Practically every single zombie movie made since 1970 has been influenced by George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in some way. Every time a small group of survivors boards themselves up in a cramped locale only to be besieged & disemboweled by an invading zombie horde, Romero’s legacy hangs heavy in the putrid air. And so, I found myself thinking a lot about Romero’s Living Dead series this Halloween season as I saw its influence echoing throughout all the zombie titles I binged during the heaviest days of my horror-movie mania. What confounded me most about seeing Romero’s work infinitely reiterated and reinterpreted was that I was starting to forget why, exactly, the dead rose in the original Night of the Living Dead in the first place. The only explanation I can recall is that, “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth,” and that the phenomenon is otherwise treated as a natural disaster that can neither be understood nor prevented by the living. So, then, why were all the post-Romero zombie flicks I watched this October so intent on explaining the sources of their zombie outbreaks instead of just letting the walking dead speak (i.e., groan) for themselves? If anything, it felt as if they were all in an ever-escalating competition to come up with the most preposterous, absurdly over-specific reason for the dead rising instead of following Romero’s lead and leaving it deliberately ambiguous.
Romero’s zombie-attack victims philosophizing about Hell running out of room for deceased sinners at least gestures towards a religious reason for the phenomenon, even if it is pure speculation. Maybe that’s what inspired MVP Romero enthusiast Lucio Fulci to lean into religious blasphemy for the source of the zombie outbreak in his 1980 classic City of the Living Dead, a.k.a. Gates of Hell. City of the Living Dead was Fulci’s attempt to pay homage to H.P. Lovecraft, as indicated by its setting in the Lovecraft-invented town of Dunwitch but, as the inclusion of “The Living Dead” in its title suggests, it’s a pure Romero riff through & through. All of the zombie-horde invasion & disemboweling you’d expect to see in a later, proper Living Dead film is on full, shameless display, with Fulci going his usual extra mile to make sure everything is as disgusting as possible in a series of for-their-own-sake gags: ocular bleeding, victims puking their literal guts up, windy blasts of flying maggots, etc. And what is the reason for all of this hellish mayhem? A Catholic priest has hanged himself in a Dunwitch graveyard. We first see the priest’s suicide as a psychic vision during a distant seance, and once we travel to Dunwitch to investigate, the image repeats itself at the start of every gross-out zombie attack. Fulci presents that suicide as an act so blasphemous that it has opened the literal gates of Hell, so that any fucked up horror he can imagine is justified in being unleashed upon the audience. Meanwhile, Romero & Lovecraft both likely would’ve skipped the explanation part and left the source of that supernatural mayhem horrifically unknowable.
Scooter McCrae’s 1994 SOV horror Shatter Dead also uses religious blasphemy to explain the source of its zombie outbreak, but it at least tries to keep the inciting incident unfathomable to the human mind. The film opens with a meeting of the sacred and the profane: a sexual tryst between The Angel of Death and a human woman, staged under a ceiling fan light and a layer of warped-VHS grime. Months later, we watch a Romero-style heroine survive the daily banality of a post-zombie apocalypse, wherein religious cults run amok and the undead are homeless societal rejects. Like City of the Living Dead, most of its thematic blasphemy is suicide-based, establishing a world where everyone & everything conspire to pressure you into joining the zombie horde via suicide, so you can stay “young” forever. Shatter Dead has earned some cult-cinema notoriety as an obscene object by allowing that nihilistic sales pitch to follow its characters into the bedroom, including some incredibly graphic sexual imagery involving gun play. In the most memorable sequence, our suicide-avoidant protagonist has sex with her undead boyfriend and works around the lack of bloodflow to his penis by strapping a pistol to his belt and using its barrel as a marital aid. It’s a shocking image, and it’s one that recalls the Angel of Death sex scene at the start of the picture, where a gender-ambiguous angel appears to be wielding an unseen hard-on despite their external feminine appearance. The angel’s phallus is never revealed to the audience with the same pornographic detail as the strap-on handgun, but it is indicated to be a dangerous weapon in its own right, given that it incites a zombie apocalypse by getting a human woman pregnant.
If the reason behind a zombie outbreak isn’t religious, it’s usually scientific. Even Night of the Living Dead includes a throwaway line from a news reporter supposing that the dead may have risen because of a passing satellite. The 1974 Spanish whatsit The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (a.k.a. Let Sleeping Corpses Lie) is much clearer in passing the blame for a zombie outbreak to newfangled scientific machinery. Set in the English countryside, its own zombie lore involves a new piece of experimental agriculture equipment that eliminates pests & parasites from farm crops via new forms of radiation. The danger of this experiment is only apparent to the hippie Londoner who happens to be passing through this farmland on vacation, given that his all-natural granola lifestyle means he’d rather see the parasites kept at bay via more traditional methods. He’s proven to be in the right when the radiation from this newfangled farm equipment starts to bring the dead back to life and they start to drag the living back to the graves with him. Only, no one believes him, and the small-minded townies suspect that he’s responsible for all the murders himself. The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is very clearly a post-Romero zombie movie, but its main villains are the cops who suspect the urbanite out-of-towners for the undead’s supernatural crimes. Every single time the heroes see a way out of a tight jam, the cops rush in to fuck it all up, all the way through the bummer ending. Then, the radioactive farm equipment gets switched back on again, no lessons learned. Brutal.
Not all dead-raising science is accidental, nor is it always exclusive from religion. In 1981’s Dead & Buried, a mad-scientist mortician (played by Jack “Grandpa Joe” Albertson of Chocolate Factory fame) has found a means of reconstructing the human body post-death in cosmetic procedures that go far beyond his usual duties as a corpse beautician. We watch in time-elapse as reconstructs the human form from the skeleton outward like Dr. Frankenstein building his monster. Only, he needs a little religion to help animate those corpses, so he turns to Voodoo to help get them back on their lumbering feet. It turns out this combination of religion & science makes for a relatively healthy mix, as far as zombie outbreaks go. The living dead in the small town of Potter’s Bluff, where this crazed mortician reigns supreme, are thoroughly re-integrated back into society post-death. They’re given jobs; they’re given a hobby (even if it’s always the same amateur photography hobby, documenting the mad scientist’s crimes); they’re made part of a real, functional community. All of that plot explanation likely constitutes major spoilers for the uninitiated, but I imagine if you’re reading this far into a blog post about vintage zombie movies you already have at least a vague idea of what Dead & Buried is about. If not, you might switch it off halfway through, impatient that there are no zombies in the movie at all, given that the first half plays like a story about small-town weirdos who violently murder outsiders for daring to treat their coastal home as a vacation getaway. Once those murdered interlopers start popping up around town as reanimated corpses, however, Potter’s Bluff turns out to be a very welcoming community to outsiders; they want you to stay forever.
Romero teases several explanations for the initial zombie outbreak in Night of the Living Dead without ever confirming one in particular. It seems that in the half-century since those teases, other filmmakers have gone mad attempting to find solid, specific reasoning for the dead to rise from their graves. We know that we like to see the dead walk around every October, but we’re not entirely sure there’s a good enough reason why they’d want to re-join the living to do so. It only fully makes sense if they’ve been ejected from Hell, the only place that’s presumably less miserable than this one. Everything else just plays as wild supposition and faint political commentary, when no excuse is truly needed to get those corpses walking.
-Brandon Ledet
