R and Julie have opted out of the capitalist conveyor belt that turns humans into braindead zombies and or war-mongering huddled masses. While it could also be read as a fundamental laziness to even stand up for themselves, the two succeed by not fighting.
This guest post by Emily Katseanes appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.
George Romero’s 1978 zombie flick Dawn of the Dead opens in a newsroom. As the world descends into chaos, darkness and violence, two talking heads are deadlocked into an intellectual debating about the causes of what’s killing so many people and then bringing them back. The theme of humanity’s utter banality and pettiness is backed up as we meet our main character, Francine, who is trying to get her boss to stop broadcasting inaccurate shelter station locations at the bottom of their screen. Even the 2004 remake of this movie repeats this cynicism. Zack Snyder’s film of the same name includes a particularly gruesome scene in which a human husband restrains his pregnant, zombie wife, keeping her alive to birth an undead child, which of course, causes the outbreak to take down the rest of the remaining humans.
Seriously, what a bad day.
The message in both cases is overwhelmingly clear: the post-apocalyptic zombie landscape is one in which the violence of the undead’s feasting is small potatoes compared to man’s inhumanity to fellow man. It’s a familiar theme in both dystopian and zombie genres.
And that’s what makes Warm Bodies such an interesting dystopian flick: The film deftly defies expectations by presenting a world gone to hell that’s still full of humanity and, dare I say it, romance. The 2013 film centers around a charmingly vulnerable and mostly decay-free Nicholas Hoult as R, a zombie with a heart of gold and a reluctance to resort to the monstrous behavior normally associated with the undead. Partway through the film, he encounters Julie (Teresa Palmer), a tough, tender, and fully alive human girl. The two form a friendship and, later, romantic relationship. The star-crossed lovers’ relationship sets off a chain reaction that ends up rehabilitating most of the undead and uniting them with the living against the malicious, more-decayed Boneys.
The film first defies the genre by blending the zombie gross-out factor with a teenage romance, as if George Romero and John Hughes collaborated on a script. But beyond that, Warm Bodies stoutly rejects the pessimism that haunts the hellscapes that are Romero’s zombie America and Hughes’ Shermer, Illinois high schools. Instead, the film fully embraces all the messiness of the Millennial and manages to make an argument for hope in that mostmalignedgeneration.
Hoult’s character R is the narrator and driver of the plot. He’s a deadpanned young dude, given to quips such as this introduction to his best friend Marcus, played humorously by Rob Coddry: “This is my best friend. By best friend, I mean we occasionally grunt and stare awkwardly at each other.”
R’s blend of irony and sincerity—he really does count Marcus as a friend even as he pokes fun at the concept—registers well with the Millennial attitude. Hoult, who’s even Millennial enough to be the subject of a Buzzfeed listicle, is outfitted as well as any Brooklynite or San Franciscan can be who’s cool without trying to be too cool. He wears a red hoodie with skinny jeans and lives in an airplane bedecked with a record player and other irony-heavy objets d’art, such as a bobbleheaded Chihuahua and an old-fashioned viewfinder.
R, as befits the stereotype of the Millennial hipster, is sensitive almost to a punch line. He laments the loss of the pre-zombie world not for its safety or conveniences, but for a population that “could express themselves, and communicate their feelings and just enjoy each other’s company.” (In that most-Millennial blend of irony and sincerity again, the movie plays off a visual gag, showing a world of everyone sucked into smartphones, even as R’s voiceover remains serious.)
Julie, on the other hand, reads as a woman of the new Millennium, albeit differently. Although she’s not the bespoke-wearing, Zooey Deschanel, quirky girl who handcrafts and bakes, she’s a woman in the vein of Scandal’s Olivia Pope or The Mindy Project’s Mindy Lahiri. She’s traditionally feminine and yet stoic, independent and able to hold her own against any men (including her dad, played by John Malkovich). Whereas R is the perpetually awkward, sensitive boy, Julie is cool, competent and clad in plaid.
He may be undead and falling in love with someone alive, but like teens the world over, R still can’t pick up his clothes.
Beyond aesthetics, R and his fellow fresher zombies, called “u,” increasingly follow Millennial markers. They’re more listless than ravenous, underwhelmed rather than driven by rage and seem, more than anything, bored by the routines of middle-class life. R and Marcus meet to hang out at an airport bar and other zombies are seen going through the motions of their pre-death jobs. But, again echoing Millennials and the fraught economy they came of age in, it’s a middle-class lifestyle that’s no longer accessible to them. In an economic recession that renders a 9-to-5 with a travel expense account almost as mythical as a zombie, the lifestyle that Marcus portrays of the traveling businessman is as far away for Julie and R as it is for most 18- to 24-year-olds.
R and Julie also tap into the somewhat aimless creativity of the hipster/Yuccie generation. They’re creative, but it’s geared toward no particular endeavor. Julie and R aren’t poets, painters, or revolutionaries. Their creativity expresses itself as curators: of clever one-liners, tastefully decorated rooms, and arty Polaroids of each other. They’re lifestyle bloggers for the post-apocalyptic youth.
