Zombies, as we know them, are Americans, created in the late 1960's in the vicinity of Pittsburgh. In folklore, the walking dead, or deeply sleepy, had existed for centuries, drifting in and out of world culture much like the vampire, the witch and the demon. This ur-zombie was no cannibal. He was a slave, the victim of magic, a day laborer in the vineyards of evil. What he ate hardly seemed to matter.
By hiring a few non-actors, putting them in greasepaint and shooting them in black and white as they fought over intestines, a lapsed Catholic named George Romero changed all that.
"They're coming for you, Barbara," says a soon-to-be victim in Romero's game-changing classic Night Of The Living Dead. Soon enough, they were coming for us all, still are, but no matter where they turn up, in the cosmically screwed up metropoli of Lucio Fulci, the ransacked London of Danny Boyle or the cleared-out Atlanta of Frank Darabont's and Robert Kirkland's new AMC series The Walking Dead, they owe their identity to one man.
George Romero never gets enough credit for creating the definitive monster for the age of demonization: human beings as lurching, repulsive, utterly malevolent target practice.
In 1967, Romero and his crew of costume designers and make-up artists made the zombie into an unconscious cannibal who hunts humans in dumb, ravenous packs. That's the key innovation. There were other ghouls in the 1960's, and a few of them--like the ghosts in Herk Harvey's Carnival Of Souls--look a lot like the dead in Romero's first movie. But Harvey's creations didn't bite. They goaded or seduced. They were unkempt, brooding ghosts.
Others, like the undead vampires in Mario Bava's Black Sunday, aren't technically zombies, but seem much closer in spirit and in the flesh to the creatures in The Walking Dead than to Christopher Lee's portrayal of Dracula, their contemporary. Bava's vampires don't have fangs and don't eat flesh, but actress Barbara Steele has a peculiar hungry quality, a portrait of thwarted gluttony in gaunt cheeks, livid eyes and pale skin. A design concept had started to evolve, but it needed a context.
19th Century vampires had consciousness, if not conscience, and they tended to be proud individualists. They drank blood, but they also craved companionship and status. Bram Stoker's Count conformed to those earlier patterns, but he had brutish tendencies. More interested in gorging than knowing, he was arguably the first modern zombie. By the middle of the 20th Century, cinematic interpretations had begun to strip away the romantic yearning in the vampire and revealed the monster to be mostly a blood drunkard who lured his nubile female victims for sport and pasttime.
With Christopher Lee and his portrayal of furious bodily hunger, sexual and gluttonous, the center could no longer hold. The vampire split in two. One version led to Robert Pattinson of the Twilight series, by way of Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows; the other led to Romero. Fury and horror attached to the zombie, who became in Romero's vision the cockroach inheritor of the earth, a devolved human who abandoned all civilization, urbanity and pretense to civility in the search for food sources. Fears of population explosion and race genocide further shaped this monster.
A key influence would be Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, in which one man, Richard Neville, faces a horde of genetic vampires in the wake of a worldwide plague. In the novel, the monsters are identified as vampires, but that's not the bit that made its way to Romero. What really stuck was the apocalyptic scenario. Neville lives like a survivalist in a dead city. He arms himself with the latest weapons, boards up his besieged house and waits for other living humans to make contact. He sends out radio signals that go unheard. He rounds up supplies in decaying grocery stores and hunts sleeping vampires in their nests. His wife and children are dead of plague, like everyone else, but he feeds on memory like a vampire on blood. One memory haunts him, in particular, the night his dead wife came back for him.
In 1964, an Italian company made a low-budget but very atmospheric version of the book starring Vincent Price, entitled The Last Man On Earth. In the movie's best scene, the wife comes back, and we hear her voice, her nails scratching at the door, and we are very close to Romero. She has a consciousness, but it is already fading. All she really wants to do is feed. In general, the vampires in the movies are schlubs. They dress in whatever they died in, suits, sports wear, party dresses.
