Prompted by a joke on The Daily Show, about a zombie Adlai Stevenson seeking brains…
In Night of the Living Dead (1968) the zombies are cannibals, but not particularly interested in brains.
In The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror III (1992), the zombies stagger around, muttering “brains…” and bypass Homer. I infer from this that the concept of zombie as encephalophagic (I just made that up) is so well established that it’s become a joke.
So somewhere in between 1968 and 1992, zombies became fixated on brains. Where did it happen?
It was Dan O’Bannon, whose movie Return of the Living Dead branched off from Romero’s persional mythology and established its own. He directed and, IIRC, wrote or co-wrote the screenplay.
Before Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, by the way, zombies weren’t cannibals – they were simply the somewhat stupefied Walking Dead, and were simply creepy. Supposedly they were inspired by people drugged and enslaved by fugu poison, according to Wade Davis, who wrote the Serpent and the Rainbow about his researches. The book was itself turned into a Zombie movie.
So zombies have been evolving in the movies. Nowadays, in addition to eating flesh, they no longer shamble around, but run and leap, too. The “Brains” thing is just the icing on the cake.
Dan O’Bannon also gave himself a cameo as a police officer wgho gets eaten.
OBannon keeps on doing things until he gets them right, then keeps on going until he gets it wrong again. Having written and acted in a flick with an Alien Creature Aboard the Spceship (Dark Star), whe went on to do it again in (Alien), then doing the screen story for AVP.
He gave us The Evil Living Dead in Dead and Buried and the “Soft Landing” sequence from Heavy Metal before doing return of the Living Dead, then toppling over with LifeForce.
At least he hasn’t given us any helicopter flicks since Blue Thunder.
In Return of the Living Dead 3 it was explained that zombies somehow derive energy from the electrical impulses of the neurons.
The real reasons O’Bannon choose to have his zombies eat ony brains instead of all flesh were; 1) to make the film less gorey and ensure an R rating, and 2) to distance his work from Romero’s. AFAIK no Romero Dead film (or any film using his rules) has shown a zombie eating brains.
The 1968 film’s zombies were of my parent’s generation,t he one that helped win WWII and all. They just get right down to the basics.
The later film, though, completely bypassed my generation and had Gen X’er (or was it Gen Y’ers?) zombies.
As we all know, these kids are all about status and other frivilous stuff. So natch, they were not content munching an arm or something. Nothing but brains would suffice.