All of this makes the dystopia of Warm Bodies at once threatening and not threatening at all. While the zombie threat is a plot catalyst, the actual undead shamblers often take a backseat to the interactions between the two leads. And that’s where Warm Bodies’ genre subversion really takes off. Like all dystopian flicks, it’s a commentary on our current world. The difference is that while most films in this genre present characters who are oblivious or somehow unaware of the lurking catastrophe humanity’s bringing upon itself, Warm Bodies presents characters who are well aware the world’s already gone to hell. They’re just not going to buy into all that negativity, man.
“I guess I’ll improve the world or…whatever.”
And that’s not just a twist on the zombie dystopia. It’s a twist on how R and Julie’s generation is painted throughout media.
In addition to being the main characters, R and Julie are the happiest. In a world that’s fraught with danger and starvation, most of the other humans and zombies on screen seem to experience only fear and grim determination. In one of their early scenes together, R and Julie drive a red convertible. It’s a familiar scene of carefree enjoyment, whooping and hollering as they speed around.
But even beyond that, Julie and R are successful. They’re the ones who enact change in the world, creating a “cure” for zombie-ism by getting the undead creatures to feel love again. And they do it by proving the Millennials’ critics simultaneously right and wrong. R, Julie and their allies end up shifting the world by doing…not much of anything. It’s Julie and R’s simple affection for each other, born of those afternoons taking Polaroids and dancing to records, that gets the zombies feeling, dreaming and living again.
R and Julie have opted out of the capitalist conveyor belt that turns humans into braindead zombies and or war-mongering huddled masses. While it could also be read as a fundamental laziness to even stand up for themselves, the two succeed by not fighting. It is the peaceful revolution hippies of the 1960s might have wanted or it’s the ultimate move by a generation of wimps.
But whatever it is, it works. It changes the world, for the better. And that’s a narrative that’s not only missing from most dystopias, but from many depictions of the current generation. Of course, like a lot of narratives about Millennials, this remains problematic. The world of Warm Bodies is overwhelmingly white and the characters read as upper-middle class. In a film arguing for optimism for the youth, it’s both telling and disappointing that the youth included are white and affluent. There’s still a long way to go to get our representations to actually reflect the demographic of the world they exist in. It’s also easy to blow off the movie as teenage fluff and in a way, it is. It’s a cutesy romance that uses Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as a skeletal structure and adds a killer soundtrack and a budding romance to flesh it out. But like R, who (mild spoiler alert), becomes human by the end of the film, it’s a vision of humanity that grows less not more fetid as it goes on.
A native Nevadan, Emily Katseanes has degrees from the University of Nevada and New Mexico State University. She has done everything from cleaning houses to filing fatality information at a gold mine to reporting on city council meetings in rural Idaho. Currently, though, she works her favorite job of all: teaching English at Louisiana State University.
While the men are shopping, Francine is left alone to fend off a zombie with no means of self-defence. As she attempts to escape onto the roof, the others return to save her from the zombie and bring her back inside. She is dismayed to realize that they intend to stay there indefinitely. While the men enthusiastically describe the mall as a “kingdom” and a “goldmine,” Francine describes it as a “prison.”
This guest post by Jennifer Krukowski appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.
George A. Romero’s 1978 zombie classic, Dawn of the Dead, poses many of the same questions as your average zombie flick: what is the difference between living and surviving, and what makes us human? Where Dawn of the Dead stands apart from the rest is its exploration of the childlike bliss of denial in a time of crisis. We don’t know what the world looks like in this particular zombie epidemic because the heroes isolate themselves from it after seeing a mere glimpse of the beginning of the end. The characters spend more time literally watching paint dry than fighting zombies, and yet it is still an entertaining, scary, and thought-provoking experience for the viewer. The end of the world means not having to plan for the future. There’s a banal comfort in that. It is pleasurable to imagine certain responsibilities crumbling away in the wake of a disaster.
Of the four main characters in this film — Roger (Scott H. Reiniger) and Peter (Ken Foree) who are police officers, and Francine (Gaylen Ross) and Stephen (David Emge) who work for a local news station — Francine is the only one who does not indulge in the luxury of denial. She is willing face the scary and uncertain future of the outside world, whereas Peter, Stephen, and Roger prefer to distract themselves from the possibility that there may not be one. Being that Francine is nearly the only survivor, Romero seems to express through this film that, against all odds, hope for a better life — or at the very least, a “real” life — is far more brave than it is naive.
Stephen, Roger, Peter, and Francine flee the city in a stolen helicopter — the most detached mode of transportation available. When they land on the roof of an abandoned shopping mall, the initial plan is to rest briefly, get a few supplies, and move on. As the men sleep, eat, and smoke, Francine paces anxiously, ready to keep moving. Initially, Peter and Roger venture into the mall only to collect a few essential supplies. On their way down, they switch on the power for everything in the mall because “we might need it,” although things like rotating window displays and decorative water fountains are functionally useless beyond creating the illusion of normalcy. As soon as they realize that they have access to a fully stocked department store, the desire for necessity is lost in the wake of a delirious shopping spree. Even Francine’s boyfriend, Stephen, agrees that Peter and Roger are acting like “maniacs,” and yet he grabs a gun that he doesn’t know how to shoot and rushes off to join the fun.
