Wel­come to The George A. Romero Zom­bie Cycle Film Fes­ti­val. Join The Dork Report in revis­it­ing all five canon­i­cal episodes in the orig­i­nal epic zom­bie saga:

• Part I: Night of the Liv­ing Dead
• Part II: Dawn of the Dead
• Part III: Day of the Dead
• Part IV: Land of the Dead
• Part V: Diary of the Dead

I haven’t had the plea­sure of see­ing what is now rec­og­nized as the first zom­bie movie ever made: White Zom­bie (1932), star­ring none other than Bela Lugosi. But arguably, George A. Romero’s Night of the Liv­ing Dead (1968) is the actual zom­bie urtext. It pre­ceded the first of its four offi­cial sequels by almost a decade, but laid down the defin­i­tive tem­plate for the great flood of deriv­a­tives, remakes, homages, and ripoffs to come. Night of the Liv­ing Dead is in the pub­lic domain, and can be legally down­loaded for free from Archive.org.

If there is any doubt as to the endurance of the genre, check out Wikipedia’s com­pi­la­tion of over 300 zombie-themed fea­ture films. Zom­bies thrive online in the open-ended zom­bie nar­ra­tive Zom­bieAt­tack slowly unfold­ing on Twit­ter, and in online shrines to the undead like AllThingsZombie.com. Max Brooks has cor­nered the lit­er­ary zom­bie field with his books The Zom­bie Sur­vival Guide (2003) and World War Z (2006) (the first a dis­pos­able tri­fle, but the sec­ond a grip­ping tour de force). Zom­bies have invaded the Mar­vel Uni­verse comics, ironic t-shirts, and hacked road­work signs in Austin.

Braaaaaaaaaaaaaains!

One may won­der about the men­tal health of such obses­sive zom­bie fans, but now that The Dork Report is host­ing a Romero Zom­bie Cycle film Fes­ti­val, I must now count myself among them. Also, the word “zom­bie” is just kind of fun to say. Zom­bie, zom­bie, zom­bie. Per­haps sens­ing the recent spike in the zom­bie zeit­geist, Romero him­self has picked up the pace of his zom­bie cycle, adding fresh new entries in 2005 and 2007, with yet another planned for the near future.

What exactly is the appeal? The basic zom­bie con­ceit is uncom­pli­cated. Indeed, the Night of the Liv­ing Dead mar­ket­ing tagline “They won’t stay dead!” pretty much says it all. Sim­ply, any and all dead peo­ple (no mat­ter what the man­ner of their expi­ra­tion) will inevitably come back to life as unthink­ing, unfeel­ing, car­niv­o­rous mon­sters. There’s some­thing pure to Romero’s orig­i­nal con­cept, with­out the com­plex­i­ties added by later zom­bie sto­ries. Hor­ror and sci­ence fic­tion blog io9 posits that war and social upheaval cor­re­late with spikes in zom­bie movie pro­duc­tion. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), for­ever retooled the zom­bie con­cept for a world obsessed with con­ta­gious dis­eases (SARS, AIDS), and the essen­tially ani­mal­is­tic bad­ness of human nature (tor­ture, ter­ror­ism). Boyle’s zom­bies don’t want to eat; they are just plain mad.

This is how you do The Mon­ster Mash

Romero’s zom­bies have some rudi­men­tary intel­li­gence and are able to open doors, employ sim­ple tools like blud­geons, and are afraid of fire. But they have no rem­nants of their for­mer mem­o­ries or per­son­al­i­ties, and exist only to sup upon the liv­ing. Com­mon to nearly every zom­bie tale is that an epi­demic effects a break­down of soci­etal order, be it on a micro (such as the clas­sic hor­ror movie sce­nario of a few sur­vivors locked in a farm­house in Night of the Liv­ing Dead) or macro scale (wit­ness the total col­lapse of civ­i­liza­tion in Brooks’ novel World War Z). There’s a basic pes­simism inher­ent in the genre; every­thing we regard as human is frag­ile. Faced with zom­bie hordes, the liv­ing turn on each other, cut and run, or totally shut down.

