“They’re Coming to Get You” – Favorite Zombies Films

With The Walking Dead scaring up record ratings on television last weekend, zombies have officially taken their place as “monster of the moment”. Zombies have been around in cultural lore for decades, but it wasn’t until the 1932 Béla Lugosi film White Zombie that the undead entered the pop culture consciousness and we haven’t looked back.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) dir. George Romero

Amid the cultural chaos of the late sixties, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the grandfather of all modern zombie films, is steeped in chilling uncertainty that is just as disturbing now as it was forty three years ago. Made for just $114,000 and filmed entirely in Pittsburg, the film used grainy black and white stock to give it a quasi-documentary feel that only served to heighten the horror. The story is simple, a band of survivors of various ages and races take refuge in an abandoned farmhouse as the newly reanimated, flesh-eating dead lurk just beyond the doors. We follow these doomed folks as they try, in vain, to escape to safety, thwarted at each turn by horrible luck, bad decisions and simple human folly, yet, we know given the same circumstances, we made have made the exact same decisions. The film was universally dismissed by critics as another low-budget exploitation horror flick, but over the years, it has garnered a rightful place among the best horror films ever made. Romero’s film is so timeless because it is less about the horrible ghouls waiting to devour us (although, the film is shockingly graphic given the time) and more about the people trying survive another day. The film feels relentless in its horror because what we are witnessing is a decent into absolute chaos where the bonds of family, love, friendship and traits like intelligence and resourcefulness may not be enough to save you from a terrible fate. This was the decay of the American dream, quite literally represented by the living dead, turned into an American living nightmare.

Dawn of the Dead (1978/2004) dir. George Romero/Zack Snyder

It is a well-established rule of cinema that a sequel is never as good as its predecessor, but George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead is one of the rare exceptions. With a bigger budget and in colour, Romero’s vision of the American nightmare is expanded and perfected. In many ways superior to Night of the Living Dead, the film starts pretty much where the last film left off as America, and perhaps the rest of the world, is being literally consumed by the growing zombie plague. A band of survivors steal a news helicopter and barricade themselves inside a suburban shopping mall. As with his last film, Dawn of the Dead isn’t really about the living dead, even though this film is more grotesque and graphic than its predecessor, but about the helpless survivors trying to make it another day. But more importantly this film is a critique of the growing and vapid consumer culture that started to rule our brains in the seventies and the message is just as potent today as it was over thirty years ago. Trapped in a mall, our survivors have everything they could ever want, but what does it really mean when the entire world has gone to hell and your safe haven has become a prison? Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake drops any real pretence of being a societal critique hidden in the guise of a horror film, yet, it still delivers enough genuine horror to make it a worthy if inferior remake. In this film, our band of survivors is larger and we know that a posse this large will not remain intact for long. Snyder’s zombies are not the lumbering, slow-moving walkers, but monsters capable of outrunning their prey before gutting them, a whole new level of horror.

28 Days Later… (2002) dir. Danny Boyle

The first great zombie movie of the 21st century isn’t technically a zombie movie, a fact that purest of the genre take great pains to remind us of time and again, but I don’t think any film has come close to capturing the spirit, both in style and theme, of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as perfectly as this film. The film begins with a group of animal activists storming a facility and unwillingly releasing a rage virus passed through contact with infected blood. Jim awakens from a coma in a deserted hospital twenty eight days later to a London devastated by the epidemic as he fights off roaming packs of the fast moving, instinct-driven infected. Shot on DV in a low-budget style that echoes Night of the Living Dead in many ways, Danny Boyle’s film also touches on one of the main themes of Romero’s trilogy, the de-evolution of society. The truly terrifying monsters in this film aren’t the ones who will tear your face off, but the military that seek to impose a new world order and will do so by whatever means necessary. The need for self-preservation is sometimes a human being’s deadliest and most inhumane instinct.