No rest for Francine
While the men are shopping, Francine is left alone to fend off a zombie with no means of self-defence. As she attempts to escape onto the roof, the others return to save her from the zombie and bring her back inside. She is dismayed to realize that they intend to stay there indefinitely. While the men enthusiastically describe the mall as a “kingdom” and a “goldmine,” Francine describes it as a “prison.” And though it may be smarter to leave, it is certainly more convenient to stay. Squatting in a shopping mall seems like a viable option to everyone but Francine who, feeling trapped and vulnerable, knows that it is too delicate a bubble to settle into. She makes frequent attempts, often subtle and sarcastic, to remind the others that they are simply indulging in a fantasy, most notably when she refuses to accept a wedding ring from Stephen, telling him that “it wouldn’t be real.” If he wants to marry her, he must part with his fantasy life first. He never does.
The dichotomy of real/artificial is exhibited in many ways as the characters go through the motions of daily life, where everything is an imitation of something familiar and resources seem unlimited. Pre-recorded announcements to shoppers are an unsettling reminder of how alone they are. Roger gorges himself on candy and plays an arcade game wherein his character dies, but comes back to life to play another round with no consequence. For a moment, Peter may be contemplating a return to the outside world when he takes money from the bank, but when he and Stephen strike a pose for the security cameras with fists full of cash, he knows that his actions lack consequence, and thus the money, too, lacks value. He will never spend it.
Stephen and Peter pose for security cameras
Mannequins, a vaguely threatening presence, are featured almost as prominently as zombies and contribute similarly to the theme. Roger is startled briefly by a mannequin, and the mannequins are also used for target practice. When Francine attempts to comfort herself by indulging in a makeover, she models her hair and makeup after a gaudy mannequin head. It is one of the film’s more disturbing images, reflecting her slow mental break from reality, which she is ultimately able to overcome.
Francine’s makeover
Time seems to stand still for a while in the shopping mall, perfectly preserved and untouched by an outside world that grows increasingly mysterious as radio and television broadcasts become more sporadic. One of the only signifiers of time passing is Francine’s pregnancy. As she nears her due date, her body is as a visual reminder of the inevitability of change, which may subconsciously threaten the others who are less willing to consider the future when, for the moment, everything they need is right at their fingertips. While it would be possible to give birth inside the mall, Francine’s pregnancy forces her more than anyone else to physically experience the passage of time and consider her future, no matter how uncertain it may be. It is very possible that the mall is the safest place for them to be at the time, and while we can only speculate as to why exactly it is so important to Francine that they get away, what really seems to make her nervous is not having an exit strategy. She is the first to demand helicopter lessons from Stephen in case anything happens to him. As Stephen is her lover and presumably the father of her unborn child, it is surely more difficult for her to imagine the possibility of his death than it is for Peter or Roger, but she has the strength to consider the dangerous reality of their situation and prepare for the worst case scenario.
Francine contemplates maternity
It is not only her future responsibilities as a mother that gives Francine strength. This is a part of her personality. She is often drinking and smoking, so she is not portrayed as a perfect mother-to-be. Not everything she does is for the benefit of her child’s future. While at her job in the television studio, we see that she is highly focused and assertive. When a cameraman walks off the job during a live broadcast, Francine quickly jumps behind the camera and takes over. This example of taking the wheel is mirrored later when she has completed her flying lesson with Stephen, sincerely happy for the first time in the film. It is in her nature to take charge, which is ultimately what saves her life.
Francine may not have a perfect survival strategy. It could be that she is the one who is truly in denial. But in the end, Francine wants to leave the mall, and she does. Roger and Stephen want to stay, and they die inside. When their bubble becomes overrun by looters and zombies, Peter decides that he would rather kill himself than face the uncertain outside world, but at the last moment he changes his mind and joins Francine in the helicopter. They don’t have much fuel and they might not survive, but waiting to die is no way to live, no matter how you pass the time. Although the future probably isn’t optimistic for Francine and Peter, their willingness to face reality is what keeps them alive. At least until they take off.
Francine escapes with Peter
Jennifer Krukowski is your average eco-feminist horror enthusiast. A graduate of York University’s Theatre Studies program, Jennifer currently works as an actor and odd-jober in Toronto while pursuing an interest in writing for film and television.
The crumbling cement in this relationship is the injured little girl lying on the table downstairs. Her parents are united only on the question of her safety. Unsurprisingly, Karen has no voice or agency of her own. The adults perceive her as entirely helpless— “Maybe it’s shock,” her mother says of her condition. “She can’t possibly take all the racket…”
This guest post by Julia Patt appears as part of our theme week on The Terror of Little Girls.
Kyra Schon had exactly one line—“I hurt”—and less than ten minutes of screen time in George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead. Much of her role consisted of lying supine on a table. Her big scene happened 84 minutes into a 95-minute film. Her character is not a perennial favorite on the creepiest kids in cinema lists. (Although when she does appear, she’s No. 1.) But before Regan MacNeil showed us her infamous head-spinning trick, before Damien took the world’s most sinister tricycle ride, and before Samara hauled herself out of the television and into our nightmares, there was little Karen Cooper, who ate her dad and stabbed her mom with a garden trowel.
