Living dead shuffle through history
Posted on Sunday, June 8, 2008
George Romero gave zombies something they never had before: the munchies.
“They keep coming back in a bloodthirsty lust for human flesh !” the ads promised of Romero’s literally groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead (1968 ).
Zombies had been around since misty old times. They shambled out of Haitian folklore in particular. Voodoo claimed to bring dead people back to life as mindless slaves. The pitiful creatures plodded through more of the same drudgery that killed them in the first place. They got no respect — and no lunch break.
Pulp fiction made them creepy in the distant way of something you wouldn’t want to meet, but there was no way you ever would. And even if you did, you could just waltz away. Clumsy ol’ Mr. Bones couldn’t manage his feet very well, let alone bite. In fact, it was so hard to write a scary story about zombies, almost nobody tried. Bram Stoker saw better prospects in Romanian legends about bloodsuckers with sharp teeth and terrible hungers, and wrote Dracula (1897 ). Bela Lugosi starred in the Hollywood classic, Dracula (1931 ). Lugosi tried to do as much for zombies the next year in White Zombie, but even he couldn’t. In the movie, he turns the standoffish woman of his dreams into a zombie, only to find out a zombie is dull company. You couldn’t have dinner with a zombie. A mouthful of salt was all it took to put a zombie out of action, according to zombie code. Zombies gained their place in the monster club the only way they could — slowly.
LEFT FOOT, RIGHT FOOT The Mummy (1932 ) did the considerable trick of making people scared of something they could outrun. Mummies have been sneaking up on people ever since. Zombies learned from mummies. Producer Val Lewton’s shadowy I Walked With a Zombie (1943 ) put the audience in the zombie’s shoes. EC’s infamous horror comics gave the walking dead their first rumbling appetite of sorts — for vengeance. A madman’s chopped-up victims rise from the swamp to get even with him in the 1950 s comic-book tale, “Horror We ? How’s Bayou ?” Satisfied, they go “back into the bayou.” Revenge is a dish best served clammy.
WALK OF FAME Romero grew up reading ECs — comics that broke so many rules of appropriate reading for kids, they set off a national protest against comic books. (David Hajdu’s recent book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, details the controversy. ) The walking dead came to Romero with stiff rules of zombie behavior, which he threw out.
“I never thought about [the old idea of ] zombies,” Romero says. “I never even used the word ‘ zombie. ’” He called them ghouls. They staggered like zombies, but they broke with other traditions. They not only ate people, they didn’t care which people. The choice was nothing personal. They’d just as soon have, um — you.
Another touch that Romero’s movies added: If a zombie bites you, then you turn into a zombie yourself.
And thanks to Romero, the best way to exterminate a zombie is common knowledge. The same as everybody knows a silver bullet kills a werewolf, and a stake through the heart kills a vampire, the way to zap a zombie is — Answer: (A ) Shoot him in the head.
So far, nobody has tried the other way that might work even better: (B ) Shoot him an e-mail message of “GAL” — get a life.
(Sources include The Internet Movie Database and The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural. )
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