Braaaains...

Excuse me while I justify a fascination with a traditionally schlocky genre of movies.

Next year will mark the 40th anniversary of Night of the Living Dead, granddaddy of all zombie flicks. Since 1968, other subgenres have lost their appeal while these movies keep shambling along. With their promise of violence, zombie movies still fit in with today's horror audience, which for the time being is chiefly enthralled by torture porn (Saw, Hostel, etc.) We rely on zombie movies to deliver gory kills by way of tire iron, chainsaw, boomstick, or what have you. And it's kind of okay because the heroes aren't exactly mowing down humans, but it's close enough.

They're some of the most exciting movies that can be made dirt cheap. Since they've always been such staple for B-movies, any zombie flick coming in to be taken seriously is really asking for it; most attempts at the genre just don't bother anymore. Robert Rodriguez's half of Grindhouse -- Planet Terror -- is the best recent example I've seen of this. It's a wonderfully deliberate kind of bad.

(I was going to post a review on the horribly marketed Grindhouse last month, but by the time I came back and booted up my laptop, it was already gone from theaters. I looked in the newspaper. Gone. I checked Fandango. Gone. I drove back to the theater where I swear, I had just seen it. The old man running the box office said to me, "Grindhouse? Why, sonny, we ain't never shown a movie here called Grindhouse. You hit your head or somethin'?")

The 28 franchise, on the other hand, tends to surprise people. It's in the order of zombie movies that manipulates this stereotypically mindless concept to communicate something socially relevant (if you forgive the occasional plot foible, at least). The thing is, doesn't have far to go in order to spin zombies into cultural critique.

I think zombie movies are always going to be subconsciously fascinating because what the zombie flick appeals to more than anything else is the fear of epidemic. This can be biological, of course, playing on our paranoia of looming diseases like the bird flu and West Nile. But what filmmakers long knew is that the represented plague can also be social. Political movements, religious cults, MySpace, all of these can be implied by the terrifying swell of mindless flesheaters. Culminating in the classic scenario: a band of the unconverted struggling to retain their humanity in a last stand against the mob that will stop at nothing to "eat their brains".

Look at the shopping mall-based Dawn of the Dead (George Romero's, not Zack Snyder's), which doubled as a parody of all-consuming consumerism.

Romero and his original crew, it should be noted, literally wrote the rules of zombiedom with Night of the Living Dead. For one thing, it was the first movie/book/anything where zombies were portrayed as cannibals. Maybe I'm being obsessive here, but critiques on racial tension, social class, the breakdown of the nuclear family are very legitimately applied in that simple little movie shot in Pittsburgh. I wouldn't recommend that as a topic for a Master's thesis, but it's all there.

I've always been interested in Horror movies where the line between human and monster become obscured, and in good zombie flicks, that happens all the time.

Part of what made Night unexpectedly disturbing was its minimalist zombie make-up effects. Without exposed entrails and rotten flesh, Romero's ghouls weren't very distinguishable from the humans; oftentimes the only tell was that they were acting kinda strange.

The finale of 28 Days Later played with this ambiguity when its hero, shirtless and covered in blood, ran mad through a military compound in a way similar to the Infected. He ended up dispatching the human villain in an eye-gougingly gruesome kill worthy of more shudders than any of the Infected crazies.

Any decent zombie flick brings the question to mind, Just how far off are we from being these empty-headed, groupthinking killers? That's why a zombie movie, no matter how intellectually bankrupt, has this social commentary innately within.

Actually, I take that back. There are very special exceptions.