Kyra Schon as Karen Cooper
It’s impossible to understand Karen without discussing her parents, Harry (Karl Hardman) and Helen (Marilyn Eastman); initially, her family is all that gives her context in Romero’s strange new world. But the Coopers always bothered me in Night of the Living Dead. They didn’t seem to belong. After all, almost half the film passes before they appear. Ben (Duane Jones), our protagonist, has spent a good chunk of screen time securing an abandoned farmhouse against the undead. All the stuff you want a good survivor to do, he does: barricade the doors and windows, look for supplies, and settle the nearly catatonic survivor-girl Barbra (Judith O’Dea) on the sofa. Forty minutes in and we’re all ready to weather the long night of Romero’s undead apocalypse.
And then the Coopers emerge from the cellar snarling with metaphorical significance—i.e., the nuclear family staggers out of the underworld to reassert its importance. We’re what you’re meant to defend, they seem to say. Of course, their presence also highlights the awful truth of any zombie apocalypse film: there are no safe places.
If the dead don’t overrun a stronghold, you will have to deal with the living eventually.
Karl Hardman as family man Harry Cooper
By the way, good luck if the living you have to deal with is Harry Cooper. He’s all the worst characteristics of the patriarchy packaged and amplified: aggressive, entitled, self-centered, oddly petulant, and arrogant. He won’t apologize for not coming up to help, despite hearing Barbra’s screams. Instead, he lashes out at Ben for criticizing him. When the others refuse to join him in the cellar, he throws a temper tantrum. He’ll board up that door and leave them to rot, understand? Moments later, he furiously demands they share the supplies Ben’s scavenged from the house. “We’ve got to have food down there,” Harry blusters. “We’ve got a right.” Helen, his wife, is not much more compelling. Bitter and cynical, she can’t resist poking at her husband’s neuroses:
“That’s important, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“To be right and for everyone else to be wrong.”
We know from just a few lines of dialogue that this is no close-knit couple or loving family, for all that its structure might evoke white picket fences and suburban houses. (Note: it’s unclear where the Coopers come from, but they seem neither rural nor urban.) And in case we miss the point, Helen sums up their situation this way: “We may not enjoy living together. But dying together isn’t going to solve anything.”
Marilyn Eastman as Helen Cooper
The crumbling cement in this relationship is the injured little girl lying on the table downstairs. Her parents are united only on the question of her safety. Unsurprisingly, Karen has no voice or agency of her own. The adults perceive her as entirely helpless— “Maybe it’s shock,” her mother says of her condition. “She can’t possibly take all the racket…” her father objects to bringing her upstairs. She is, they believe, the thing to be protected, shielded from the horror of the events outside. Like the house itself, if they can get her through the night, it will all be OK.
What no one understands in Romero’s first film is, of course, that the undead have already infected Karen. While audiences of Dawn of the Dead and every zombie movie after know that a bite is a death sentence, the characters in Night of the Living Dead haven’t fully realized what they will have to sacrifice. The news reports in the background that families “will have to forgo the dubious comfort of a funeral.” But the problem is much more insidious and frightening: families will have to forgo the comfort of family in order to survive.
It only takes a brief moment of contact for the Coopers to lose Karen. And no amount of hand-holding or parental influence will undo the contamination. While many debate the extent to which Night of the Living Dead is a political allegory, Romero has repeatedly stated he wanted the film to capture the social unrest of the 1960s. Once exposed to the chaos of the world outside, Karen is irrevocably changed. She is about to become part of the danger. Only Ben seems at all cognizant of the fact that she may pose a threat to them. “Who knows what kind of disease those things carry,” he points out when her parents acknowledge that she’s been bitten.
Sure, she looks helpless…
Until the end of the film, Karen remains what she seems: a sick little girl. She dies and rises amidst the chaos of the house being overrun by the undead. After a struggle, Ben shoots Harry, who went for his gun. Harry stumbles down to the cellar and staggers towards his little girl, hand outstretched in what should be a touching scene between parent and child. The next time we see the two of them, Karen crouches over her father—now dead or unconscious— a handful of meat in her hands and his blood on her lips. She does not need his affection, but she will take sustenance from him.
Undead Karen takes a bite out of dear old Dad
Helen finds them this way and, having drawn Karen’s attention, backs into a corner, horrified. Karen advances and then stabs her mother with a garden trowel in an almost surreal, Hitchcockian sequence. Helen is helpless against her undead daughter. All she can say is “baby,” which Karen does not acknowledge or recognize. Her murder of her mother is ultra-violent; she deals several blows to Helen’s abdomen, thus destroying the origin of her own life.
Romero’s living dead regularly use tools
The film and the scene disturbed audiences to no end, and Karen Cooper has become one of the iconic images of Romero’s films. As said, her moment is brief. Yet, it sticks with us. If we compare Karen to the other women in the film, she initially does not seem unlike Barbra, who is mostly helpless and overwhelmed. She must depend on the others for her survival; alone, she wouldn’t make it. Predictably, these young women are fragile, delicate, and need protection. They are not meant for the horrors outside the house.
This appears to be true up until Karen’s point of resurrection. Where Barbra is devoured, Karen is transformed. Unlike her parents, who are trying to hold onto the old social norms, or Ben, who will do anything to survive, Karen joins the restless mob of the undead. Not consciously or willfully, it’s true, but the end result is the same. Although briefly a victim, she becomes the monster and destroys the remains of her family. She cements her status as a member of the undead by consuming her father and increases their numbers by murdering her mother. These two acts definitively separate her from humanity. She neither wants nor needs the shelter of the family unit.
