From Dawn to Shaun: The State of Zombie Films and Televised Adaptations

Editor’s Notes: World War Z is now out on Blu-ray and DVD. Special features include ‘WWZ: Production’, ‘Looking to Science’, and digital copies. Christian Jimenez is finishing a doctorate on fascism, story-telling, and narrative theory. He currently is at work on a number of projects including a novel and a book on conspiracy theory in the work of director Stanley Kubrick.

The success of World War Z is likely to fuel another round of zombie films and/or televised adaptations. The genre (such as it is) has become so popular it made itself the object of satire in Shaun of the Dead (or the a similar light comedy such as Zombieland) and yet it hasn’t lost its potency. This is rather odd since most times horror characters go through cyclical phases. Beyond a certain point, vampires, aliens, and werewolves, wear out their welcome and have to wait a couple of years to be revived. But zombies have never gone away and one kind – especially today – them appearing just about everywhere.

One method has been to redefine and refine the zombie and its capabilities. Unlike vampires or werewolves, there is no canonical set of rules to obey. There is no Bram Stoker or Dracula text that lays down the law as it were on the subject. There isn’t even agreement if zombies first appeared in Victor Halperin’s White Zombie (1932) or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919).

It’s hard to track the origins of zombie movies much less the recent breed of running-zombie movies but there is a consensus that 28 Days Later kick-started the recent trend in the fast, mobile zombie. But what the zombie exactly is remains disputed.

Still, the vast majority of films have opted to depict the slow zombie, invariably stupid, silent, incapable of speech, and easily distracted. But World War Z is interesting for having not just zombies that give chase but able to leap incredibly large distances. It’s hard to track the origins of zombie movies much less the recent breed of running-zombie movies but there is a consensus that 28 Days Later kick-started the recent trend in the fast, mobile zombie. But what the zombie exactly is remains disputed. One might say zombies are just the undead. But even the phrase the walking dead doesn’t much capture what a “zombie” is or even does. Frankenstein isn’t considered a “zombie” since he (it?) is capable of some (slurred) speech.

Nor are zombies even in the horror genre per se. More recent films imagine zombies as a consequence of some infection, plague, and/or virus. And this is usually part of some larger (usually ecological) apocalypse of civilization collapsing. The zombie could belong in a medical drama as much as a horror film. Wes Craven in The Serpent and the Rainbow plays on this ambiguity since one can’t tell how much of the film is composed of actual zombies or more “natural” causes like drugging and medication.

Another possible reason zombies have become so popular is their allegorical potential.

George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was meant to be an obvious allegory about the Vietnam War and anti-Communist hysteria. But other times, zombie pictures are apolitical sometimes to the point of unintentional parody. The remake of Dawn of the Dead takes place in a mall yet the message of consumerism is completely lost! One might think this is impossible being set in a mall but part of the attraction may be precisely that zombies can be detached from any political perspective. Vampires with their bloodsucker metaphor are more dangerous and alarming (especially in terms of possible anti-Semitic resonances). But zombies are more ecumenical; they eat everything.

This indeed is the dilemma in writing a screenplay about the zombie. “Dead” as a word appears in many zombie titles and writing about the dead as dead is, frankly, hard to make interesting. Just why are they so popular? The easiest explanation is that they merely piggyback on the more inescapable “apocalyptic” fiction genre that has been with us since Plato and the Bible. But this argument can be taken too far sometimes. People often say there seems no equivalent werewolf apocalypse to speak of (but then there lots of vampire apocalypses). In any case, this misdirects our attention.

Indeed if the zombies manage to win they will either die of starvation or go to sleep, effectively ending all storytelling itself. Maybe this is the real – slightly sadomasochistic – urge that drives writers; a world without normal humans is comprehensible but a world without stories is hard to imagine.

It isn’t so much that werewolves and the apocalypse don’t come together but the sheer inhuman nature of zombies that make them visually attractive making them seem to fit better in videogames as The Resident Evil series demonstrates (not to speak ill of Paul William Scott Anderson’s Resident Evil). Werewolves like vampires are still human, if mutated, capable of some cognition. But if zombies took over it really would mean the end of humanity since all that would be left are mindless organisms trying to find human flesh to eat. (Of course, this has always been a fatal logical flaw in these stories – why bother with human meat? Are cows any less edible??) This has always been a rather problematic stereotype to keep the story going.

Why is becoming a zombie such a bad thing? Richard Matheson in I Am Legend takes this argument seriously but most films opt for making the eating part of zombies ridiculously painful and grotesque that no one could possible enjoy the experience – again, a sharp contrast to the (alleged) erotic attractiveness of being bitten by vampires.

Indeed if the zombies manage to win they will either die of starvation or go to sleep, effectively ending all storytelling itself. Maybe this is the real – slightly sadomasochistic – urge that drives writers; a world without normal humans is comprehensible but a world without stories is hard to imagine.