night of the living dead

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

One of the more exhausting tendencies of zombie outbreak stories is how they all inevitably devolve into large-scale militarism. Even the more modern deviations on vintage zombie tropes in 28 Days Later, Overlord, and The Girl With All the Gifts are largely military stories, as if there is no way to depict a worldwide zombie outbreak without filling the frame with tanks & helicopters. All zombie roads lead directly to the military, and they all trail back to George Romero’s original Living Dead trilogy. Following the suburban invasion of 1968’s Night of the Living Dead and 1978’s trapped-in-a-shopping mall satire Dawn of the Dead, 1985’s Day of the Dead is a pure brains-vs.-brawn showdown in an underground military bunker just below the surface of an ongoing zombie apocalypse. If violent, crowd-controlling military action is essential to zombie outbreak storytelling, then movies might as well make the conflict between that military and the citizens it supposedly protects a central part of the text. Being more of an Idea Guy who was always eager to dig into the moral & philosophical implications of his films’ supernatural events than someone who could convincingly stage propulsive action or heartfelt drama, Romero was perfectly suited to explore that conflict at length, locking the audience into the bunker with him until he could sort it all out.

Lori Cardille stars as a scientist willing to dedicate the rest of her life to researching a cure for zombie blood infection. Unfortunately, she’s the only woman in the underground military bunker that’s been retrofitted into her research lab, and the heavily armed meatheads who provide her rations are getting tired of her work showing no discernible progress. The only thing stopping them from stripping her of her lab equipment (and more) is the parallel research of Dr. Matthew Logan, a mad scientist whose colleagues mockingly refer to as “Frankenstein”. Having long given up on finding a cure, Frankenstein has instead shifted his research to training zombie captives from the mines outside the military base on how to behave. He rigs their undead, semi-disassembled bodies to machines, stimulating them with electricity to see how their flesh might be controlled by the living’s command. He’s also taken one specific zombie as a pet, a specimen who he’s nicknamed “Bub” in loving, disdainful memory of his own father. Thanks to the power of positive reinforcement, Bub can vocalize simple phrases, operate a Walkman, salute the military officers in the room, and (most recklessly on Frankenstein’s end) fire a handgun. He can also apparently hold a grudge, since he eventually escapes containment to hunt down the bunker’s most fascistic militant in retribution for the crime of being an asshole.

There are three clear MVPs at work here, Tom Savini the most obvious among them. The all-out zombie mayhem of the final minutes (when the military base is inevitably invaded by the horde outside) gives Savini and his make-up team dozens of chances to stage and restage the classic Romero gag where a victim is overwhelmed & disemboweled by hungry zombies’ reaching hands. Before that climactic payoff, the frequent visits to Frankenstein’s lab allow Savini more freedom to construct individual animatronic monstrosities that show the mad doctor’s abandoned experiments in various stages of failure & disrepair, and the results rank among the gore wizard’s most unforgettable creations. The unlikely comic duo of Frankenstein (Richard Liberty) & Bub (Sherman Howard) are also obvious MVPs, delivering most of the film’s memorable character moments. The way Frankenstein wanders into meetings with military officials smeared from face to boot in infected zombie blood while explaining why they should pet-train the cannibal ghouls instead of shooting them dead makes for consistently rewarding comic relief. Meanwhile, his star pupil Bub is initially amusing as a slack-jawed walking corpse who can only vaguely mime human behavior while chained to the laboratory wall, but he ends up carrying most of the film’s effective pathos once he breaks free – just like the original Dr. Frankenstein’s pet creature.

Like with most Romero classics, I found the scene-to-scene drama in Day of the Dead to be frustratingly inert but was greatly impressed by its thoughtfulness in theme and tactility in violence. Maybe the main scientist’s heart-to-hearts with her infected boyfriend or the renegade helicopter pilot who could eventually fly her to safety ran a little dry, but the larger dramatic concerns about military muscle overpowering scientific experts after the breakdown of societal decorum felt true and continually relevant. On the film’s 30th Anniversary, it isn’t especially difficult to find contemporary meaning in a story about scientists working towards a solution for an infectious illness that could wipe out the entire planet’s population but having their research derailed by a few gun-toting fascists who don’t care to understand the value of the work. The most Romero stands out as a visual stylist here (outside the opportunities he gives Savini’s crew to run wild in the lab) are during a brief zombie hunt sequence in an underground cave, where he brings back the same extreme red & blue crosslighting he experimented with in 1982’s Creepshow. Otherwise, his artistry is most deeply felt in the philosophical nature of his writing, which finds a way to interrogate the inherent militarism of zombie narratives instead of casually accepting it as a matter of course.

-Brandon Ledet