Karen Cooper transformed
What’s subversive about Karen Cooper, then, is that she doesn’t just die. In the eyes of society, a good, innocent little girl would simply perish when she encounters something so monstrous. Instead, she joins it. Embodied in her, the new generation does not save us or give us hope. Rather, they become part of the chaos. And no amount of reasoning or pleading will sway them.
Julia Patt is a writer from Maryland. She also edits 7×20, a journal of twitter literature, and is a regular contributor to the Tate Street High Society literary blog. Follow her on twitter: https://twitter.com/chidorme
Birth of the Living Dead is Rob Kuhns’ documentary of the making of George Romero’s 1968 cult horror genre game-changer Night of the Living Dead. Bitch Flicks writers Max Thornton and Amanda Rodriguez discuss both the documentary (BOTLD) and the original film itself (NOTLD).
Bitch Flicks writers Max Thornton and Amanda Rodriguez discuss both the documentary (BOTLD) and the original film itself (NOTLD):
MT: I spent my teens as an ardent fan of all things zombie (and I have a lot of theories about what this says about my relationship to embodiment as a trans person, but that’s another discussion). I went on a zombie walk in London for the 40th anniversary of NOTLD in 2008. I skipped a college class to go meet George Romero when he was doing a signing for the Creepshow re-release. My first academic publication is a chapter on zombies (and queerness, and Jesus, because those are my other favorite things). My cred as a Romero fan is well established, and I’m guessing yours is, too. Do you think someone who’s less of a zombie nut — or perhaps even someone who hasn’t seen NOTLD — could enjoy Birth of the Living Dead?
AR: I am a huge horror and zombie fan, but I didn’t start out life that way. I saw NOTLD when I was 4. I can empathize with Ebert’s observations of the younger children who didn’t have the resources to protect themselves from the fear and dread engendered by the film. I refused to watch NOTLD again until I’d graduated college because it was so formative and so terrifying. Perhaps in large part because of NOTLD, I have always been fascinated with what frightens us and why. The deep psychology of fear and what that fear represents within a larger cultural context have been the subjects of much of my critical analysis and fiction writing. I love the idea that horror, in particular the zombie, is a physical manifestation of our societal fears.
Karen cannibalizes her father, illustrating society’s fear of the brutality of youth.
That said, I’ve only properly seen NOTLD once, so I think the documentary can be interesting to people who aren’t as entrenched in zombie culture; although who isn’t these days, considering they’re such a popular horror subgenre? I found Romero’s continued enthusiasm for the film all these years later to be quite endearing. Film nerds and aspiring indie filmmakers could find value in this documentary. People interested in history, particularly the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war could benefit from seeing this documentary, as it and NOTLD deal with those huge cultural landmarks from a different angle than we’re used to seeing. I also really appreciated the way the documentary casts NOTLD as a meta-narrative of the actual making of the film: the DIY approach and guerrilla tactics the crew used despite the huge filmmaking machine that is Hollywood. The process of making the film becomes its own protest against the Hollywood status quo, the insistence on professional actors, the elitism of art and entertainment. In a way, this is exactly the function of zombies; to disrupt the normalcy and complacency of institutions.
MT: Is this documentary perhaps a little too much of a hagiography? Does it give Romero too much credit for inventing the zombie as we know it, provide too little contextualization of the Haitian origins of the zombi, and thus perhaps whitewash the racism, colonialism, and cultural appropriation inherent in our cultural enthusiasm for the zombie?
Haitian Zombi in ‘I Walked with the Dead’
AR: Though I thought Romero was a sweet man, and as a fan, I couldn’t help but gobble up his nostalgic reminiscences, the documentary underscored for me the importance of the concept of the death of the author and the fallacy of the notion of authorial intent. It is clear that Romero had no idea what he was making. This film is considered a cult classic and of cinematic significance in spite of him. He makes it clear that he didn’t intend to comment on race by casting a black protagonist, and I doubt he had any idea he was critiquing the Vietnam war or truly upsetting the horror genre in a profound way. I think the film does all those things in a compelling way, which is why it withstands the test of time and is infinitely imitable. Without divesting him of his agency completely, the documentary shows that film experts and filmmakers today understand the important work he created more than Romero himself does.
You’re right that the documentary seems to gloss over the true origins of the zombi, which does divorce it from its racially-charged roots. However, I always thought the movies that predate NOTLD featuring Haitian zombis were painfully racist. Romero zombies are different from the Haitian zombi and speak to our culture in a different way…probably because the Romero zombie is versatile and can morph into any of our greatest fears. It would have made sense, though, to have the documentary further explore the origins of the zombi. Since BOTLD is so racially aware, I would have enjoyed seeing it tackle the implications of colonialism and appropriation. Do you think Romero’s so-called reinvention of the zombi is ultimately racist? Does his malleable notion of zombies only address first-world fears and insecurities?
George Romero Portrait
MT: I think this is something that deserves more interrogation than it tends to receive — consider the fact that he always cites I Am Legend as a huge influence, and not the Haitian voodoo roots or even the massively racist earlier zombie films like White Zombie — but then NOTLD doesn’t actually use the term “zombie.” As well as getting more credit than he deserves, perhaps Romero gets more flak than he deserves when we criticize his appropriation of the zombi, because, as you point out, he doesn’t necessarily know quite what he was doing. (I would note that some people are attempting to balance out the deification of Romero as inventor of the modern zombie: the editors of my zombie chapter, for example, were very insistent on giving Romero’s co-writer Russo equal credit.)
