Thing is, though, the concept only works if the cause of the phenomenon is supernatural. If there were a virus like that and you caught it . . . you wouldn’t live 28 days. In fact, you’d probably die of thirst or hunger in a week or two. Think about it.
In a world gone mad with economic down turns, car bombings,WMD’s, missing white women, rampant obesity, Anna Nicole’s Unsurprising Death and Whose her baby’s Daddy? I am thankful for the Real Issues of life like THIS being asked.
This Magnificent Question is the kinda genius that keeps me subscribing to The Dope year after year.
I bow to your greatness, sir.
I can’t think of any movies of the zombie holocaust genre that have involved any supernatural elements. I’m sure there are a few out there, but almost invariably, the zombie plague is either wholly unexplained, or the result of a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong.
I haven’t seen it yet, but I believe Robin Campillo’s [URL=]Les Revenants [2004] more or less fits your bill, even if it may be more a [melo-]drama than a comedy.
And that film in turn sounds like it could’ve been very loosely inspired by Will Self’s 1991 gently comic short story “The North London Book of the Dead,” in which a forty-ish man discovers that his mother, though deceased and cremated, is enjoying an afterlife in a modest basement apartment in a rather dull neighborhood in Crouch End. These living dead are zombies, but they’re perfectly ordinary – even banal – in their behavior. Their society is self-administering, with its own telephone book, real estate agents, and so on.
A key difference between the short story and the film might be that Self’s [un]dead aren’t assimilationist, per se – they’re content to avoid their loved ones, live in unfamiliar neighborhoods to prevent their discovery, and not advertise their true nature.
And all that reminded me that in 1932 besides White Zombie, the original *The Mummy * was also released, AFAIK Lugosi’s zombies were more related to the zombies from Haiti (slaves in a trance, the people not quite really dead) I do wonder if the Mummy’s walk and mood at the time of reanimation was the influence for future undead behavior.
I know… that came a little bit confusing. I meant to say indeed that in White Zombie Lugosi’s Zombies were walking around like in a trance, Karloff’s The Mummy was more (Romero) zombie like when it got out of the sarcophagus.
BTW if you have the time and the bandwidth, you can check the original White Zombie in Youtube, (warning: terrible sound quality)
If it’s not a supernatural cause, it’s a matter of practically indistinguishable blackboxing. I mean, you and I walk and move because we eat food and drink water every day. A zombie who cannot be killed except by a head injury – IOW, who cannot die of dehydration or malnutrition, yet still somehow finds the energy to walk and move – is not a living organism by conventional standards.
As far as I Am Legend goes, I can’t say I hold out too much hope for the plot of the movie. I can, however, say that I expect it to be visually stunning.
I’m biased, however. My cousin Pat’s the art director.
[spoiler]Hmm… if I’m very very lucky, I’d rather be killed first, raped, and THEN eaten. Or maybe, (if I’m in a whimsical mood that day,) killed first, then eaten, and then raped, but I’m not so sure about that.
Or are you implying that nobody is ever lucky enough to be killed first??[/spoiler]
