The success of Zombies as a phenomenon can be seen as remarkable. Zombies have a long tradition in horror, dating back a long ways. One of the first films to show Zombies was WHITE ZOMBIE, a 1932 Bela Lugosi independent horror flick, that may not have measured up to the 1931 successes of DRACULA or FRANKENSTEIN, but it certainly had enough success to warrant continuation of the species. Jacques Tourneur made his most famous horror movie in the early 1940s: I walked with a Zombie, in which VOODOO was also referenced.
Of course in these days, the zombies were not of the flesh-eating kind, but reanimated corpses doomed to obey their masters until their bodies literally fell apart. The Plague of the Zombies, a 1967 Hammer horror film follows more or less the same conceit but it was a young American filmmaker by the name of George Romero, who would give zombies a new face.
Romero made his film NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD on a shoestring budget with no name actors and friends as co-producers and so on. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD tells the story of a few people who are trapped in a house surrounded by the living dead. The story is simple but very persuasive, economically filmed and incredibly effective, considering the film was a big financial and critical success.
It should be noted that the film was radically different from other zombie horror films. Zombies would earlier just be portrayed as reanimated dead people who can not find rest and must follow the wishes of their new master in what mostly were melodramatic horror films, devoid of much talent. Romero's zombies were people who were deceased, come back to life and eating human flesh!!! Although Romero would not revisit the theme until the mid-1970s with his DAWN OF THE DEAD classic, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD would remain a longtime classic amidst a heap of melodramatic crap around it.
When Romero wrote DAWN OF THE DEAD, he had just seen one of the new shopping malls in the Philadelphia area and he thought he could make an interesting film if he could film inside one of these. The story told of a group of ragtag people bonding together and finding solace in a shopping mall that would allow them to live a life and keep the zombie infestation outside. Of course, things would happen to complicate this and other survivors besieged the shopping mall and brought the zombies inside as well. DAWN OF THE DEAD was again filmed with no name actors but had a budget of half a million dollars, that was put to good use. It was made and distributed without having been rated first by any board of film classification. The film made more than 55 million dollars internationally and Romero saw his future as a filmmaker assured. He would later revisit the theme (zombies) several more times.
Other filmmakers also jumped on the bandwagon now. The Italian director Lucio Fulci released a hugely successful ZOMBIE 2 in 1979, even though this film was totally unrelated to Romero's film DAWN OF THE DEAD, which in some countries was titled ZOMBIE. Fulci showed more explicit gore and from the story it was obvious his film was less interesting than Romero's but ZOMBIE 2 was banned in several countries due to the excessive amounts of gore.
One particularly grisly and explicit scene was one in which a girl has her eye gouged out because her face is being pulled towards the opening of a door by a zombie. Her eye is gouged out by a splinter of wood, sticking out from the moment the zombie's arm crashed thru the wood. Another memorable scene was an underwater battle between a zombie and a shark. Although this film also did not star any major actors, the lead is played by Tisa Farrow, Mia Farrow's sister.
Before Romero was back with his next zombie flick, Dan O'Bannon jumped in with a very enjoyable zombie comedy RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD in 1985. The very plausible plot told of a few putrid bodies remaining of the original zombies of the first George Romero film, which had actually been a documentary and not a fictional film. When a young man starts working for a company where these bodies are stored, something goes wrong, the bodies are cremated and the gases coming from the burnt bodies reanimates corpses of the cemeteries around. O'Bannon, who had earlier co-written ALIEN, entered a great deal of humor in the plot, for instance, when cops are killed by zombies, the reanimated cops call for help. "Send more cops!" The film was so successful it spawned two more sequels in the 1980s and early 1990s (neither of which were very good) and two more 15 years later.
George Romero, Grandfather of all ZombiesIn the meantime a lot of films have gone the way of the zombie theme. George Romero, who by now may be considered the grandfather of all zombies, has revisited the theme at least once every ten years since NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and even now has plans for more. Paul. W.S. Anderson also delighted us with his first film of the RESIDENT EVIL series in 2002 starring Mila Jovovich as Alice, an amnesiac who turns out to be very efficient as a Zombie Killer in this former computer game movie franchise. For my own tastes, I don't bother with these.
My own personal choice now, to sum the whole thing up with is the current television series hit THE WALKING DEAD, which is now in it's second season. Frank Darabont was involved in the first season and the first few episodes of the second season before he was dismissed from the show.
Glenn Mazzarro is now the leading executive on this show that depicts a group of survivors looking for a new and safe place to stay and spend their lives. It features plenty of scares but this show is so good, it is about the people who have to deal with an unusual problem.
The show was based on Robert Kirkman's comic strip, which has also been very successful so far. The television show has not even finished it's second season but is already locked for a third. It's most definitely on my MUST WATCH list.
Finally, one last note. Even Brad Pitt seems to think Zombies are hot. He is currently playing a lead role in WORLD WAR Z, a film by Marc Forster (director of QUANTUM OF SOLACE) and based on the novel by Max Brooks. The screenplay is written by J. Michael Straczinsky (famous for BABYLON 5 and for a very successful run on The Amazing Spider-Man comics) and Matthew Michael Carnahan. The film is currently under production and enjoys a healthy budget of 125 million dollars. It is slated to be released december 21, 2012, so we will have yet to wait to see if Pitt is any good as a Zombie Killer.
In the meantime though, as this piece is by no means meant to be a complete listing of the theme, feel free to report to me personally if you find something along the same lines that is interesting. Report to armentus@gmail.com . I'll give you one really cool example. MARVEL COMICS has done two miniseries in which their Superheroes are nearly all killed and eaten and then turned into zombies. Cool reading stuff, if you have the stomach for it.
