ONCE A SUB-GENRE REVILED BY CRITICS, adored by splatter movie anoraks and ignored by the masses, the zombie film has now entered the mass consciousness in a manner which would have seemed unimaginable a decade ago. And with the mainstream's anti-zombie defences breached by 2003's Shaun of the Dead, the undead are running amok across the media landscape.
Novels like Max Brook's World War Z and the gore-drenched Jane Austen remix Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are storming the bestseller lists. Advertisers use zombie movie iconography to promote everything from energy drinks to The Samaritans. And, with zombies having supplanted alien invaders as gaming's most inexhaustible adversaries, video games such as Dead Rising and Left 4 Dead ask us to battle the metabolically challenged.
In the multiplexes this month, Danny Dyer is fighting an all-female zombie uprising in the misogynistic Shaun of the Dead knock-off Doghouse, while this season's other Brit horror also-ran, the teen zombie flick Tormented, pits a chunky asthmatic revenant against a gaggle of photogenic sixth-formers.
But, unlike the outbreak in 28 Days Later, the contagion is not confined to these shores. In Hollywood, A-listers are joining the monster mash. Woody Harrelson is headlining the upcoming undead road movie Zombieland, and, after a frenzied bidding war with Leonardo DiCaprio's production company Appian Way, Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment is adapting World War Z for the screen. Meanwhile, Euro zombie thrillers such as Norway's Dead Snow, France's Mutants and Spain's terrifying Rec series are filling the EU quota for shambling flesh-eaters.
But why, after a torrent of zombie films earlier this decade, has this genre broken free of its crypt once more? The first factor is budgetary. While otherworldly monsters require expensive prosthetic make-up and convincing CGI, any aspiring director with access to camera equipment, grey face paint and a crowd of extras can summon up a semi-convincing zombie horde. It's a recession friendly MO enthusiastically adopted by Colin, a lo-fi British zombie movie purportedly shot for less than £100, which wowed this year's Cannes Film Festival. The big-screen version of World War Z will presumably have a more generous budget, but zombies are still cheaper to realise than giant robots, a fact not lost on a newly cost-conscious movie industry.
Budgetary advantages aside, the principal appeal of zombies is thematic. After all, they're not merely harbingers of death, they're also potent agents of violent change; a point best illustrated by the work of George A Romero, whose 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead established the rules of the genre and transformed an obscure figure from voodoo lore into a monster for the ages.
A mass threat with no individual voice, Romero's undead legions have proved to be remarkably adaptable, serving different subtexts in each of his Dead films. In Night, the flesh-eating ghouls were a metaphorical manifestation of the turmoil gripping late 1960s America. In his most celebrated work, the shopping-mall horror satire Dawn of the Dead (1978), he casts the encroaching zombies as literally mindless consumers. Land of The Dead (2005), meanwhile, sees an army of socially evolving zombies, all clad in the blue collar garb of their pre-death professions, laying waste to the wealthy denizens of a gated community. In Romero's work, the proletariat aren't merely lumpen, they're also ravenous and partially decomposed.
Despite Romero's social metaphors growing clunkier with each sequel, his contention that the zombies are us is central to their appeal. Yes, individual zombies are easily countered, but en masse they're a force to be reckoned with. Vampires remain an aloof, frilly-shirted elite but the zombified are a populist movement willing to embrace all comers, and their single-minded perseverance is strangely admirable.
Mobs confer a sense of exhilaration and unity upon their members, but their presence is usually a threat to the established order and a terrifying prospect for anyone outside their ranks. And film-makers, free to affix new meanings to the undead's mindless wailing, regularly deploy zombie throngs as a proxy for any apocalyptic anxiety or threat.
28 Days Later, touching on our fears of urban violence, gives us enraged turbo zombies. Dead Snow, part of the Nazi zombie sub-genre, drolly suggests that fascism's well-preserved corpse might be re-animated at any moment. Meanwhile, Rec and its Hollywood remake Quarantine, exploit our fears of terrorism and biological warfare to harrowing effect.
In zombie cinema the world ends not with a whimper, but a chorus of sepulchral groans.
