Dawn of the Dead (remake)
Land of the Dead (fourth installment of original Romero series)
Shaun of the Dead
28 Days Later
Grindhouse: Planet Terror
Resident Evil
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
and the forthcoming “28 Weeks Later”
Not to mention an Australian zombie film whose name escapes me just now (but released around the same time as the “Dawn” remake) and I heard about a “Day of the Dead” remake on the way as well.
That’s an awful lot of zombie apocalypses for such a short span of time. These movies more than any other type of horror movie tend to be the most formulaic (IMO): Zombies over-run civilization. Group of bedraggled strangers reluctantly band together and hole up in some isolated establishment. Feuds & power-struggles break out amongst the holed-up surviviors. More & more zombies gather outside the gates and beseige them, eventually breaking through the barriers. Survivors get eaten. The whole genre of zombie movies seems to behave like actual zombies - they’re lumbering, awkward, easily disposable, but just keep coming and coming and coming. Just why are they so popular?
Genre fads come and go, especially in low-budget horror area of cinema. Look at the plethora of ‘torture’ movies (Hostel, Saw).
Many horror villains are relentless, zombies are hundreds and thousands of relentless villains. The zombies in 28 Days Later are not slow and lumbering, though. I imagine it has something to do with the relentless pace of technology in this day and age. Many of the recent zombie movies have a human-technology cause for the infestation (Resident Evil, 28 Days Later).
I hate to say it, but I think you’ve maybe not watched the films you cite there.
28 days later (I’m going to avoid the zombie/non-zombie debate for now) does’nt have a huge horde of zombies. Yes there is a fortified location, but the rather small numbers of zombies that attack it are really only a distraction to what’s happening INSIDE the structure.
I don’t think the Resident Evil movies count, as our heroine is almost never actually fighting what are clearly supposed to be zombies. I was disappointed in them, in that regard.
I think the remake trend is due to current directors hoping to redo movies they liked in ways they think could have made them better… Lord knows that Day of the Dead can use some updating (though if he gets rid of Bub, the zombie hordes will have nothing on the fans).
But overall, I think garygnu pretty much nailed it. A movie does well, so other studio’s give green lights and money to similar films, hoping to catch a piece of that pie.
Land of the Dead, while not a terribly good film, doesn’t speak to your theory very well. The formulaic events you’ve talked about have already happened by the time the film starts; the characters have mostly gotten comfortable with the state of affairs vis-a-vis zombies, and almost all of the tension comes about by living humans giving each other the shaft.
And, of course, Shaun of the Dead isn’t a horror movie so much as a romantic comedy.
The theory is that the cynicism and anger of the first rash of these movies, in the early 70s, was a response to the violence of the Viet Nam War shown on the nightly news, and the mistrust of government; both paradigm-shifting events. I think it’s likely that today’s political and global climate is just as relevant.
Pretty soon we’ll all be talking about Pulse Zombies (Cell). It’s the best psychological anaylysis and theory for modern zombiedom’s relevance in early 21st Century Media disguised as a Zombie story.
Wait till someone finally makes Mark Rogers’ THE DEAD into a film! It is THE Zombie Apocalypse tale- after the Rapture takes all the virtuous people (not just Christians) from the Earth, those left behind must develop faith & virtue in order to be saved from joining the hordes of demonized zombies ravaging the dying husk of creation (apparently, the Rapture split Creation into the Eternal Realm of the Blessed, and the aforementioned dying husk.)
And more still to come… like the big budget adaptation of World War Z, set for release next summer. We should be pretty much “Zombied-out” by then and the genre fad will probably fade away.
Wow. I thought there was a general concensous among zombie fans that Bub was (generously) a bad idea or (raving fanboy mode) the thing that killed the Living Dead movies.
::: Moderator interjection :::: silenus, there’s a thin line here and I think you’re on the wrong side of it. If you want to analyze a current movie trend in terms of current political trends, that’s fine and probably interesting. But a snappy one-liner isn’t analysis, it’s a drive-by political snip and that’s not appropriate.
I don’t buy that it reflects current trends in anything - the movies just play to an audience that is too young to remember the last time this genre ran its course. In some sense, it’s rather like a rereleasing Disney classic every five years, because there’s a new crop of five year-olds who have never seen it. Eventually zombie movies will be passé and they’ll molder in their graves for 20 years to re-emerge and terrify future audiences.
And I thought 28 Days Later was a pretentious piece of crap with its only bright spot being the skewering of environmentalists. Shaun of the Dead was funny and scary and touching and is an infinitely better film.
Actually, I’d say that zombie films are symbolic of the loss of individuality and a surrendering to the mindless herd mentality. If you’ll note, the zombies eat the brains of living people (who, in turn, become zombies), and while there’s obviously a number of ways to destroy a zombie (fire, dismemberment, blowin’ 'em the fuck up, crushing them, etc.) what’s the primary way of killing zombies? Shooting them in the head. Now, why would a bullet to the brain stop a zombie when a bullet to the heart won’t? Zombies are obviously the original Borg prototypes.
