Welcome, my dear students, to the 113th lecture in CraveOnline‘s Free Film School, hands down the single best film school you will ever encounter. Why is it good? For one, it’s informative and educational, and will – if working properly – expand your view of the world of cinema. Perhaps more importantly, it’s free, and you’re allowed to attend classes in the nude. Take THAT, NYU. This is also a film school that, when not expounding endlessly about queer cinema, or offering you half-baked editorials that escaped from the mind of the sometime-humble professor masterminding the whole deal, will have fun lectures on obscure subgenres of film. This week’s lecture will be all about that now-everpresent stalwart of popular culture: zombies.
Over the course of the ’00s, zombies (like vampires) somehow escaped the purview of the Halloween season, and started to shamble through every facet of pop culture at any time of the year. There was, it seems, a shared zombie apocalypse fantasy on the fingertips of every blogger, video game fan, and geek who had internet access. The joyous chaos and delightful gore promised by a good zombie attack proved to be a delicious escape that everyone seemed to share. There were the occasional books or board games or movies with zombies in them, and video game most certainly felt a huge influx of zombie material, but the zombie phenomenon seemed to be predicated on something far less tangible than a singular piece of art; it wasn’t a book or a movie that kicked off the neo-zombie craze.
What seemed to have re-birthed zombies was a vague cultural consensus that zombie movies were – and have always been – fun. Internet memes and t-shirts saw this through, and now we seem to be in a world where zombies are a quiet rumbling presence under everything. One of Cable TV’s biggest hits right now is a show called “The Walking Dead,” which is all about a zombie apocalypse and the survivors thereof.
Let us, then, look at the cinematic legacy of the zombie, and see where it came from, where is exploded, and where it may be headed.
The early zombie movies involve – vaguely – these notions. The earliest zombie movie is 1932’s White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi. Yes, the film is where the band got their name. Victor Halperin’s White Zombie, about a witch doctor who turns the hero’s would-be girlfriend into a zombie slave, was a mild hit in the ’30s, and then was lost until the 1960s, when it resurfaced and immediately began to make the then-nascent grindhouse circuit. No, there is no brain-eating in the film.
Is Frankenstein’s monster a zombie? Perhaps. He is most certainly a resurrected corpse, and has been played a mindless brute, but he is not the shambling virus spreader like in future zombie iterations. It’s fair to describe the monster as a zombie, but the character – in most instances, and most certainly in James Whale’s famed films from the 1930s – is usually possessed of a sophistication and pathos rarely seen in your usual mindless brain-craving zombie.
Another notable early zombie feature dealing with voodoo slaves is the Jacques Tourneur/Val Lewton B-movie masterpiece I Walked with a Zombie from 1943. The film is famously the Jane Eyre story, but with zombies and voodoo rituals instead of a mere mad wife in the attic. Again, though, this is more about the notion of mind-erasing slave mechanics, and less about the walking dead.
The walking dead was a notion explored in the infamous Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood’s magnum opus from 1959. In that film, aliens used high-tech space rays to resurrect the recent dead, who would wander about silently and kill living humans at the behest of their alien masters. In a weird way, Plan 9 from Outer Space was the great turning point in movie zombies. Until this point, they had been voodoo slaves, carrying out the will of their overlords. In Plan 9, they were also the undead. Ed Wood’s multiple genre obsessions with sci-fi creatures, vampires, and bonkers film premises mixed to form the screen’s first resurrected corpses. Well, apart from Frankenstein’s monster, whose status as a zombie is of dubious veracity.
The granddaddy of all zombie films is, of course, George A. Romero’s famous 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. A low-budget survival film that borrows its premise oddly heavily from Plan 9, Night of the Living Dead is about a small group of people trapped in a house while a horde of zombie creatures impinges slowly and steadily from the outside. The creatures in Night of the Living Dead hunger for human flesh, shamble clumsily across the landscape, do not speak or think, and cannot be killed easily. They are dead bodies who want to eat you. They are truly terrifying, and work really well as creatures for a filmmaker who is operating on a small budget.
It’s interesting to consider that we got our modern notions of zombies from a film that never once uses the word “zombie.” The creatures are called “ghouls,” or “those things,” but never zombies. How the connection was made is a fact I am unable to track down. Night is, incidentally, also one of the earliest films to feature a black protagonist (Duane Jones) whose skin color was purely incidental, making it a revolutionary film in terms of racial politics.
They’re coming to get you, Barbara.
