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.