Zombies and vampires, zombies and vampires -- sure, we're entering Dias de los Muertos, but the undead are crawling all over popular culture these nights. "Twilight" to "Tru-Blood," "Zombieland" to "Fox News," the undead are back with a vengeance. But, of course, they've been around for a long, long time. Matt Zoller Seitz takes a bite out of the cinematic zombie corpus with his latest video essay, "Zombies 101." He begins, (un-)naturally, with George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), flashes back to Jacques Tourneur's voodoo-themed "I Walked With a Zombie," and moves forward through the Romero "Living Dead" pictures to 21st century remakes and variations -- "Shaun of the Dead" (2004), "28 Days Later..." (2002), "28 Weeks Later..." (2007)...
Matt writes:
Ever since director George A. Romero released his 1968 shocker "Night of the Living Dead"--which reimagined zombies, the dark magic-entranced slaves of voodoo folklore, as shambling fiends that crave warm flesh and can only be offed with a head shot--the zombie genre has displaced the western as cinema's most popular and durable morality play... [Its] deeper resonance lies in its portrait of ordinary people struggling to survive in extreme circumstances.
Ultimately zombie films aren't about the zombies, which have no conscious mind and therefore no personality. They're a collective menace--rotting emblems of plague, catastrophe, war, and other world-upending events.
And, of course, the most terrifying thing about zombies is that they were us, and we could easily become them. (This is also at the root of the attraction-repulsion people feel toward vampires: everlasting life, but what kind of "life" if it involves a steady diet of human platelets and plasma?) The unearthly pod people of movies like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956 and 1978) are blood kin to zombies in that they resemble people we know, but are not. Like the dead, the undead are physically there, but drained of their human essence. Cold and cold-blooded, they embody only appetite -- but they don't feed to stay "alive" (because they aren't), they feed only to consume and convert. They might be members of Super Adventure Club or some other cult, or maybe they're just... sick, but they're definitely not feeling like themselves. Then again, maybe they're just investment bankers.
In David Cronenberg's 1975 "Shivers" (aka "They Came From Within"), the infected/afflicted are pure appetite, bloodthirsty and libidinous. In John Carpenter's 1988 "They Live!" they are, in the writer-director's words, "Republicans from outer space," sporting expensive accessories and brainwashing the docile populace with invisible propaganda to make them more submissive to authority. But they're not human -- they can only mimic human behavior like sociopaths do. Until they revert to their monstrous true selves.
What do you think? Why have zombies and vampires are found such a ravenous audience in the last few years?
UPDATE: Edgar Wright likes it, too!
15 Comments
I have no clue whatsoever but I know Twilight has alot to do with the vampires. Maybe because zombies are easy fun and vampires are easy drama, and we're living in an era of lazy filmmaking?
I think a large factor in the attraction with the undead goes back to a primary (and primal) quality that's key to all horror tales: they allow us to explore and contemplate our mortality in a safe fashion.
In the case of zombies, they can even make it reassuring. After all, the concept of normal death in which people die but stay expired doesn't seem quite as horrible in contrast to the deceased suddenly growing all cannibalistically peckish.
I think zombies also allow us to confront the very terrifying notion of what happens when people stop thinking; when they refuse to use reason and just blindly follow the herd mentality, allowing themselves to follow instinct and hunger after their basic needs without consideration or contemplation. Romero certainly understood this with Dawn of the Dead and the hilariously creepy juxtaposition of normal and zombified London in Shaun of the Dead bears this out as well.
Vampires seem to operate under somewhat different rules. While some function as horrific creatures similar to zombies, I think the greater romantic allure to vampires in popular culture may partially derive from how well they function as a metaphor for interpersonal relationships: the way each person craves and and must take something from others to survive, whether it's sex, money, attention, emotional support, self-respect, control, etc.
I think Zombies represent the feat that people in western culture have become mindless and are just going with the flow. That we are so complacent that everything could be falling to pieces in front of our eyes but no one will ever notice.
Vampires or atleast contemporary vampires represent sexuality and power. We want sexuality and power but we also know that there is a price to pay to have these things. We also know that people who have these two things are dangerous.
We are obsessed with being individuals and we are obsessed with sex and power. I think it is that simple. But maybe I'm wrong...
Honestly, I think zombies have gotten big lately for the same reason people are still making Chuck Norris jokes. It's just one big corny in-joke for people with no sense of humor to call their own.
They also make great fodder for action movies. You might think watching Commando "Why can't the badguys aim for crap?" well, zombies are completely content to get shot in the face without shooting back.
However, the true appeal, the reason some people liked zombie movies before 28 Days Later came out, if you go back and watch Night or Dawn, I think is the constant reminder of one's own mortality. This is why I think zombies need to be slow to have an effective screen presence. In Romero's classics, you always get those grisly closeups of glazed eyes, pale, cold skin, and those explicit gore shots that are not so much for schlocky thrills as they are a meditation on death.
That's why they always creeped me out as a kid, and why I'm not really into the recent trend of having them run at the heroes and get shot up. I think that any visceral impact they had as a walking existential nightmare has been cheapened by the tendency to use them as pop-up targets for the heroes to shoot at.
Also, I must say, 28 Weeks Later is one of the scariest movie's I've ever seen! It's REALLY hard to scare me, I've watched alot of horror movies and they almost never scare me. To me horror movies, specifically after Gothika(2003) for some reason, have become very unscary. They've lost all essence. I watched 28 Days Later and it was scary at times, but certain acting "flaws" ruined the verisimilitude for me and threw me out of the film. Also, it always amuses me when people call "Days" a great zombie movie, because it is very scarce in its zombieness. Days is the movie that overtly unveils the superficial point of zombies, because if you cite the great moments in Days it will be its character study you're talking about.