Vampires have the edge, by ALISTAIR HARKNESS
Lesbian Vampire Killers
IT PROBABLY HASN'T ESCAPED YOUR attention that vampires are big business again. Ever since teen bloodsucker romance Twilight displaced Quantum of Solace from the top of the US box-office charts late last year, these garlic-haters have been sinking their teeth ever deeper into the neck of popular culture. Need proof? Just look around you. Earlier this month, the trailer for Twilight's forthcoming sequel New Moon made headlines after being watched a record-breaking ten million times in its first week online. On Tuesday, HBO's acclaimed vampire show, True Blood, receives its first British airing at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. In cinemas from Friday is a live-action remake of Blood: The Last Vampire, and film director Guillermo Del Toro's debut novel, The Strain, about a viral vamp outbreak in New York, is in all good bookshops now. This is all in a year that has already seen another instalment of the woeful vampires-versus-werewolves franchise Underworld (OK, forget that one), as well as the magnificent Swedish fang flick, Let the Right One In.
What gives? Well, the truth is, since the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897 and the release of FW Murnau's silent classic Nosferatu in 1922, vampires have never really been out of vogue. The seductive elegance of Hammer's Christopher Lee-starring Dracula productions, the overblown pomp of Interview with a Vampire, the scuzzy Western outlaw cool of Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark, the hedonistic goth posturing of The Lost Boys, the ass-kicking teen angst of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the comic-book stylings of the Blade movies and From Dusk Till Dawn – vampires have been through plenty of iterations and mutations to become one of the more adaptable and resilient forces of evil over the years.
They've also provided the horror genre with a more sophisticated way to address the social and political complexities of the times. Yeah, yeah, zombies are bluntly effective tools for talking in generalities about the oppressed masses, consumer culture or media manipulation, but they lack the all-important element of human complicity that gives vampire stories their bite. Take their sexual dimension. The transference of infected blood and the way desire is inextricably linked to death made them a perfect visual metaphor for the Aids crisis, something that both Tony Scott's The Hunger and Francis Ford Coppola's take on Bram Stoker's Dracula riffed upon. They're good for addressing issues of sexuality, too. In Let the Right One In, when vampire next door Eli asks her smitten, yet-to-be-bitten 12-year-old neighbour Oskar: "What if I'm not a girl?" we assume she's referring to her status as a vampire, but her androgynous looks suggest she might be referring to her gender, which adds a whole other layer of complexity to the film's coming-of-age storyline.
Twilight's abstinence theme, meanwhile, can be read as either the product of the conservative, family-values moralising of the Bush era (when Stephenie Meyer's source novel was published), or a sincere attempt to capture the all-consuming nature of falling deeply in love for the first time.
Here, vampirism essentially functions as an extended metaphor for the tortuous nature of female adolescence, but a vampire's feverish impulses also make them perfect for exploring the society-ravaging effects of addiction (see George Romero's Martin or Abel Ferrara's The Addiction), the breakdown of the nuclear family (Near Dark, The Lost Boys, Twilight again) and issues of class and politics. On the latter, Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampire, provided a fine critique of the exploitative nature of capitalism, while True Blood subverts the aristocratic traditions of vampire lore to make them the ones fighting for acceptance in a world where blood substitutes have negated their need for human feeding. For a further twist on things, in True Blood it is humans who seek out vampire blood for its sexual performance-enhancing properties.
Indeed, it's this complex interaction between humans and vampires that give them a metaphorical edge over zombies. The tag line for The Lost Boys – "Sleep all day, party all night, never grow old – it's fun being a vampire" is usually invoked as a sign of the genre's shallowness, but the whole point of vampires is that there's an aspirational quality to their lifestyle. That's why Time magazine got it wrong recently when it declared the zombie "the official monster of the recession" because that presupposes we're innocent victims. Banks may have put temptation in our way with the promise of cheap credit, but nobody forced us to collectively run up millions in debt that we had no hope of ever paying back. Vampire stories better reflect the complexities of a world in which the elite can bleed us dry for their own ends while simultaneously seducing us into doing their bidding. Life sucks like that. But you won't find that out from a zombie.
The full article contains 1596 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
