I like zombie stories. All two of them.

You gotcher origin story, where we find out why people are turning into zombies, and the other one, where the few human survivors try to hold out against the ever increasing zombie horde.

I won’t say I’ve seen every zombie film or read every zombie comic and novel produced since George Romero reinvented the concept in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, but I sure feel like I have, because no matter how well done, it’s only a matter of how clever the evasions and blood-letting are.

I saw the original NOTLD as the middle part of a disk til dawn drive-in marathon a year or two after it was first released, and amidst the other crap -movies I can’t remember other than one was a late Boris Karloff vehicle–NOTLD absolutely terrified me. Not only had I never been scared like that before, but that last bleak bullet to the brain felt like it hit me rather than the guy on the screen. I won’t say the movie changed my life, but it was the kind of moment that are usually only attributed to Bergman movies.

Gone were the days when you could stop a zombie by laying a track of salt across the threshold of your room (or at least I haven’t seen anybody try to use that in any modern zombie movies.) Dawn of the Dead was a little wackier, although the social commentary was kind of ham-fisted. But the idea of being surrounded by an unbeatable enemy is truly the stuff of nightmares, right up there with running but not being able to move forward and the weird feeling of your teeth detaching from you gums and tumbling  out like lumps of lead.

Day of the Dead ratcheted up the concept of the overwhelming menace and hopelessness, and Romero’s goofy sense of humor, another notch. Romero’s vision was as far from Lugosi in White Zombie or Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie as Erik Prince is from Doc Savage (and a good bit further from its near contemporary, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and became Mixed Up Zombies (1964) But no matter how I looked at it, Day was just a variant on Dawn.

And that’s pretty much where things have stayed ever since.

When Romero and his partners split up, him keeping the original storyline, while they got the ‘Living Dead’ title, the partners made Return of the Living Dead, written and directed by Dan O’Bannon. It tells a slightly alternate version of events from NOTLD, then goes off into out and out comedy, two decades before Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland. All three are great entertainment, but again, essentially the same stories.

28 Days Later had an original twist on the origin of the plague, but despite a fine cast, quickly became trapped in the conventions of the genre, and really ran out of steam for me when they got to the, er, ’safe zone.’  Honestly, with all the zombie material out there, shouldn’t they have known better?  (And technically, can we really call them zombies, since they aren’t dead, only infected?) 28 Weeks Later, a less successful film, is a fairly tame spread-of-the-disease tale, and the forthcoming sequel, 28 Months Later, looks to be more of the same. And there are other bloodier, cheaper, less imaginative knocks offs by the dozens.

Resident Evil , game and movie, took us into a higher tech world, and gave us the Licker, a mutated zombie (though with roughly the same goals as the originals). I’m not sure that takes us to a new level.

In comics, it’s not much different, whether in print or on the web: The Walking Dead, Escape of the Living Dead, Black Gas, Dead World, The Zombie Survival Guide, The Zombie Hunters, Everyday Decay…that’s just off the top of my head, and I know I’ve seen a lot more titles recently. There have been some signs of life (heh-heh) along the way, though no paradigm shifts that I know of. Marvel’s old series, Tales of the Zombie, was limited to a single creature and by the end of the original series he was developing free will and other non-zombie associated stuff.

And Xombie (not to be confused with Xombi), which started as a web cartoon then migrated to comics, has a zombie (xombie?) as a hero, with full consciousness and a code of conduct that keeps him from scarfing up every brain in sight. Marvel Zombies? Don’t make me laugh — at least not as hard as the first series did. Tremendously witty, bloody send up of the genre, but slapping familiar costumes on zombies and giving them the Stan Lee character treatment is a gimmick, not a game changer.

I’m not saying any of these are bad books or movies; in fact, at least as far as the comics go, most are really well done. (North 40, one of my favorite current books, has a whole raft of zombies shuffling and biting along, but they are such a small part of the overall weirdness that I’m not sure it should even appear in this post —but hey, never miss a chance to promote a good thing.) Obviously, the key element in the comics and movies (and novels, too, I suspect, though I’ve never read one besides King’s Cell) is the character of the surviving humans. But even given the level of writing that the best of this genre has to offer, I am still astounded at the continuing popularity and fascination with what remains two basic plot lines. It’s like watching endless repeats of any given TV show done with new casts, reminiscent of that year the  TV producers decided to remake old shows from the original scripts as a way of getting around the writer’s strike. How many episodes of the new/old Mission:Impossible and Alfred Hitchcock Presents did you watch?

In the end, I’m not complaining. It’s kind of comforting, like knowing that I can always get Cheerios at the store when and if I want them. (I love Cheerios.) And I can always hope that once the various zombie hordes finally polish off the human race for good and need a new food supply, they’ll make common cause and go after those real pains-in-the-wazoo and all-time media hogs….. vampires.

(As an aside, some folks consider I am Legend, the Will Smith version, a zombie movie. I hope they’re kidding. It might be a reasonably entertaining movie, but it kills me that after three tries, two with big budgets and major stars, Hollywood has still not had the courage to do an honest version of Richard Matheson’s powerful novel. It’s that ending that gets them every time, and it’s the ending that makes it one of the most thought-provoking horror/sf novels ever written. And just for the record, the creatures in the book are vampires, not zombies.)

//Tags: George Romero, H.P. Lovecraft, horror, Larry Latham, Lovecraft comic, lovecraft graphic novel, Lovecraft is Missing, Lovecraftian, Lovecraftian horror, Night of the Living Dead, north 40, zombies

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Noxious Fragments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.