"Weeks" on the other hand was practically traumatic. And the zombies are a more essential part of the film, they seem to represent the emotion of anger. The movie has a subtext of kindness being overwhelmed(eaten!) by anger.
Well, the vampire part is easy: The "Sexy Young Vampire Guy" is the new "Boy Band" in the life of the American teenage girl. (A fact that Conan O'Brien has been mining for mostly hilarious results.)
The zombie part is trickier: I have no idea what it was in recent years that brought them back in such a big way, other than perhaps chalking it up to the weird Hollywood-Audience feedback loop. Maybe it started with "28 Days Later" becoming a big hit, and Hollywood going "Zombies Ca-ching!", and then more zombie movies came out, and then people watched them because they liked 28 Days Later, which made those movies successful, which made Hollywood go "Zombies Ca-ching!" even harder, and then inevitably the zombie spoofs came along to comment on the sudden zombie craze, and on and on it goes like a self-perpetuating machine until the day when audiences seemingly arbitrarily decide zombies aren't cool anymore and the next feedback loop begins (maybe invisible paranormal presences will get their turn now?).
Perhaps that's a cynical explanation, but then I find a lot of the recent zombie movies kind of cynical enterprises. I was never a big fan of zombie movies to begin with (years of playing Castlevania games as a kid made me much more of a vampire guy), but movies like the "Dawn of the Dead" remake and to a lesser extent "28 Days Later" (but definitely "28 Weeks Later") strike me as existing for little other reason than saying, "hey, aren't zombies nifty?".
By the way, I still stand by my initial assessment that True Blood is a lousy show.
By the way 2, Matt Zoller Seitz's video was fantastic. As someone who's experienced a couple of hurricane aftermaths (Wilma was particularly fun), his assertion that zombie movies are really about the disturbance of complacency through disaster rings pretty true.
Hm. Not to be simplistic, but I think it comes down to the greatest human fear and (one of) the greatest human drives.
Zombies = fear of death
Vampires = sex, possibly with a touch of rape fantasy, although I don't know if that part is true or not.
the only thing I have to say is that is an amazing video!
If I had to guess at deeper reasons why zombie films have become popular, I'd say either Bush's "you're either with us or against us" policies or maybe the way everyone is jacked into facebook and whatnot. But realistically, I think it's just because Hollywood xeroxes everything that is popular and crams it down our throats.
My favorite such movie in recent years was [Rec], which was decent enough throughout but had a pretty freaky final 10 minutes (it's the rare horror film that delivers on the "ten foot bug", at least for me).
Very nice video. Would have been nice to see it touch on Fulci's zombie contributions a bit, but it still is a great little reflection on the zombie genre, and serves as a nice little flashback to a lot of the moments I love in the various movies.
I think the zombie movie just has a couple of great elements that make for compelling entertainment. It's very simple. You take a motley group of survivors, isolate them, and put them in an extreme situation. It's a great enviroment for character study, comedy, or action. You add in the fact the survivors die off one by one until there are only a couple left at the end of the film, and you realize it shares a lot with that other enduring pop culture fad. Reality TV games in the style of Survivor.
That is indeed a great video, though you must admit, it's the last two seconds that truly seals the deal. ^_^
Zombies have attained a new popularity because they have been stripped of their bleakness and in some ways "sanitized." They can run, blow up real good, and eventually I suspect they will listen to techno and practice kung fu. Romero's zombies were like a creeping fungus, and watching them get destroyed only made me sick to my stomach. With a few exceptions (Shaun of the Dead), new zombie films completely miss the boat; they posit the walking dead as pop up targets rather then the shells of people we love.
Zombie films are a subset of general "apocalypse" films, where the apocalyptic event represents a complete society "game-changer". Such a story always transforms ordinary folks into a literal hero, and the values often sentimentalized as the quiet dignity/nobility/morality of the lower classes are shown to be the most effective in dealing with the game-changing event. For example, its amazing how--in nearly every zombie/apocalypse movie--heads of state or high government officials are among the first to go (when you would presume they'd be the most protected), and the few upper class folks who do survive are often petty bureaucrats or snooty rich boys who end up putting the survivors in danger and dying by their own greed/foolishness. In short, they're popular because they lionize a core set of humble principles that many think are under elitist attack in current society, and set up a world where the beneifts of those priniples over elitist sensibilities is obvious.
Vampires, I think, are a little more individually psychological. I think you're on the right track with the attraction/repulsion angle; vampires are a physical incarnation of what religious types call the temptations of sin, a more acceptable (and less overtly religious) genre for exploring the tension of a Faustian bargain, a theme that has thrived (often in disguised form) throughout the history of TV and film.
You guys all sort of miss the point...
Zombies are the best allegory for the fears of modern society. Every catastrophe we face- global warming, drought, famine, holes in the ozone layer, drug abuse, obesity, species extinction, over-population, the credit crisis, etc.- stems from one single problem: over-consumption. We, as a civilization, eat/buy/consume/destroy more than we have the means to.
Zombies are mindless consumers (as Romero stated in Dawn of the Dead), destroying society because their hunger cannot be satiated. They embody exactly what is terrifying about mankind- an inability to quench our desires until we decimate those around us.
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