Dead, All Messed Up: The Evolution of Zombies

Hi. This is my first blog post, and I'm pretty awful at introductions so I'll keep it short. I'm Mike, and in this blog I'll be sporadically enlightening you with my opinions on music, movies, politics, and anything else I feel like writing about while bored at work. My posts should range from "boring and pointless" to "unbearably pretentious," depending on how much effort I feel like putting into them. I was going to make a graph to illustrate this, but I don't feel like it.

For my first entry, I thought I'd write about something near and dear to my heart - zombie movies. This post contains spoilers for Zombieland, so if you haven't seen it yet, proceed with caution. I say "yet," because it's a great movie and you really should go see it. Right now. I'll wait here.

My first real exposure to zombie movies was in a film class in high school. My teacher, who I'm fairly sure was only teaching the film class so that he could sit quietly at his desk for a while, threw on an old copy of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and told us all that it was "cheesy" and "dumb," but that it had probably been scary to someone at some point.

So I was pretty surprised when the movie scared the shit out of me. Well, not really. It's hard to be scared when you're surrounded by bored high school students who are only taking a film class so they can sleep. But I was caught off guard by how claustrophobic and bleak the movie was - Night was a revolutionary film for its time because of how little hope it offered audiences. Somewhere between the scene where dozens of zombies pull people from a car accident and start eating liberal handfuls of organ meat and the scene where a young girl murders her mother with a gardening trowel, I realized that this was a pretty ballsy movie for 1968.

Afterwards, I sought out as many zombie movies as I could, which was pretty easy since a full-blown zombie revival started happening right on cue with the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. The remake kept the mall setting of the original, but removed most of its consumerist satire, amping up the blood and guts in its place. From there, a ravenous horde of zombie movies descended on theaters, ripping the box office to shreds and eating the brains of... okay, I'll be honest. This metaphor has gotten away from me. Suffice it to say that a lot of zombie movies got made. Some of them were great (28 Days Later...), some of them were... not quite as great. (House of the Dead) The resurgence even brought Romero out of retirement for the flawed Land of the Dead and the even-more-flawed Diary of the Dead.

But by far the best of the bunch was the least traditional. Shaun of the Dead managed to subvert nearly every rule of the genre, while honoring its influences at the same time. Shaun is brilliant in the way that it brings a typical zombie movie into a world recognizable as our own. It succeeds because it replaces the action-movie cliches of other zombie movies with real life situations. The characters in other zombie movies react to the crisis by stockpiling guns, or building gigantic tank-buses. The characters in Shaun spend most of the movie just trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Shaun also takes the long-running tradition of "zombies as societal warning" and neatly turns it on its head. Zombies have stood as metaphors for conformity, consumerism, militarism, capitalism, racism and plenty of other -isms. The zombies in Shaun stand for the threat of arrested development. Shaun's struggle against them is really his struggle to mature, and face the challenges of growing up. For his troubles, he's rewarded with a stable relationship and a happy life. Those who aren't so lucky are resigned to playing video games in sheds. It's a brilliant move, and it recasts the zombie genre in a more personal and relatable light.

Which all brings me to the inspiration for all of this, Shaun's new American cousin, Zombieland. Zombieland hones in on a crucial, sometimes subtle, part of all zombie movies: wish fulfillment. Sure, a zombie apocalypse would suck when you're being ripped to shreds by living corpses, or shooting your loved ones to keep them from turning into crazed cannibals. But if you manage to survive, the world becomes your playground - full of empty amusement parks and deserted mansions where everything can be yours for the taking. Even the zombies become wish fulfillment in Zombieland, with zombie killing turned into the competition that more serious movies have always denied it is. The zombies aren't a metaphor for anything in Zombieland. They exist only to be killed, usually in the most creative and funny ways possible.

In the end, the zombies aren't even the point of Zombieland. You could replace them with monsters, mummies, or giant lizards, and the point would stay the same. Zombieland is a comedy about finding your place in the world. It just happens to be a world overrun by the living dead. And, unlike nearly every zombie movie that's come before it, all the characters survive in the end, and find something resembling happiness. Together with Shaun of the Dead, it's the zombie movie coming full circle, finding hope in a genre that has long been defined by unrelenting bleakness. And it's my first blog entry, being pretentious as all hell. See you next time!