Opinion The march of the undead

The root incarnation of the zombie as reanimated corpses (often appropriated as slave labour) was carried forward into 20th-century popular culture in colonial-era horror films like White Zombie (1932) and I Walked With A Zombie (1943),tales that involved ominous Caribbean locales,terrified white interlopers and enough discomfiting racial subtext to reanimate Edward Said. Since then,it has multiplied across platforms — from The Walking Dead of comics and television to the popular Dead Rising and Resident Evil video games. This modern conception of zombies as harbingers of apocalypse,a limitless wave of voracious resurrected human beings,originated with one man and one film: George Romero and his 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead.

Romero’s portrayal of a world where the dead return en masse to eat the cranial matter of the living derived its aesthetic from the mid-century pulp renaissance — the vengeful undead of EC Comics and the pop lit of Richard Matheson (whose I Am Legend is a milestone of zombie fiction,steeped in existential dread). Romero brought to the mix a satirical bent — Night of the Living Dead is a shot fired from the left across the bow of the socially conservative. Featuring (in revolutionary fashion for the time),an African-American lead shepherding a white woman through the zombie apocalypse,only to be mistaken for one of the undead by the gun-wielding forces of authority,it’s a blistering metaphor for the civil rights movement. It’s a prime example of how genre cinema often trumps straightforward dramas as vessels for social commentary — a no-budget monster movie that took the pulse of a whole disenfranchised generation.

Romero continued the Dead cycle with the equally groundbreaking Dawn of the Dead (1978), satirising consumer culture,its protagonists trapped inside a mall filled with lurching ex-shoppers hunting for flesh. Racial politics are not overlooked — the film begins with a massacre in a crowded urban tenement where minorities are mowed down (undead or otherwise) by armoured stormtroopers . As the survivors grow fat on the spoils of the mall,our sympathies could almost shift to the sad hungry zombies trying to walk up the down escalator,shuffling to the Muzak echoing through the corridors. The film also establishes what is widely thought of as zombie canon in terms of the creatures’ capabilities and the genre’s gory excesses — the zombies can survive any damage short of head trauma,they’re single-minded in their hunger for flesh and they lack almost all vestiges of their old selves. Oh,and they don’t run.

The Dead cycle continued into the 1980s but devolved into excess and hollow self-parody. American newscasts were (comparatively) bereft of race riots and wars,the rise of the blockbuster and the home video market had stepped up the business half of showbusiness and the cinemas saw a parade of zombie movies that focused on fun as opposed to lofty thematic preoccupations. The best of these films — The Evil Dead and its sequels,Re-Animator,Return of the Living Dead — were canny,amusing movies that traded in the incongruous yet somehow natural pairing of grue,retro B-movie plotting and comedy.

Things took a turn after 9/11. With the twin spectres of environmental disaster and global terrorism hanging over our heads,the prospect of world’s end suddenly became fodder for sombre reflection. Zombies are now the worst case scenario; the fanciful face of the apocalyptic fallout of societal stupidity. It’s no accident that the definitive zombie stories of the 21st century — movies like 28 Days Later,28 Weeks Later and Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead — frame the condition realistically,as if it were just another pandemic. SARS with a twist. The result is large-scale urban destruction,situations only a few steps removed from the grainy pictures of street-level violence circulated every day. Often,in these movies,fellow humans are more dangerous than zombies,stabbing each other in the back for spare ammo or a can of beans. The zombie zeitgeist is the cultural antibody to the species-threatening crises we find ourselves embroiled in; both a fictional escape from those problems and an uneasy acknowledgment of them. This is why the over-exposure of the beloved undead is such a shame. When a potent symbol is overused to the point of becoming little more than a hipster icon,it loses teeth. The zombies are us and we are them and every time we devalue our rotting surrogates,we’re reducing ourselves to a punch-line.

Das is a New York-based writer

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