Whatever happened to the zombie horror flick?
They have been around since 1932 when a zombie first graced our screens in the film White Zombie. The legendary Béla Lugosi starred and, in part, directed. There is indeed something deeply unnerving and captivating about the idea of the dead walking the earth as there is equally something deeply thrilling about the concept of having it all to yourself.
I first watched George A Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead in about 1986. I was stunned. The world was ending on my TV screen and all the rules of society that I didn’t even know to abide by yet were crumbling from this imaginary American nightmare. I loved it.
In the world of Dawn of the Dead, the zombies were horrible, plentiful and utterly dumb. And you were allowed to kill them. They weren’t people anymore – you could shoot them with guns looted from shops, the concept of survival horror emerged in a way that intrigued and captivated young impressionable minds like mine.
I watched Dawn of the Dead several times through my young teenage years. Mostly when it was on terrestrial television late at night. I love that film and as a result I love zombie films, books and even ‘video games’ that hold within them the same apocalyptic fantasy that gripped me all those years ago when Peter, Roger and Stephen and Fran hid themselves away in that shopping mall to try and ride out the plague of shuffling monsters.
Romero’s ‘Dead series’ spans 40 years of cinema:
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Night of the Living Dead (1968)
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Dawn of the Dead (1978)
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Day of the Dead (1985)
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Land of the Dead (2005)
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Diary of the Dead (2008)
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Diary of the Dead 2 (2009)
It wasn’t long before I had watched the trilogy that comprises the first three films in this list. I soon realised that I loved them, and began to hunt down books from the genre too. I was pleased to see Land of the Dead brought out in 2005, although not entirely enamoured with it on first watch.
My rationale was that 20 years between Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead (if you ignore the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead) is enough, to my mind, to explain the slightly less captivating atmosphere that prevailed in the 2005 film. Let’s be honest, even the 1985 movie itself, complete with subterranean military stronghold and live testing on zombie subjects was a little off-kilter from the sheer magnificence of the 1978 classic.
Imagine my delight when I found Diary of the Dead on the shelf in a well known DVD retailer last week. George A Romero’s Dead series represents a filmography spanning the breadth of the Zombie film genre – despite the mild disappointment of the most recent offering: Land of the Dead I had to give this a go.
Let me get straight to the point: Diary of the Dead is an awful film and I hated it from start to finish.
First of all it tries, horribly, to cash in on the POV genre unlocked by films like The Blair Witch Project, but unlike other recent attempts to escalate the visual (and other) tension of a film in this way - like Cloverfield - which had some success - Diary of the Dead is just fucking irritating. The only time the POV angle worked for me was when it was combined with some relatively good special effects, but this wasn’t frequent.
The standard of acting in this film is incredible. Incredible in terms of how fucking terrible it is. It has the appearance and subtlety of an A-level drama production, like a series of crudely over-acted monologues direct to camera, one after the other. I’m not sure quite how this can be the case when supposedly the whole point of the POV approach is to take you on the journey as a part of the story.
In rejecting the traditional narrative this film needed to immerse you in earthy reality – the magic would surely only come from the suspension of disbelief, documentary visual and un-polished, fragmented storyline?
Clearly not.
Ironically, the opening scene is on the set of a low-budget horror movie. I’m not sure if this is an accident, a homage to the 1968 origin of Romero’s filmography, or ‘B’ movie horror – including The Blair Witch Project – as a whole. Whichever, this film would have needed to, at some point, elevate itself above the little corner of cinematic history that it perhaps seeks to tip its cap to?
Another major bugbear for me is that there is a constant, clumsy reference to society’s voyeuristic need for a visual record of all events. I’m pretty sure there is a good point to be made there somewhere, but I’m damn sure a string of clumsy, out-of-place references and a few more horribly acted monologues isn’t the way to make it.
One of the things that made Dawn of the Dead superb was the ongoing story of desperate survival mixed with the total apocalyptic emptiness of the world at large. There is an underlying theme of adventure in the playground that the world had become. Freedom despite the oppressive presence of the zombie hordes. There is none of this in the most recent offering – just an overwhelming feeling of witnessing an unpleasant series of disjointed little mini-dramas. Horrible.
Overall I am tragically disappointed. For me, the series peaked with the 1978 film. The remake of Dawn of the Dead was a good effort and is worth a watch – but avoid Diary of the Dead like the [zombie] plague.
So where to look for a apocalyptic zombie-esque fix now?
Watch I Am Legend but make sure you ignore the final cut ending and watch instead the original which is based more closely (although still not quite right) on the ending of the 1954 novel by Richard Matheson – a book that could and should be 600 pages longer.
Read the excellent Monster trilogy by David Wellington, although the first in the series Monster Island is the best of the three for me and conversely I would have preferred to see them combined into one large novel.
28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later are both watchable films.
Even the Resident Evil series are a good way to pass the time.
But when it comes down to it. I think you might want to go back to 1978. Take the quality of the effects and perceive them as ‘classic’, take the vast usage extras and perceive it as eccentric. Settle in and watch Dawn of the Dead. It really isn’t challenged by its mediocre offspring;
When there is no more room in HELL, the dead will walk the EARTH.