In The Walking Dead, the zombies are direct descendants of Matheson by way of Romero. They roam the streets at night--maybe because "it's cooler", one of the surviving humans speculates--and in the pack bobs a familiar face, the wife of a man who can't bring himself to kill the woman he loves, even if she would sooner eat him than kiss him. She wouldn't know her husband if she saw him; her mind is gone. The husband knows, though, and as the audience, we can't help but see that relationship as a big part of the horror.
People we know, people we've loved, have died and come back as our irredeemable enemies. They have been inhabited by a virus, and the virus possesses them. They don't want anything from us but our flesh. They can't be reasoned with. They can't be bought off or made love to or in any way reached by friendly or hostile persuasion. They can only be dispatched by a shot to the brain.
In a way, they are ideal occupiers. Moral complication is moot. You can never have a conversation with them, so they are easy to kill without conscience. No matter what they may have believed in life, in death they assert only one value. They are the most reductivist of monsters. Survivors rarely know exactly why the dead have come back to eat the living, but it almost never matters. The battle to survive so completely eclipses the need for explanation that attempts to understand begin to feel like suicidal tendency.
In a world overrun by zombies, intellectual pursuits get you eaten fast.
All of which should give us happy pause as this staple of low-brow, gut-bucket cinema goes decisively mainstream in the hands of one of our most sentimental filmmakers. Darabont makes movies about decent people caught in hell. His characters tend to be richly rounded in the grand manner. Their conflicts and identities rise above cliche, but never quite become original, which is a commercial plus. His best-known work, The Shawshank Redemption, a movie I don't particularly love, has a devoted following because it walks the line so well between maudlin sentiment and human complication.
It's clear to me already in The Walking Dead that Darabont has big plans for the genre. Though he's working from the text and images of a graphic novel by Robert Kirkland, the novel itself is steeped in forty years of Romero-inspired zombie mythology. That's the starting point, but it's going to vanish in the rearview quickly. In one scene, a man who doesn't know what's going on sits on a sidewalk step while a lone figure approaches slowly in the distance. In an earlier scene, a little girl with a half-devoured face looks perfectly innocent at first. Closer inspections reveals the truth and makes her a threat.
These may or not be frightening sequences, depending on your tastes, but they are very definitely direct lifts from earlier movies, which is shrewd. Darabont seems to be offering an olive branch early on to those who prefer the old ways, that primal world where zombies meet humans in mute combat, and no one tries to understand, and no one can afford much cosmic speculation on the meaning of it all. But it's only an olive branch. The series will definitely go for bigger prey. Early scenes suggest an uncustomary pathos.
My favorite involves a sheriff who goes out of his way to find a haggard woman who had earlier menaced him. She's been left with half a body, and he just wants to put her out of her misery. When he finds her, he says, "I'm sorry this happened to you."
It's a lovely and unexpected moment. It's also flagrantly emotional for a zombie flick, practically illegal. If I'm not mistaken, a suggestion of angelic choirs hovers in the background. Darabont goes there; it's what he does. I don't usually like this heavy touch, but it's a welcome approach here. He's making a promise. If it's true that the zombie is the ultimate monster of the culture war, our Godzilla, then we could use a long interrogation of that lurching creep. In the process, sadly, the walking dead will be lifted out of the realm of primal nightmare and into the sunlight of literary respectability, but that doom was inevitable.
Zombies won't be scary for very much longer. They've crossed the Rubicon of AMC. That doesn't mean they'll go the way of the vampire, but they will have lost forever the element of surprise. Through Darabont, we'll get to know them extremely well. They will leave behind their dirt past and rise to significance, and their reign of terror will quietly end. Sesame Street will get a zombie puppet to replace the out-moded Count.
Meanwhile, happily, unseen as yet, other monsters wait for us in the depths, not yet captured by art or commerce, but lethal and vital and indispensable to the maintenance of our fevered imaginations. Compared to them, the zombie may one day look as quaintly comforting as the vampire.
THE WALKING DEAD: The Culture War Gets The Monster It Deserves
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