kent_allard_jr (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kent_allard_jr) wrote2010-10-10 12:34 pm
kent_allard_jr) wrote2010-10-10 12:34 pm
Zombies and Phil Nugent
The weather is cool, the sun is shining, and this would be a terrible time to ruin it with an angry political screed. Instead I'll say something positive and shout out to my new favorite blog, The Phil Nugent Experience. Nugent's blog is about 1/3rd liberal rant, 2/3rds cultural commentary, the latter encompassing everything from movie and TV reviews to his reminisces about Colonel Sanders. I particularly loved this bit, from one of his "October 2010 Horror Movie Diaries," insightful and funny (to me, at least) at the same time:
For a true student of the evolution of the movie monster, Plague of the Zombies may be of even greater historical interest, as one of the last full-blown depictions of the old school zombie before George Romero rolled in with Night of the Living Dead and single-handedly reinvented a whole species of ghoul, a feat comparable to rewriting the rules of the Western so that whole generations of moviegoers could scarcely imagine a time when cowboys didn't wear pink tutus and fire laser cannons. The classic zombie, as seen in this film and earlier pictures such as the Jacques Tourneur-Val Lewton production I Walked with a Zombie and memorably strange, low budget White Zombie with Bela Lugosi, were the products of voodoo...It makes me feel bad for putting Romero-style zombies in Two-Fisted Tales (they clearly don't belong in stories from the 1930s), but those guilty discoveries are part of the fun of learning.
Probably pre-Romero zombies never really caught on as movie monsters not just because they lacked personality, but because they had a workplace... Zombies were drones, dragged out of a restful grave to do the bidding of some Montgomery Burns figure. (In Plague, the villain turns out to be the local mine owner, who is callously working the non-union living dead to within an inch of their non-lives. My favorite image is that of a zombie failing to notice the hero sneaking past him because he's too busy irritably brushing dirt off his tunic, as if to say, I know I'm dead, but this still sucks.) Time and again, the real villain of these stories is the zombie master, the conscious player who is pimping out the undead. By taking the middle man out of the equation and giving his zombies insatiable appetites, Romero gave zombies greater metaphorical power and relevance, but he also made them free agents. This made them more fun to watch, and after the shock of seeing them biting into people's faces and inhaling human intestines as if they were licorice began to level out, it even made it possible to project onto them, which is why the clearest steady development throughout most of Romero's zombie movies is that, the longer he keeps making movies about them, the more opportunities he seems to find to allow you to sort of root for them.
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This blogger is right about Romero's change to zombies, but not much of what he's saying otherwise is really new. I mean, Romero made the thinking zombie the hero of Day of the Dead, a movie easily 20 years old. Land of the Dead featured spontaneously thinking zombies (not tinkered with by man). The fact is, people have devolved in Romero's movies as much as the zombies have evolved. In Night of the Living Dead you had Barbara, the screamie-meamie, but you also had a bunch of characters all fulfilling roles and being lived in by amateur actors. Cut to Diary of the Dead, the second to latest movie in the series, and the kids are all indistinguishable tweener hipster douches, most of whom are behind the camera half of the time, thus completing their near obsolescence. Meanwhile, zombies are pitiful to begin with and getting smarter and more interesting all the time...
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Oh, I suspected as much, although it was new to me. Mostly I just loved the tutu line. :)
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