I really enjoyed the film’s emphasis on the social context of the late sixties and how that shaped much of the imagery and message of NOTLD: race riots, Nam, anger, disillusionment with the hippie movement’s failure to elicit major structural change. Are we currently in a comparable period of crisis and distrust in institutions, reflected in the renewed zombie boom of the past decade? And yet is the profound social consciousness of NOTLD largely missing from zombie stories today? For example, I rage-quit The Walking Dead at the end of Season One because it seemed to me so profoundly the white men’s story, with the female characters and characters of color remaining firmly secondary to the almighty White Man. I think maybe I find this particularly disappointing in zombie stories because I want more out of a genre rooted in a movie that was so far ahead of its time in its attitude toward race.
‘Night of the Living Dead’ hero Ben played by Duane Jones
AR: I think zombies will always appeal to us because our society is a house of cards. Zombies remind us of a life without the comforts of technology, safety, and structure. The more complicated and reliant we become on institutions and corporations, the more relevant dystopian fantasies like zombies become because we are one global crisis away from that house of cards collapsing on us, leaving us weak, reeling, and unable to fend for ourselves.
I think zombie movies are being made left and right because they’re a hot item, but a zombie movie isn’t truly great unless the zombies are a compelling metaphor. The last zombie movie I remember adoring was 28 Days Later because it explored the terrifying fear of pandemics, the brutality of the military, and the rage that exists inside us, constantly questioning whether or not human nature is really as pure and good as we’re led to believe. Though Naomie Harris’ Selena was its secondary protagonist and her characterization falters at the end, she is a majorly badass, smart Black woman who kicks some serious keister with a machete. (However, I didn’t love the sequel 28 Weeks Later because I thought that was some misogynistic bullshit.)
Selena slays first and asks questions…not at all.
I, too, have been struggling with the TV show version of The Walking Dead. I even wrote a Bitch Flicks article comparing the superior graphic novel series to the show. You’re totally right; the show is reactionary, racist, and sexist. It’s not doing much new or interesting with its post-apocalyptic material, which has vast potential to make meaningful commentary about what day-to-day life looks like when you’ve stripped our society away. There are questions ripe for the asking, such as: What do morals look like? How do you raise children? Can we work together against a common enemy (as touched on in the BOTLD), or are we inherently self-motivated?
What do you think the zombie trope “means”? Why do you think it’s still got such a stranglehold on us after over four decades?
Are zombies then not really a horror subgenre but a dystopian subgenre? Maybe the words “zombie” and “apocalypse” always go together. Can you think of any zombie film examples where the threat of utter human and societal annihilation were not issues?
MT: I wonder — and this is highly speculative, and clearly born out of my perspective as a theologian with seminarian friends who worry a lot about the decline of mainline Christianity in the US — if the zombie’s place as a monster of the 20th and 21st century is intertwined with secularism. Is it a manifestation of a certain cultural anxiety related to the “rise of the nones” — that is, a cathartic expression of a fear of being swallowed up by materialism (in both the philosophical and the economic senses of the term)? As mindless masses of rotting flesh whose only drives are the basest physical urges, zombies represent the logical extreme of pure materialism, and I suspect it’s not a coincidence that our cultural psyche is obsessed with them in a time when global capitalism is engulfing everything while traditional channels for religious/spiritual sensibilities are on the decline — among the young westerners who are the primary audience for zombie culture, at least.
Zombies gravitate to the mall in ‘Dawn of the Dead’, capitalist consumers even in death.
It’s an odd and frustrating paradox that zombie stories are always these grand-scale, global apocalypses, and yet they always focus on your straight-white-male protagonists. This piece does a grand job of addressing this issue. I’d take World War Zas an example of the paradox: the book actually does take on the geopolitics of the zombie apocalypse on a truly global scale, whereas the film is a by-the-numbers Hollywood disaster flick where the global disaster is mere backdrop to the story of whiterocis dude hero and his perfect(ly passive) white family. I think that’s perhaps symptomatic of the increasing polarization of mainstream and independent content in our age of digital distribution, and I suspect that mainstream pop culture zombie tales are only going to get more anodyne and more unthinkingly supportive of the heteropatriarchal status quo, while we’ll have to look to non-traditional channels of production and distribution for interesting stories. I haven’t yet watched Ze, Zombie, a queer zombie film, but I’m deeply intrigued — not least, I admit, because the top update on the website is currently an apology for the film’s excessive whiteness…we’ve a long way still to go, it seems.
For all its social consciousness, though, does NOTLD (and BOTLD – only one of the talking heads is a woman; African-American men are interviewed, but African-American women are not) fall into the trap of so many progressive social movements, both in the sixties (e.g. black power) and still today (e.g. movement atheism): failure to properly include, address, and account for women? Do you know of any actually feminist zombie films (I can’t think of any)? Why is this such a cultural lacuna? Other movie monsters have been reinterpreted in explicitly feminist ways: vampires (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), werewolves (Ginger Snaps) — doesn’t the zombie have feminist potential as a movie monster?
In ‘Ginger Snaps’, werewolf Ginger revels in her new power.
