Zombie Movies: The Film Genre that won't Die

Ours' is just a zombie kind of world. These brain-chomping bogeymen and women are at the saturation point in every media form extant, from live action films, animated cartoons, video games, comics, to literary publishing mash-ups with Jane Austen. What's up with this? Where in the Sam Hill did it all come from? Why do we love the re-animated so?

Academics and other smarty-pants--yes, there is such a thing as zombie scholarship--would have us think that the living dead help us process our feelings about the apocalyptic end of our fragile world brought on by inevitable disease pandemics (for more of this, check in with Kim Paffenroth, Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006). The '50s and '60s were about apocalypse-by-nukes nightmares. Now, WMD's include frightening and potentially zombie-producing pathogens, unless the cooties come from outer space, or jump species from our feathered friends. Definitely get the avian flu shots so chickens won't turn us into zombies. More on the economics of this later, or "there's gold in them thar fears!"

Okay. Sure. Helping us process our feelings is definitely a major motivator for studios, film distributors, and theaters to keep producing and showing the zombie oeuvre, right? Maybe not so much. Critics talking about the violently sexual fetish subtexts of seminal zombie flicks of the 40s and 50s, like "White Zombie" and "I Walked with a Zombie," probably have a better idea about the lurid bondage "lite" that fooled early Hays Commission censors, yet still got titillated viewers into the movie house. Post-modern, post-colonial theorist Edna Aizenberg deserves credit for being honest about these early zombie films. She pinpointed their erotic brew of exotic slavery-steeped Caribbean settings and passive beautiful white female sex slaves concocted by ingesting the voodoo version of puffer-fish neurotoxin roofies. This was some hot fantasy fodder for your great-grandfather down at the Bijou.

Zombie films continued pretty much in the same sex fetish vein, with the occasional undead fiend showing up in a Sci-Fi B-movie, until Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" in 1968 exploded the zombie genre virus everywhere.  Romero and his former colleague, writer John Russo, spawned a number of similar zombie apocalypse productions after Night went through the roof.

What Romero did to cause the genre to explode was that he scared his matinee and drive-in kiddie and teenie-bopper audiences in a new way. Instead of the campy Frankenstein-meets-Dracula scream fest the kids were anticipating, Romero frightened  his young viewers into whimpering silence, according to the grindingly ubiquitous, but nonetheless present Sun-Times reviewer, Roger Ebert.

Revolutionary as Romero's magnum opus may have been, Night's uniqueness wasn't enough to propel zombies to the top of the contemporary horror heap. Turns out there is an economy to it if you "follow the money." Kevin Heffernan (Inner-City Exhibition and the Genre Film: Distributing "Night of the Living Dead") discovered that "nabe house" (neighborhood theaters) declining revenues in the late 60s caused their owners to find a new product that would put butts in the seats during the early autumn slowdown between summer vacation and the holidays. Romero's creepy undead arrived at the right time to fill the Halloween movie doldrums. Cinematic zombie apocalypse filled a major marketing void. Like the Energizer bunny, zombies just keep going and going.

Fun Zombie Factoids (verbatim from Wiki):

1.Romero's Night made no reference to the creatures as "zombies". In the film they are referred as "ghouls" on the TV news reports. However, the word zombie is used continually by Romero in his 1978 script for "Dawn of the Dead," including once in dialog. This "retroactively fits (the creatures) with an invisible Haitian/African prehistory, formally introducing the zombie as a new archetype."

2. The early 1980s was notable for the introduction of zombies into Chinese and other Asian films, often martial arts/horror crossover films, that featured zombies as thralls animated by magic for purposes of battle. Though the idea never had large enough appeal to become a sub-genre, zombies are still used as martial-arts villains in some films today.

3. "Return of the Living Dead" took a more comedic approach than Romero's films; Return was the first film to feature zombies which hungered specifically for brains instead of all human flesh (this included the vocalization of "Brains!" as a part of zombie vocabulary), and is the source of the now-familiar cliché of brain-devouring zombies seen elsewhere.

4. "Zombie" may be related to the Congolese term for deity, "nzambi."