Zombie 101

Matt Zoller Seitz explains why zombie films are often the most misunderstood of genres in cinema today.

By Matt Holmes / October 30, 2009

Thanks to Jeff Wells' Hollywood Elsewhere blog for pointing out a great Zombie 101 article written by Matt Zoller Seitz, which is one of the best I've ever read explaining why zombie movies are important and a genre to be taken extremely seriously...

Ultimately zombie films arent about the zombies, which have no conscious mind and therefore no personality. Theyre a collective menacerotting emblems of plague, catastrophe, war, and other world-upending events. The films depict representative social types wandering amid the ruins of the civilization they once took for granted, trying to reconcile their pre-zombie moral code (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) with the harsh necessities of the present (If youve got a gun, shoot em in the head, a sheriff tells a TV reporter in Night of the Living Dead, adding, If you dont, get yourself a club or a torch. Beat em or burn em, they go down pretty easy).

If theres no military, no police force, no law, no justice, and no hope, whats the point of being decent as opposed to selfish? Might it be possible that, under such unimaginably awful circumstances, selfishness is decency? And if your mom is bitten by a zombie, at what point is it all right to stop treating her like your mom and reach for the 12-gauge? Dear Abby never had to ponder such questions. To quote the alternative title of a 1974 Werner Herzog movie, in zombie films its every man for himself and God against all. And as survivors sift through the rubble, weighing selfish imperatives against kinder, gentler impulses that might get them and everyone around them killed, the genre pulls off a nifty bit of creative jujitsu, defining civilization, morality, stability, and decency by depicting their opposites.

I often get really frustrated by the people around me who don't like zombie films. In fact, apart from my co-OWF writer Simon Gallagher - I'm not sure I know one person socially who actually enjoys or really understands the genre. My girlfriend hates them with a passion. Bless her. She'll watch anything with me... pretentious art house French films, crazy Japanese Samurai movies, Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo a thousand times (I'm obsessively watching it these days) but zombie films are always a no-go area. They freak her out. The dead return to eat the flesh of the living in the movie that started it all, Night of the Living Dead (1968). I think it's the scene from Shaun of the Dead (the emotional shooting of his mum) and the 2004 version Dawn of the Dead exposition scene early on explaining that everyone they have ever known are dead that made her this way. Bizarrely, I convinced her to come with me and see I Am Legend two years back and even though it was a movie set during the aftermath of everyone being dead, she was more upset by the scene when the dog croaked than anything else. I tell her that her being frightened by these movies is a testament to how well made zombie films are and how smart this genre is but it never really gets me anywhere. My lack of zombie genre friends has meant I have yet to see Zombieland, although I hear it's great and Simon has a review pending... he's almost done with it. He's also got a review ofZombie Transfusion on the way and us fans of the genre have George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead, which seeks an American distributor but Quint at AICN (who like me, thought Diary of the Dead was a huge step backwards) has praised as a return to form.