The Year of the Zombie

 You would think life is tough being a zombie but really things may have never been better for this cate-gory of the undead. in the Chinese zodiac 2013 is the Year of the Snake but in popular culture thia could be the Year of the Zombie.

 Zombies are one of those stock characters that can be wide range of things and still be recognized as themselves –those undead people that we want to avoid becoming. Since zombies have no anti-deformation league or a team of lawyers to represent them; zombies have become the perpetual punching bag in a gazillion first person shooter video games or the cheap mayhem of low budget horror films that can barely afford extras covered in fake blood

Movie zombies have gone through their own evolution; from creatures that incorporated their Haitian origins to, animated but dead, virus ridden eating machines.  Hollywood’s fascination with zombies started the movie White Zombie in 1932. It is a creepy atmospheric movie noted for its over the top acting and an early starring role for Bela Lugosi . In defense of the actors from the early 1930’s , sound was still a novel innovation and many film actors continued to  use techniques from the silent movie era.  Even the more natural actors from the first few years of the 1930’s  lacked subtlety and many times talked in that kind of slow well enunciated speech that made you think everyone was either deaf or stupid

White Zombie is an excellent choice for any all night long bad movie marathon. It’s bad enough to laugh at but good enough for any film student to be inspired by.  Recently the story was sold on option to be remade though the project remains on the shelf until a number of small copyright issues are settled.

For a while zombies stayed in the back ground of the movie monster pantheon. The next big step came with George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead. In 1968 this was a landmark film and it changed the direction of horror movies from the psychological fear of what lurked in the dark to an in your face presentation of gore.  Friday The 13^th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Hotel Hell, Halloween and dozens of other similar films all built on the success of Night Of The Living Dead.  

In Night Of the Living Dead, cinematic zombies didn’t need voodoo to justify their existence. Also and maybe unintentionally an element of grim comedy was added to realm of zombies   with the character of Sheriff McClelland. Several times he explains for the news cameras how his fellow citizens in Pennsylvania should deal with zombies.  I think the best all time Sheriff McClelland quote is “Yeah they’re dead. They’re all messed up.”

Next was The Omega Man, instead of a mysterious blast of radiation, the zombie-like denizens of this movie are transformed by virus.  It opened up so many new possibilities for zombies. They were no longer exotic immigrants from Haiti, they were our neighbors and former fellow citizens. They could stand in to represent middle class Americans or religious cult members.  In the 1970’s the zombies in The Omega Man didn’t look that different to us from the members of Sun Myung Moon’s  Unification Church. 

The other thing I find noteworthy is The Omega Man was a Hollywood studio film with a sizable budget  and professional actors like Charlton Heston and Rosalind Cash.   Night Of The Living Dead had a four hundred fold return on investment , Hollywood saw there was money to be made in zombies .

Zombies may have come to full bloom. While watching the coming attractions at the local cimaplex the trailer for Warm Bodies caught my attention, is this the beginning of a new genre? The zombie romantic comedy –girl meets zombie but she won’t give him up for dead.

My resident experts on zombies tell me this trend has been around. If you take past hit films like Shaun Of The Dead and Zombieland, both of those movies have a comic romantic element in them. They're zombie films you can take a date to.  

I guess as time goes on zombies will continue to develop. I have in my slush pile of movie scripts one title -The Unthinking Dead, were a corrupt town mayor has a voting constituency of zombies.  Zombies make the perfect citizen because they pay their taxes on time but don’t really need that many city services

And I just heard a pitch for a movie where zombies learn to like bacon instead of brains. Where two slacker brothers – and charter members of their local Epic Mealtime fan club, go out to save the world’s bacon.  There isn’t a working title yet but if you come up with one, please post me –just a little food for thought.

Maybe zombies will someday return to their Haitian roots. In another movie idea an American insurance adjuster is transferred to Haiti. His job is to investigate claims on life insurance policies –and if the dead person is a zombie, he has to “claw back” some of the money from the beneficiaries.

                                             How ever you like your zombies, it seems they are here to stay.