31 Days of Zombie!: Opening Thoughts

Regardless of the immensity of those to follow later in life, a certain weight remains attached to our early experiences – the ones that guides us, reverberating years later, often in unseen ways. Despite having had my mind blown by the likes of everyone from Stanley Kubrick to Abbas Kiarostami in my roughly ten years of full-blown cinephilia, an undying flame of love remains inside for the early work of James Cameron. His Terminator films remain great in my mind, no doubt, but my love for them extends beyond a mere appreciation of their quality as both art and entertainment. Their essence is practically programmed into the DNA of my soul.

Similarly do I feel towards George A. Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead. Infatuated with the fantastical and the horrific in my youth, I was drawn to the childlike, innocent personas of such iconic characters as Frankenstein and Godzilla, whilst being similarly entranced with vampires, werewolves, and other creatures of the supernatural. While this broad obsession laid much of the foundation for my absolute devotion to cinema later in my adolescence and through my still young adulthood, I’ll always be able to return to a singular point that truly opened the floodgates. Around age eight or nine (so, 1993 or 1994), the Sci-Fi channel spent a summer hosting a series of weeklong mini-marathons, showing one new title each weeknight concerning a particular subject of the horror genre. One of these marathons (hosted by White Zombie, no less) focused on the living dead, and it was on one of these evenings that my mischievous self stayed up past his bedtime to watch Romero’s original 1968 film.

In less than two hours, my perception of what movies were capable of had been redefined, several times over. Great though many of the Universal classic films may be, their visceral aspects are relatively safe, their horror quotients more scary-fun than truly terrifying. Frankenstein gave me chills, but it never made me feel personally threatened. Watching Night of the Living Dead, on the other hand, made me feel as though I was occupying the same mental and physical space as its characters, sharing the same problems and fears, my fate entangled with theirs. By the end, none of the “good” guys remained alive, a startling outcome for a relatively happy, optimistic young’n (boy, how that’s changed in thirteen years). What I’d seen wasn’t a self-contained story pat with a resolution – it was real, and like life, things didn’t always turn out for the best.

This touchstone viewing was complimented by several other subsequent experiences, among them my renting of Dawn of the Dead on VHS from Blockbuster some years later. My memory of that particular viewing remains a blur; the gore factor just about overloaded my senses, although the infamous “this was an important place in their lives” quote made as much brilliant, scathing sense then as it does now. Similarly, while I’ve never been much of a videogamer, the PlayStation classic Resident Evil 2 – a game heavily indebted to the works of Romero – was an additional entertainment milestone of my adolescence.

My fascination with zombies – particularly Romero’s creations – has remained bright ever since, although it isn’t one that has precluded me from rationality when judging other films of the genre; some zombie films are among the worst I’ve ever seen, subject matter notwithstanding. My preference for his flesh-eating ghouls, however, should not indicate too strong a bias – I take pride in not being a zombie purist, by which I mean that I consider everything from the souls resurrected by voodoo to the rage-virus victims of the 28 Days Later films to be equally legitimate of the title. If it is undead/mindless and/or bent on eating living victims in any capacity, then chances are I’ll consider it a zombie; like almost any good aspect of cinema, I appreciate them for their reflexivity. The allegorical components showcased in Romero’s films, however, strike me as a brilliant tool for better understanding ourselves as human beings, in that we are fearful, greedy, hateful, and violent, but also hopeful, giving, compassionate and altruistic. We’re physical and spiritual, mortal and infinite. We are many things at once, and zombies - by embodying those two most definite of qualities, living and dead - show us that contradictory complexity in all its glory. Even if they simultaneously want to eat our brains.

With this blog-a-thon, I intend to further explore my own fascination with this sect of cinema, in part returning to films I already know and love while also checking out a variety of titles as of yet unseen. My hope is that this will encourage others to do the same, whether they already share a similar passion or simply wish to explore an unknown area of filmmaking. If all goes as planned, one new review/analysis will appear per day on this blog, while all external contributions will be posted in the accruing linkage (send links to robhumanick@gmail.com).

Feature: 31 Days of Zombie!