Oct

5

Zombiphilia.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 5, 2007 |

There’s something about zombies that, no pun intended, keeps them coming back. The classic zombie of contemporary cinema, appearing in low-budget classics like The Last Man On Earth with Vincent Price and, of course, George Romero’s original Night Of The Living Dead, with its vacant stare and shuffling walk is the stuff of our deepest and more horrible nightmares. While Romero’s film has been read as, among other things, a comment on Vietnam and the United States, while the sequel Dawn of the Dead takes darkly satirical jabs at American consumerism, the really frightening thing about zombies is the shock of recognition. Imagine a loved one you thought you’d lost coming back as a monster. Imagine yourself coming back that way, neither alive nor dead. In Re-Animator, the mad medical student Herbert West turns his mentor, Dr. Carl Hill into a walking corpse carrying his own head in a tray. West’s girlfriend, Megan, also sees her own father turned into a zombie, before being molested by the head of Dr. Hill.

As Tim Cavanaugh explains in the article We the Living there’s even more to zombies than just the slow shuffle: complex political, philosophical, and literary debates swirl around the zombie genre as much as blood and guts are spilled within it. Cavanaugh reviews three books. Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture by Annalee Newitz sounds like it would put me to sleep while Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema by Jamie Russell would keep me up all night. On the other severed, crawling hand The Dominion of The Dead by Robert Pogue Harrison is, as Cavanaugh explains, not a zombie book, but a study of death and burial rituals in different cultures. The political and social implications of George Romero’s zombie films, particularly the original Night Of The Living Dead and Dawn Of The Dead (both the 1978 original and the 2004 remake), are dark satires and explorations of human nature. Because of the recognition zombies are a blank canvas for whatever scares us most because they are us, but death also surrounds us, slowly smothering us in much the same way that, in most zombie films, the undead surround their victims. Zombies are a physical expression of a great contradiction: we don’t want to die, but we wouldn’t want the kind of immortality they offer. As Mephistopheles says in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus when he’s ordered to return to Hell, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.”

This fear may also be why zombies are such great material for comedy. In giving an overview of the zombie genre, Cavanaugh mentions of Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide, a must-have for any devoted zombie fan, and possibly for anyone else caught in a zombie attack. It includes the ten most important lessons for surviving zombie attacks:

1. Organize before they rise!
2. They feel no fear, why should you?
3. Use your head: cut off theirs.
4. Blades don’t need reloading.
5. Ideal protection = tight clothes, short hair.
6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it.
7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike.
8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert!
9. No place is safe, only safer.
10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.

And then there was the screamingly funny Shaun of the Dead. Special thanks to BlueLemonFilms for compiling this music video of some of the best moments . You’ll never listen to Queen the same way again, and that’s doubly true if you’ve seen the movie.


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