American Zombification

No, I don't mean that everyone is becoming zombies from TV or for blindly following someone...although...

Actually, I'm talking the current zombie trend in pop culture. After the discussion last week about vampires, I thought I'd go a different direction and talk about a horror "villain" that doesn't have a unified lore. As I stated last week, most (good) vampire movies have some similar tendencies and lore that define the category and movies (or shows) that deviate from this lore run the risk of gathering a huge amount of haters and I'm one of them. Zombies, on the other hand, have a different set of rules depending on the "world" they inhabit. About the only thing you can count on anymore is that destroying the brain kills the zombie. That makes them something that can be fresh and interesting all the time, but also something that divides more people than it unites.

So let's dispel a few quote/unquote myths about the zombie horror genre and show why it is such a scattered lore:

George Romero is the grandfather of all zombie movies - this isn't really true unless you insert "modern" after the word all. Zombie movies have been around since "White Zombie" in 1936 (yes, the movie that Rob Zombie got his band name from); and if your definition of a zombie (we'll get to that in a minute) is a reanimated corpse, then "Frankenstein" in 1910 had one of those, so he only linked the two together. If he had just done that with "Night of the Living Dead", it probably would have been forgotten. That's not what made it interesting. Romero's zombie movies have always had something to say. "Night" was a metaphor for race relations just as "Dawn of the Dead" was about rampant consumerism. That's what made them great, not the zombies themselves.

Zombies eat brains - have you always thought that that was kind of a staple of the genre? Well, it hasn't been. In fact, no "classic" zombie film had that in it. What started that idea was a small part in "Return of the Living Dead"in 1985 (a personal favorite) where a severely decayed zombie groans "BRAINS!" at one point which just stuck from then on as "lore".

Zombies can drown - now here's a point of contention that leads to that point of no unifying lore. You've seen it in several instances that a zombie drowns in water. How? Unless you prescribe to a certain aspect that we will get to in the next section, zombies are dead and don't breathe, so how would they drown? Several movies ("Land of the Dead") and even "Walking Dead" have shown otherwise. Lucio Fulci's "Zombii 2" even has an infamous fight scene of a zombie walking on the ocean floor and encountering (and fighting) a shark!

Zombies are the undead - here's a big sticking point with me. That's generally what I consider to be a main tenet of the genre, but really it isn't. The term zombi itself came from the Caribbean, more specifically Haiti, where people were raised from the dead by the way of voodoo to do their master's bidding. Usually the bokor (witch doctor) is said to have trapped the person's soul so they can be controlled. It is even on the law books in Haiti that you can't zombifi someone. What really happens, though, is the person is drugged into a death like coma that lasts for days and then the person is dug up only to be brainwashed into thinking they are undead. Watch "The Serpent & The Rainbow" which is an excellent movie that delves into that. So can we really say they are not zombies if it is drugs or an infection? Hence the discrepancy over "28 Days Later" being a zombie movie or not (most "purists" and even director Danny Boyle argue not). Which brings me to my last point.

Zombies are slow shambling (un)dead - this is the other sticking point with me. Purists HATE the (fairly) recent advent of the fast moving zombie. They mostly think the shambling zombie is the only way to go, which I agree with, if they are the dead coming from the ground, but the virus style just doesn't jive with me when they shamble. I think people one day waking up and us being over-run with shambling reanimated corpses is a little more than far-fetched unless the incubation time is outrageous or we're all already infected. Otherwise, transmission from person to person takes time and a shambling zombie is too easy to get away from if there isn't a horde. This is what made "28 Days Later" so terrifying. How realistic it was with speed of transmission and speed of turning combined with fast moving "zombies". And that was just "rage". I, for one, like the fast movers AND the slow shamblers, just depends on if the world they are in makes sense for that speed.

And that's all I really have to say about them. Just hope I could shed some light on zombies and how they are an ever-evolving lore that some people take just a little too seriously. LOL.