20617: (Hermantin)Sun-Sentinel-Zombies On The Loose (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Zombies On The Loose


With `Dawn' Remake, Movie Monster Isn't Dead Meat

By WILLIAM WEIR
Courant Staff Writer
Posted March 19 2004


Maybe it's time we took the zombie a little more seriously.

It's a tough sell, what with the drooling and random shedding of limbs. But
consider the facts: For more than 70 years, zombies have figured in hundreds
of movies from virtually all cultures. And with the remake of "Dawn of the
Dead," there's no sign of letting up.

Yet even in the world of movie monsters, the zombie gets little credit.
There's a surprising dearth of zombie memorabilia at Bristol's Silver Screen
Movie Museum. Curator and horror expert Cortlandt Hull places the zombie in
the lower tier of monsters. He points out that even the mummy, a close
cousin, fares better in the creature hierarchy.

At first glance, the roots of the image problem are pretty obvious. Zombies
have none of the vampire's dash and charm nor Frankenstein's inner torment.
They don't even breathe fire. "They're extremely low-tech," says Peter
Dendle, author of The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia. "To be a zombie, you just
have to rip your clothes and look tired."

But it's a deceptive simplicity. Behind the vacant stare and gnashing teeth,
these walking dead have long served as social commentators. Depending on the
decade, they've alternately served as metaphors for Nazis, Marxists and
corporate drones.

George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" - the 1968 standard-bearer of
zombie movies - had plenty to say about racial tensions, Vietnam and the
breakdown of the nuclear family, Dendle says. Its 1979 sequel, the original
"Dawn of the Dead," warned of an increasingly commerce-obsessed society as
the undead instinctually flock to a shopping mall in Pittsburgh (Romero's
hometown and the modern zombie's home base). The middle class wasn't just
shrinking, Dendle notes; it was eating itself.

Indeed, says Dendle, there's nothing like being chased by the undead to
force a re-examination of your entire world. Take a table, for instance.
It's not a table anymore but a weapon or something to hide behind.

"The cultural and sociological value of things is no longer there," says
Dendle, who teaches English at Pennsylvania State University. "You have to
reassess what these things are. The same goes for people; that may look like
your daughter, but it's a zombie."

Elizabeth McAlister, an associate professor of religion at Wesleyan
University, is less impressed.

"Yeah," she says, chuckling at a preview of the new "Dawn of the Dead" on
her office computer, "that's really dumb."

But the movie looks fairly harmless, and that's more than she can say for
most zombie movies. Since 1932's "White Zombie" with Bela Lugosi, she said,
the genre has exploited Haitian culture to fit Western notions of evil in
voodoo.

She keeps behind her desk a bottle intricately decorated with scissors and
mirrors that, according to Haitian voodoo religion, contains two zombies.
She commissioned it from a sorcerer in Haiti, only later learning the
religious significance of the work. In Haitian voodoo culture, the zombie -
or zonbi - is a spirit captured near the graves of the recently deceased and
put to work.

As the tradition goes, the talents of the person whose spirit has been
captured will benefit anyone in possession of the zonbi. Catching the spirit
of a shrewd businessman, for example, could mean a temporary boost in
business acumen. After a few weeks, it's usually returned to the grave. It's
a minor inconvenience for the spirit, but the practice is considered morally
neutral in Haiti.

Associations of black magic with voodoo (or vodou) came by way of the tall
tales of U.S. military officials stationed in Haiti in the 1920s. Hollywood
further distorted the zombie's origins, leading to the flesh-eaters we know
from the movies.

Particularly objectionable to McAlister are the racist overtones in these
movies that "find evil in African religion and in African racial
differences."

Though earlier zombie movies were often set in the West Indies and other
exotic locales, Pittsburgh is the modern zombie's home base.

And spirituality figures a good bit less. In "Night of the Living Dead,"
it's radiation from a fallen satellite that causes the dead to walk.
Romantic notions about life after death - specifically those of the vampire
- get the once-over. Witty, well read and remarkably well preserved after
centuries of walking the earth, the vampire is the anti-zombie.

"With vampires, it's increasingly about being one yourself," Dendle says.
"It's like having a membership to an elite club."

Slow, clumsy and reeking of putrefaction, he says, zombies are a club no one
wants to join.

But then Dendle hasn't met Chris Gore.

Now the editor of the Los Angeles-based magazine Film Threat, Gore traveled
across the country in 1989 to do just that. A zombie film fan growing up, he
jumped at the chance to be an extra in the remake of "Night of the Living
Dead."

"They had a zombie school on the set," he recalls. "It was pretty simple -
they would walk you through different moves. It was the Romero school of
zombies, where they lumber like they just woke up from a bad hangover. But
if one guy screws up, you have to do the whole thing over."

He went on to endure the taste of chicken soaked in Karo syrup and red food
coloring (yep, that's how they make flesh) to earn his pay - a certificate
confirming his zombiehood. For Gore, it was the realization of a lifelong
dream. But he understands why others don't always share his enthusiasm.
"Exploding heads are not for everyone."

The over-the-top violence draws a good deal of criticism, but Dendle says it
serves a purpose beyond mere shock in this particularly nihilistic genre.
Showing the human body in its most grotesque form drives home the bleak
philosophy that we amount to little more than accumulated cells.

"You don't see things like religion faring too well in zombie movies,"
Dendle says. "There's an almost Nietzschean will to power in these movies.
They're suggesting that we are ugly, petty, selfish creatures trying to cast
dominance over each other by having us literally go around and eat each
other."

Gore takes a more cheerful view. Behind all the blood, brain matter, etc.,
the zombie movie is a celebration of humanity. Take, for instance, the
survivors stranded in the mall of the original "Dawn of the Dead."

"They're surrounded by everything their hearts could desire - clothes, TVs -
but it's all worthless," he says. Zombies, Gore says, teach us to value life
and each other.

So any chance they'll get more respect? Dendle doubts it. And he doubts that
zombies would want it anyway, preferring to revel in their countercultural
status.

"I have a hard time seeing them go the way of the Oscars," Dendle says.

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