Saturday May 5, 2007
The Guardian
Many of the great works in cinema have posed one basic, central question. What is Rosebud? Can one man make a difference? In the madness of war, who is to say that any one man may be mad? Or, in the case of 28 Days Later, what would happen if London were over-run by bloodthirsty living dead driven by the bubbling furnace of their own raging id? The answer, in that movie at least, was simply that "things would be bad", but this is elaborated upon in 28 Weeks Later, the sequel in which the UK's survivors return to the capital after the original zombie wave has all died out. It turns out -- and here the lesson is elaborated upon -- that this is not a very good idea. So what else can we learn from zombie films?
Man-made viruses are bad things
The Rage virus in the 28 series is man-made, distilled from the blood of enraged primates, as is the T-virus, the plague responsible for mass zombifying in Resident Evil. Viruses are also responsible for the dead rising in the likes of Zombie Creeping Flesh, a classic nasty (and aka Cannibal Virus, just to hammer the point home), and Day Of The Dead 2: Contagium, one of the worst zombie films, and therefore films, ever made, and the soon-released, mouth-watering Plane Dead, which is basically Snakes On A Plane but with zombies. An innate fear of the rampant advance of technology is one condition of the postmodern era, which is why most films take the stance of: "Oooh, man-made viruses? Oooh no, we don't like them!" when even now, there exist man-made viruses which can eat cancer. So don't just take this one as read, is what we're saying here.
We, as humans, are fragile things
In these postmodern times we have become, as a people, increasingly horrified by the fallibility of our earthly vessels, our bodies, in direct proportion to our increased knowledge of that fallibility. It is perhaps for this reason that the zombie genre sees the human body in postmodern terms - as meat and bones, and eminently attackable for that. Certainly, in zombie films, the human body doesn't seem to offer up much resistance - 28 Weeks Later offers perhaps THE benchmark humans-as-flying-offal scene in cinema history, and in George A Romero's
The
Much has been made of the allegorical undertones that exist in your average zombie films, but they can usually be summed up as "[insert name of something socio-political here] is bad." In Dawn Of The Dead it was the soulless consumer age, in Shaun Of The Dead it was the unconscious selfishness of practically everyone who lives in London (amen, brother!) but generally, it is the US military who gets it in the neck. And the guts. In 28 Weeks Later they are smugly self-assured about the infallibility of their clean-up operation, with disastrous results. In Day Of The Dead, they are all racist, sexist and insane, with disastrous results. Quite where the inspiration comes from for this bumbling, disaster-prone, incompetent redneck vision of
Your family messes you up
No genre has reflected the increasingly obsolescence of the nuclear family unit more gleefully than the zombie movie, which posits that family life will not just mess you up, it will also attempt to eat your spleen too. Zombie films have seen children eating parents (Night Of The Living Dead), boyfriend attacking girlfriend (Dawn Of The Dead remake), boyfriend leading zombies to pregnant fiancee (Dawn Of The Dead original), wife infecting husband (28 Weeks Later) and, in Peter Jackson's magnificent Brain Dead, son allowing zombie mother to attend polite dinner party. Now THAT is definitely messed up.
Always stay close to a helicopter pilot
No matter what goes down in any given zombie movie, you can be sure of one thing - if you haven't got a helicopter pilot with you, then you are fubar. Given that the only place where you can be absolutely sure of not running into a zombie is up in the sky, but that planes are a little on the unwieldy side (not to mention prone to zombie infestation themselves - bring it on, Plane Dead!) it's generally good to have a helicopter pilot on the team. In 28 Weeks Later it is Flynn (played by Lost's Harold Perrineau) who joins a role-call of heroic chopper jocks (and, in one quite astounding set-piece, uses his rotor blades to deal with a field full of infecteds in a manner that has to be seen to be believed) that includes Flyboy in Dawn Of The Dead and the saintly John in Day Of The Dead. It is noteworthy that, in the Zack Snyder remake of Dawn Of The Dead, there is no helicopter pilot anywhere to be found, and where do they all end up? Dead, that's where. So if you are ever introduced to a helicopter pilot, be nice to them
Women are better in a crisis than men are
This may not be news to our female readers (on your side, sisters!) but zombie flicks are either keenly aware of women's inherent stoicism, or the blokes who make zombie flicks are just trying to suck up. Because all the major living-dead-fests have a ballsy heroine, from Gaylen Ross in Dawn Of The Dead to Sarah Polley in its remake, Lori Cardille in Day Of The Dead to Kate Ashfield in Shaun... and Rose Byrne in 28 Weeks Later. Meanwhile, the blokes, with their tendency to go all John Wayne (or, in Robert Carlyle's case in 28 Weeks..., try to get his end away with his infected wife one last time), just fuck things up for everybody. Look, we're only trying to help, OK?
Animals can be zombies too
Hmmm. Not quite sure how this one can be applied in modern society, but there are zombie monkeys in the 28 series, zombie alligators in Day Of The Dead, zombie dogs in Resident Evil, zombie spiders in Lucio Fulci's The Beyond, and in Zombie Creeping Flesh there is actually a zombie kitten. Yes, you read that correctly. So I guess what this teaches us is maybe that keeping pets is cruel. Or something.
In summary, then: stay away from pets and family members, retain a keen awareness of your own mortality and the power of science, and hang out with female non-US military-affiliated helicopter pilots. Valuable lessons, there, for all of us.
· 28 Weeks Later is on general release from Friday
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