Part One: Fear of losing control: Zombies!
Ah, the undead… slow, slimy, deliberate, and indestructible, except for the shot to the head… Zombies represent our fear of losing control: powerless to stop your own actions, mindlessly driven forward by irresistible urges. The urge to shuffle, ever so slowly. Or to eat brains. Zombies!
White Zombie (1932)
There’s some debate going on as to which film actually depicted the first zombie, but this must be one of the very earliest and probably the one that started the whole thing. In it, the legendary Bela Lugosi stars as Haitian voodoo master ‘Murder’ Legendre (SUCH a good name!), who, using his dark magic, turns the young & beautiful Madeleine into his mindless slave. You see, the very first zombies weren’t brain-munching monsters, no! They were living people stripped of their will, walking like… Well, like zombies, trapped in someone else’s command. (There’s probably some psychology in there too about how men like their women nice and roofied, but that’s another Top Ten altogether.) The plague starts here.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Right then! Now, it begins in earnest. For most people that like zombie movies, this is probably the first about what we consider ‘real’ zombies: the undead! And that brings us to the grandmaster of all zombie movies: George A. Romero! Solely responsible, I think, for basically creating the genre itself. In this one we meet a group of Pennsylvania residents trapped in a farmhouse, while undead ‘ghouls’ attack them from all sides. These were the originals, if you will: the zombie shuffle, the urge for brains, and the unkillability, except for the shot to the head. (And also burning, decapitating, exploding, things of that finite nature.) This is the first real outbreak.
Dawn of the Dead (1978)
When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth. Romero’s second. The zombies by now have spread, and four survivors barricade themselves inside a big Philadelphia shopping mall, from whose roof they shoot all the zombies that keep on coming, as if they’d like to go shopping still, in this horrible joke of an afterlife. In this, the zombies take on a more accustomed look: the grey faces, the whole ‘rawrr‘(with stretched-out arms)-thing… Supposedly Romero also wanted to make some comment about consumerism, but it’s basically one long zombie shooting gallery. Which is awesome. Fuck the rubber duck: if you miss, you die. Shoot ’em up!
The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
And now, they run! Oh, yeah! Despite the resemblance in title, this is not from Romero but from Dan O’Bannon. The first running zombies! Because, let’s be honest, the biggest flaw of the ‘originals’ was, after all, their slowness. Slimy and hard to kill as they may be, when you can outwalk something, it loses much of its dread. Not these, though. In Louisville, Kentucky, some idiots accidentally release a poison gas that resurrects, once again, the dead from their graves. As much a comedy as it is a horror, this movie is a riot. By now the zombies have gone from simple gray to the absolute gooey, the face-like-a-melted-pot-roast, the moist, shall we say… Send… more… paramedics..!
Resident Evil (2002)
Science takes over. Mad scientists start experimenting with a virus that causes zombicity in a high-tech underground lab run by an AI called the Red Queen. Yes, we’re in the present now. Milla Jovovich plays some sort of secret agent that, with a group of soldiers, breaks into the sealed facility to try and stop that evil bitch from killing everybody. She fails, of course, after looking all hot and sweaty and scarcely clad throughout the movie, and after laser grids cut some of her crew into little cubes, the virus escapes. Enter a slew of vastly inferior sequels to an already mediocre beginning, and this whole series is only acceptable because of A: Milla Jovovich and B: we now have new & improved, genetically enhanced super-zombies! Even harder to kill! Game on…
World War Z (2013)
And so, they spread. At first, the news reports of strange, seemingly random outbursts of violence occurring in cities worldwide. When things start to turn really strange, Brad Pitt gets tasked by his former employer, the UN, to investigate. Now, these zombies, they’re something special. Were the earlier ones running? These guys come in waves. The infection spreads very rapidly, and the zombies form hordes that quite literally engulf entire cities, forming horrible living towers of growling faces and grappling arms and legs that crawl up defensive walls and destroy everything in their path. Except sick people. They weave around them like water around rocks in a river. Zombies don’t like sick people, apparently (something about not getting their germs all over their undead bodies, I suppose), and therein lies this movie’s solution: inject yourself with a non-zombie virus, and you’ll be fine!
28 Days Later (2002)
But alas. Mr. Pitt’s heroics notwithstanding, it’s done. The world as we know it is gone. Cillian Murphy wakes up in a London hospital to discover that it’s completely empty. He walks outside in his blue hospital robe to find all of London deserted. The zombies in this one are again of the fast, aggressive, virus-induced variety, as is pretty much the standard by now. Society has collapsed completely, and we’re all back to our basic Mad Max survival strategy: kill or be killed. Dog eat dog. Zombie eat dog. (Do zombies eat dog brains?) End of the world, people. Or is it?
I Am Legend (2007)
Not if Will Smith has anything to say about it! He was a doctor, you see, out to cure cancer, except his virus delivery system turned the whole planet into zombies. Nice going there, doc. To his defense, though, as the sole survivor AND instigator of this global catastrophe, the good doctor IS trying to redeem himself by going out and catching those heaving, fast-moving ugly mothers and then experimenting on them in his basement. He and his faithful German shepherd roam the empty city, shooting deer for lunch and talking to mannequins. He eventually gets company from Alice Brega and some kid. Does the good doctor succeed in his attempt to re-cure mankind? Of course not.
Train to Busan (2016)
Because it has already spread all the way to South Korea! Over there, bad daddy Seok-woo feels guilty about abandoning his cute little girl, Soo-an, at a singing recital, so he takes her on a high-speed train (to Busan, yes) for her birthday. While en route, the train gets swarmed by zombies. Nice going there, Dad. After a lot of zombie bashing and kicking, they end up just outside the city of Busan, where they almost get shot by soldiers, mistaking them for zombies, were it not for Soo-an singing “Aloha ‘Oe” in tribute to her now dead bad daddy. Tear-jerker zombies! I mean, oops, spoilers. Adding to the shot to the head, burning, and exploding as means to kill a zombie: ramming a high-speed train up their ass also does the trick.
Zombieland/Double Tap (2009/19)
But you know we’re all well and truly fucked if it comes down to Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg to save what’s left of the world. But at least Jesse has rules. Although Woody’s big-ass double-barrel shotgun seems much more useful. The world is truly gone now. No twinkies anywhere. Streets are empty. Cities are empty. The whole country is empty; heck, the whole darned world may as well be. So why not have some fun? Destroy a mall whenever you feel like it. Drive any car you want. Shoot a zombie through its head at point blank range. It’s the little things, you know? I like this movie a lot. The humor, the banter between Jesse and Woody—it’s all great. But I like it most of all because those bastards get to live out one of my lifelong dreams: to smoke a joint with Bill Murray! No more ‘shoot ’em up!’ but ‘light ’em up!’ Followed by more shooting, of course. Zombies forever!
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