AR: I’m totally with you on your critique of World War Z the film vs. the book. We’re like E.T. and Elliott here because I wrote a Bitch Flicks review critiquing the film: its narrative choices that narrowed the scope of the book until it was unrecognizable, the way it cast Gerry as a messianic figure, and its under-development of its potentially fierce female characters, rendering them as nothing more than symbols to reflect back upon Gerry’s manly manliness.
I’ve always thought that NOTLD wasn’t feminist when I consider all the female characters in the movie. I wish someone would have commented on the flat female NOTLD depictions in the documentary, but I guess the movie wouldn’t come out looking so well…the documentary does kind of lionize NOTLD.
They were coming to get you, and they got you, Barbara.
I think Jennifer’s Body could maybe be categorized as a female zombie flick, but it’s debatable whether or not its feminist. Return of the Living Dead 3 was kind of a big deal because the protagonist was a woman and a zombie, and she became a sexual icon for teenage boys everywhere. I think part of the problem with associating zombies and women is that zombies aren’t usually sexy, and it seems like a requirement that women and sexuality are linked in cinema whether it’s in a feminist or a non-feminist way. So, I’d say that the lack of feminist zombie films speaks to a larger issue, in which our culture insists on associating women and sexuality.
Sexay zombie in ‘Return of the Living Dead 3’
There’s no real reason, however, why a woman can’t be the zombie killing heroine, though it happens so infrequently. We’ve got shitty examples like the Resident Evil series, but I think there’s a lot of potential to critique the patriarchy in a film that sets up a lone woman (or a small group of women) working against the never-ending onslaught, the plague of patriarchy. Wow, now I’m stoked to see that movie! Think it’ll ever get made?
Romero identifies as “Spanish” as per his Sharks vs. Jets anecdote in BOTLD, but he’s of Cuban & Lithuanian descent. He’s never represented as a director of color (I bet his last name, as he mentions, is often mistaken for Italian), and I wonder if that has an effect on the distribution and reception of his films? Would horror films directed by a POC known to have an underlying social and political commentary be shunned by the mainstream or turned into an even more exclusive niche (i.e. something like “politically-charged cult horror films by people of color”…ugh)? I also wonder if that’s why he’s well-known for casting characters of color in his films without sort of thinking about it: because he views race differently than, say, his white director counterparts?
Romero contextualizes his sense of his race using ‘West Side Story’
MT: Your point about Romero and race is really interesting, and I hadn’t considered that before. The idea that he’s a POC who’s never read that way does go a long way to explain the use of race in his films. The history and theory of the “passing” POC is too often elided or overlooked in a lot of critical race discussions, and perhaps this element nuances the question of misappropriation of zombi above? It definitely merits more analysis!
And I think Romero’s engagement with both race and gender does get more explicit in his later films, notably Day of the Dead (clearly a heavy influence on 28 Days Later) and the very underrated Land of the Dead. It’s not an accident that Land‘s Big Daddy, the first zombie to develop a sense of consciousness, is African-American, and Land‘s whole narrative of class warfare is extremely relevant. (Now I kind of want to have future discussions about each of Dawn, Day, and Land of the Dead, looking at the evolution of Romero’s social consciousness over the years and films!)
AR: I’m in complete agreement about Romero’s evolution as a socially and politically conscious director in his later films. Dawn of the Dead‘s critique of consumerism is probably the reason that I insist upon socially relevant zombie interpretations. I also find it fascinating and a bit depressing that the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake was lazy in that it eschewed the critical commentary inherent in a mall-based zombie flick, proving once again that we’re not necessarily getting better or more self-aware as a people. Romero’s Diary of the Dead I also thought was an interesting engagement on the notions of the viral connection of online media and the viral nature of information, despite its ultimate disappointment as a film. Although Land of the Dead wasn’t as commercially successful nor as engaging as some of Romero’s other films, I, too, was impressed by its class critique and some of its underlying racial commentary. However, I think the Black man emerging from the water with his new sense of self-awareness is a problematic depiction, putting Africans and African Americans on a slower time line for evolution than white people, claiming (perhaps unintentionally) that their consciousness is nascent, which is a disturbing paternalistic attitude.
Zombie leader, Big Daddy, emerging from the water.
This is one of my long-held issues with the horror, sci-fi, and fantasy genres. In order to tell these socially and politically charged stories, they embody the Other in monster flesh: think the apartheid conversation in District 9 with the grotesque alien bug people or Oz, the werewolf, along with Angel, the vampire, in Buffy and even more so in the Angelseries or the way all the Star Trek series are rife with the creation of Othered alien species to elucidate the plight of an oppressed people (not to mention the racism inherent in the vicious warrior Klingons as stand-ins for Black people or the antisemitism of the greedy, urbane Ferengi as stand-ins for Jewish people). While the metaphor comes across, it often dehumanizes and further Others those it is attempting to bolster.
I could talk about this stuff for days and days! Count me in for future convos on the rest of the Romero zombie films! I’m planning to watch his Survival of the Dead, the last of Romero’s zombie series, for a Halloween-y treat since I’ve shockingly never seen it before.
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Thanks for joining us for this conversation between Max Thornton and Amanda Rodriguez on ‘Birth of the Living Dead’ and ‘Night of the Living Dead’. Keep an eye out for Max’s upcoming interview with Esther Cassidy, producer of ‘Birth of the Living Dead’.
