Over the past couple years I think more and more zombie films are popping up all over the place. It seems everyone wants to hop on the zombie train and make a glory, flesh filled movie. Some of them are frightening, but I would say the others are just odd comedies.
The modern day zombie in our culture is based on George A. Romero’s vision of zombies in his low budget 1968 zombie film, Night of the Living Dead. Ever since George Romero came out with that film, the film industry has been flooded with blood, guts, and brain eating zombies. Some of today’s most popular zombie films are either by George Romero or they are remakes of his original films. For example, his 1978 version of Dawn of the Dead was remade in 2004 by director Zack Snyder (Watchmen and 300) and spoofed also in 2004 by Edgar Wright in the film Shaun of the Dead. One of the most anticipated “zombie” appearances was 1983’s Thriller, Michael Jackson’s ground breaking music video. One of the more recent zombie appearances comes in the form of classic literature and it is called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) by Seth Grahame-Smith, original novel by Jane Austen. The book pretty much follows the plot of the original novel by Jane Austen, until you get to the part where Mr.Bennet is training his family in martial arts in order to fight zombies that roam the English countryside. If you have read the original Pride and Prejudice, this probably sounds so strange and unreal, but zombies are a big part of today’s pop culture, so why not include them everywhere?
Why do we have such a fascination with these mindless, brain-eating creatures? Is it because we enjoy being scared? Or do we find these brain-less monsters a form of comedy? Or maybe some of us are looking deeper into the violence? In many of Romero’s films he uses these human-devouring zombies as a metaphor to reflect the social and moral problems within the decade that each film was made. Some examples are: Racism, feminism, consumerism, and cold war) In his films, zombies and gore reflect Romero’s concern that we are living in a society prone to violence. However most viewers of these films aren’t digging very deep, they instead only see flesh hungry monsters. Why would you ever think to look past the gruesome appearance, and see a lesson that should be learned about society?
So whether it is zombie ridden malls, or frightening images of man hunting man, all zombies movies are sort of the same thing. They have one objective: Eat Brains & kill, and maybe they will make you laugh and learn along the way.