
Awaken the Dead (2007)
I Am Legend (2007)
Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane (2007)
Days of Darkness (2007)
Dance of the Dead (2008)
Day of the Dead (2008)
OneChanbara (2008) [Japan]
Quarantine (2008) ... remake of REC (2007)

There are three major series buried in this list besides the obvious Resident Evil trilogy and 28 Days/Weeks Later. First and foremost is the flagship Dead series directed by George Romero:

Romero's Dead series
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Day of the Dead (1985)
Land of the Dead (2005)
Diary of the Dead (2007)

Remakes of the Dead series (Romero not involved)
Night of the Living Dead (1990)
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Day of the Dead 2: Contagium (2005) ... a prequel
Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006)
Day of the Dead (2008)

The original Night of the Living Dead was co-produced by Romero and John Russo, who later engaged in a legal battle over the franchise rights; Romero retains ownership of the word "Dead" while Russo owns the words "Living Dead". Russo launched his own spin-off series as co-writer of The Return of the Living Dead (1985), the funniest zombie movie ever, which gave us the first instance of the undead calling for "Brains!" and has spawned four sequels (on which Russo is not credited):

Russo's Living Dead series
The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988)
Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993)
Return of the Living Dead 4: Necropolis (2005)
Return of the Living Dead 5: Rave to the Grave (2005)

Romero's Dawn of the Dead was seized upon in Italy, where Dario Argento recut and released it under the title Zombi (1978), igniting the Italian zombie movie craze that lasted through the late 80s. Most notable in the epidemic category are the two spin-off sequels directed by Lucio Fulci:

Fulci's Zombi series
Zombi 2 (1979) [Italy]
Zombi 3 (1988) [Italy]
...
(Zombie 4: After Death is not actually related)

In addition to these American and Italian series there have also been two waves of East Asian zombie movies, first in the early 80s with the introduction of classical zombie foes into martial arts pictures, and then a small renaissance at the turn of the millennium that includes the first Asian zombie epidemics: Bio Zombie and Stacy. This movement prefigured the worldwide zombie revival that has been underway since the box office success of Resident Evil and 28 Days Later in 2002.

So what is so modern about the zombie epidemic? George Romero created a break in the folklorish horror movie tradition of things that go bump in the night. When a faceless and impersonal epidemic threatens civilization collapse, a process accelerated by the high interdependence of our modern lives, the whole world goes bump. Night of the Living Dead taps into postwar concerns about the survival and humanity of mankind — the stuff of 50s science fiction, but made visceral rather than cerebral by investing it with the dismal brutality of Vietnam war footage. Cold, desaturated, grainy low-budget photography has always been the zombie epidemic filmmaker's friend, helping to explain the genre's thriving popularity in the digital era.

Two novels constitute the sci-fi roots of the zombie epidemic, one expressing Cold War paranoia about communist indoctrination and the other Cold War anxiety about apocalypse scenarios. The Puppet Masters (1951) by Robert Heinlein was adapted for the screen as The Brain Eaters (1958), a story of alien invasion progressing by the infectious spread of mind-controlling brain parasites. The second is I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson, the post-apocalyptic tale of the only man immune to a vampirism disease that has claimed the Earth. The book has been filmed three times — as The Last Man on Earth (1964) with Vincent Price, The Omega Man (1971) with Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend (2007) with Will Smith — each time with the vampiric elements reduced and the disease made ever more akin to zombification.

Which brings us full circle to the subject of the relevance of zombies, vampires and werewolves. I point out above that 505 movies in the IMDb are tagged with the keyword "zombie". For comparison the keywords "vampire" and "werewolf" yield 606 and 170 movies, respectively. Let's look at the history of these three beasts on the silver screen.


The above figure illustrates the average number of movies produced worldwide per year that are tagged in the IMDb with the keywords "vampire" (red), "werewolf" (blue), and "zombie" (green), as well as those I have determined to be authentic zombie epidemic movies (white). Data is averaged over 5-year intervals, e.g. 1998-2002, 2003-2007, etc.

Each monster had modest beginnings before and during the war, but the supernatural fell out of fashion around 1950 in the early years of the atomic age when science fiction reigned. By 1960 the vampire had rebounded and taken its place as the prince of darkness, due in part to the revival of gothic horror by Britain's Hammer Studios. The zombie and the werewolf vied for popularity until meeting a watershed in 1968, when Night of the Living Dead propelled the zombie to greater prominence while the werewolf maintained a modest, steady career. The vampire bubble peaked 1970-1975 and collapsed around 1980, only to recover late in the decade when reinvented for the John Hughes generation; vampires remained popular throughout the 90s. The zombie bubble peaked 1985-1990 and collapsed in the mid-90s, not to recover until the 2002 revival. Actually all three have seen a recent revival thanks to low-budget digital cameras and cheap CGI. Zombie epidemics had been a small subset until the revival, but now constitute a growing portion of all zombie movies. The Romero zombie has become canon.

Only the zombie is truly relevant to the modern world. Vampires are now nothing more than sexy teenage outsiders, and are only cool if you are an unsexy teenage outsider. Werewolves have become tied to geographically shrinking pockets of pre-Christian shamanism, and only pose a threat in the Yukon and the Scottish highlands. Mummies are forever trapped in the faded age of the British Empire. But the mindless walking dead are all around you.