In terms of gender representations, both men and women are shown as the worst possible version of themselves. Barbra swings back and forth from being near catatonic and unable to communicate, to wild and hysterical. Ben even slaps her at one point to get her to snap out of her state. She is weak and unable to deal with the emotions of seeing her brother attacked. Barbra would have already been killed and reanimated were it not for the über masculine Ben to save her from the perils that lie outside.
This guest post by Deirdre Crimmins appears as part of our theme week on Cult Films and B Movies.
George Romero’s 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead is a film that needs to be put into its proper context to truly appreciate it. With this week’s focus on cult films, which are defined by their reception rather than standing alone as artists’ endeavors, it makes sense to first look at the film’s early history of release before diving into its mainly problematic gender representations.
Night of the Living Dead was a micro budgeted independent film, made by a group of filmmakers who had most of their filming experiences with advertising. Romero had a life-long love of horror films (shooting one as a child on Super 8 led to a mishap that ended with him getting sent to boarding school), and he knew horror had potential for great profits. After all, the ghouls (the modern zombie was essentially invented in this film, but Romero only referred to his reanimated dead as “ghouls” because the term zombie referred specifically to Haitian voodoo victims) in his film required very little makeup and were a cheap monster to create.
The film famously had two major setbacks early on. First, Romero decided last minute to change the film’s title from Night of the Flesh Eaters. Unfortunately, the copyright declaration on the original title card was not reinstated on the new one, and Night of the Living Dead has been in public domain ever since its initial release. The second setback was a scathing review by Roger Ebert. He had gone to see the film when it was playing as a matinée. In the pre-multiplex era the earlier screening times were typically reserved for young children, and Night of the Living Dead was mistakenly programmed to be shown to a very young crowd. Ebert lamented:
The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.
After this review, other critics began discussing how to handle ultra-violence in film. The expected suggestions of censorship, and comparisons to pornography were thrown around as the film suffered at the box office. It wasn’t until Night of the Living Dead gained popularity in European film festivals that critics began to see the film as something truly groundbreaking.
It is tough to see the film today as you would have 45 years ago, but the film itself really was something special. To compare it to a contemporary horror film is one way to highlight its distinctiveness. Rosemary’s Baby was released in 1968 as well, and is an equally worshipped horror classic. That film, however, is in color, had recognizable actors starring in it, was beautifully scored, and was clearly a big budget production. With this comparison, Night of the Living Dead was essentially the Blair Witch of its time. It was set in a farm house and actually filmed at a farm house rather than an ersatz farm house in a studio lot somewhere in Hollywood. The camera work is imperfect, and the sound is not polished. The performances are raw and from unknown actors. The ending of the film is frequently compared to Vietnam War footage, and that is exactly the frame of reference that audiences at the time were bringing to the film. It felt more real than anything else they could see in the theater, and the effect is brutal.
The film is at its core an outbreak film. Some sort of other worldly satellite debris is causing the dead in to come back to life and to feast upon the living. This is very unfortunate for Barbra (Judith O’Dea) and her brother Johnny (Russell Streiner), as they are on their way to a cemetery to lay a wreath. Very quickly they are attacked, Johnny is killed, and Barbra is left to hysterically seek shelter. She finds a farmhouse which is presumptively safer than the outside, but she is not alone. Ben (Duane Jones) is a determined, organized, and armed man, who is on the house’s first floor. In the basement a young couple, Tom and Judy (Keith Wayne and Judith Ridley) hide from the ghouls along with the Cooper family (Marilyn Eastman, Karl Hardman, and Kyra Schon). As soon as Harry Cooper emerges from the basement, he and Ben fight about the best way to get out of the house and travel to one of the safe zones that the emergency broadcasters keep urging survivors to evacuate to.
In terms of gender representations, both men and women are shown as the worst possible version of themselves. Barbra swings back and forth from being near catatonic and unable to communicate, to wild and hysterical. Ben even slaps her at one point to get her to snap out of her state. She is weak and unable to deal with the emotions of seeing her brother attacked. Barbra would have already been killed and reanimated were it not for the über masculine Ben to save her from the perils that lie outside.
Despite Barbra’s shortcomings, she is not the most negative character in Night of the Living Dead. Both Ben and Harry’s overly masculine performances are what ultimately lead to the group’s downfall. They are completely unwilling to compromise or even band together to save all of their lives. Instead they bicker and insult one another, looking like a pair of Galapagos albatrosses in the middle of mating dance. It is their pig-headed defiance, which means that they each resort to death before compromising their gender performances. Had either one of them been more intent in survival over ego, they all may have survived.
None of the characters in Night of the Living Dead are the sort of folks that you would want to grab a cup of coffee with. Though this was long before the introduction of the slasher sub-genre, Romero was on to something with maintaining characters that you don’t mind seeing killed. No one in the audience was mourning Harry or Barbra when each of them was eaten by the undead. Ben’s death is tragic, but more due to the timing of it than his good nature. In the end the most interesting characters are the ones that are encircling the house, waiting to feast. And isn’t that a wonderful prediction of the zombie film as we know it today?
Deirdre Crimmins lives in Boston with her husband and a non-spooky black cat. She wrote her Master’s thesis on George Romero and is a staff writer for http://www.allthingshorroronline.net/.