Romero & John A. Russo’s Night of the Liv­ing Dead screen­play includes some pseudo-scientific tech­nob­a­b­ble con­cern­ing a return­ing space probe con­t­a­m­i­nated with radi­a­tion from Venus, but for all intents and pur­poses the ori­gin of the phe­nom­e­non is irrel­e­vant to the story. Later zom­bie films would intro­duce the con­cept of a blood-transmitted virus, but it is irrel­e­vant here whether or not any vic­tim is con­t­a­m­i­nated by a germs or extrater­res­trial radi­a­tion. Merely dying is all it takes to become a mon­ster. In a way, Romero’s orig­i­nal con­cep­tion of the zom­bie, absent of any plague metaphor, is the bleak­est of all vari­ants. Human soci­ety will be for­ever changed in a world in which even those that die nat­u­rally will have to be decap­i­tated before they revive as beastly ghouls.

Ben (Duane Jones) greets the undead hordes

Like all of Romero’s zom­bie flicks, Night of the Liv­ing Dead is set in the Pitts­burgh, PA area (except Day of the Dead, which is the odd one out for many rea­sons to be dis­cussed in the forth­com­ing Dork Report review). The open­ing sequence is set in grave­yard lit­tered with Amer­i­can flags, per­haps meant as a silent allu­sion to the vast num­bers of fresh corpses being sent back from the Viet­nam War. A ran­dom assort­ment of sur­vivors bar­ri­cade them­selves in a farm­house. Romero tells Parallax-view.org that the cast and crew actu­ally lived in that farm­house while film­ing: “We had no bread. We were lit­er­ally sleep­ing out of that farm­house, chop­ping ice out of the tank behind the toi­let bowl in order to wash our faces, and we were tak­ing baths out in the creek.”

In the best hor­ror movie tra­di­tion, we have a cross-section of soci­ety with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of every gen­der, age, class, and race: a trau­ma­tized woman, a young cou­ple, a clas­sic nuclear fam­ily, and a lone black man. For all intents and pur­poses, their var­i­ous social stand­ings are erased as they all must unite to defend them­selves against a com­mon foe. Ben (Duane Jones) proves him­self the most intel­li­gent, sane, and capa­ble of the bunch. But the humans can barely agree on any­thing, and expend most of their energy on infight­ing. One sus­pects that they wouldn’t be able to get along even with­out the zom­bie hordes assem­bling outside.

Night of the Liv­ing Dead is noto­ri­ous for remain­ing unrated by the MPAA, proudly show­cas­ing a con­sid­er­able amount of gore (and even a lit­tle nude zom­bie der­rière) unprece­dented in 1968. But I think it’s fair to say that the true rea­son the movie is remem­bered as more than a cheapie hor­ror flick is its African Amer­i­can pro­tag­o­nist. Of supe­rior intel­li­gence and matu­rity than every­one else, he alone (spoiler alert!) sur­vives while the rest of the gang self-destructs. But unbe­knownst to him, author­i­ties have mobi­lized to sweep the coun­try­side in order to exe­cute any and all sham­bling zom­bies. It’s impos­si­ble to ignore this group’s resem­blance to a lynch mob of the white male estab­lish­ment, bear­ing scythes and hunt­ing rifles. Given this sce­nario, one might pre­dict the pow­er­ful, racially charged end­ing. In an inter­est­ing styl­is­tic choice, the final sequence is told as a pho­tomon­tage, a series of still images show­ing us the tragic after­math of what hap­pens when the sup­pos­edly civ­i­lized “liv­ing” are given free reign to indulge in their bloodlust.

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Free down­load: Archive.org

Must read: Inter­nal Bleed­ing Zom­bie Week ’08

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