Right, but it doesn’t make much sense to me. Aside from Return, I’m having trouble thinking of any zombie media where they eat brains and it’s played straight.
Doesn’t happen in…
Walking Dead series, games
Resident Evil games, movies, live action or CG
Dawn of the Dead remake, or anything else Romero
World War Z book and movie
28 Days Later
Zombieland
Shaun of the Dead
L4D series
Killing Floor
That covers most of the popular zombie stuff of the last decade or so.
There’s lots of brain eating jokes in the Plants vs. Zombies games, but they’re super goofy.
IIRC, in Return of the Living Dead, someone strapped down a zombie/walker/ghoul and asked it why they ate brains and it replied something like It makes the pain slack off. What pain? they asked. The pain of being undead, it says.
If you’re a zombie you don’t care about practical.
Prehistoric man ate both brains and marrow – we’ve got the cracked bones to prove it. Both have the advantage of being pretty soft and eatable without having to cook it to make it easier to chew. (Things like the liver are that way, too, but you don’t have to crack a bone to get to it).
I don’t think they ate brains in Warm Bodies in order to feel more human – I got the impression that was a fortuitous side-effect of eating brains.
The whole thing about eating brains is a cute touch, because it means the zombies vs. peo0ple are in an extreme adversarial situation. You absolutely cannot live without your brain, and the zombie absolutely needs it. It’s not like a zombie simply eating some muscle tissue, which you could, in principle, survive. Or a vampire simply drinking some of your blood. Lucy Westenra lasted at least three nights of repeated feedings in Dracula, and would’ve survived if Drac had gone to another host.
A related thing is your monster needing some other hard-to-access body part. For some reason, pituitary glands have served this purpose. In the 1950s movie The Leech Woman, the title femme fatale needed a pituitary to stay young, and got it by breaking into her victim’s skull with a specially-shaped ring. In Preston and Child’s The Relic the unpronounceable beastie needed to eat pituitary glands, which meant killing his victims messily.
I’m also pretty sure they want to eat brains because they are themselves effectively brainless. The loss of what makes you you is the main source of creepiness for zombies after all, and it applied both to the controlled and uncontrolled kind.
Actually, the line is “The pain of being dead.” They can literally feel themselves rot.
And I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that The Simpsons’ 4th season Treehouse of Horror segment “Dial Z for Zombies” was the first pop culture callback to the “brains” thing from Return. If so, that’s probably the beginning of the switch from brain-eating being “That’s something that the zombies in Return of the Living Dead do” to “That’s something that zombies do.”
Except that, in the one movie that played this trope straight, the zombies were far from brainless. They could talk, plan ambushes, and in one of the later sequels, fall in love. (Although once you get up past four or five Roman numerals after your title, it’s questionsble wether it counts as “playing straight” any more.)
I suspect brain eating was O’Bannon trying to invert Romero’s zombies. Instead of mindless shamblers who could only be killed by destroying the brain, he had quick, intelligent, virtually indestructible zombies that ate brains.
All I know is that when we revive an old thread around here, no comedians feel called upon to make a joke about To-o-om-m-m Savri-i-in-i-i’s entra-a-ail-l-ls.
That wasn’t Savini. Savini was the guy that was sort of the leader, he had the switchblade comb in the scene where the biker thugs see the helicopter. The blood pressure machine guy was the bandito looking thug with a sombrero.
Savini’s character (Blades) got shot by Peter (Ken Foree), fell off the balcony and landed in the fountain. Then he has a (zombie) cameo in “Land of the Dead” as the same character. Don’t quote me, but I think the leader of the motorcycle gang in “Dawn…” was the dude with the Beatle haircut and the Thompson sub-machine gun* (his name was “Butchie”) riding in the motorcycle sidecar. Peter wings him and he falls out of the sidecar and becomes zombie-brunch.
You are 100% correct re the blood pressure scene. I need to correct something or hordes of nitpickers will descend: The dude with the Beatle haircut and machine gun was Larry Vaira playing “Mousey.” William “Butchie” George was the guy driving the motorcycle. “Mousey” (despite the name) seemed to be Savini’s co-leader.
