When in the distant 1968 George A. Romero was about to revolutionize the world of horror cinema with his "Night Of The Living Dead", perhaps he was not entirely aware of what he was doing. He certainly knew he had a winning idea to propose to the general public, and he also had a clear understanding of the social and political message that his film would more or less covertly launch. He was ambitious and, at the same time, reckless. But he probably did not imagine that his work would generate one of the most famous and terrifying icons of horror cinema in the century just past, he did not imagine that zombies would disturb entire generations of enthusiasts, just as other illustrious colleagues of the past such as Bram Stoker's Dracula or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
In a cinema of terror until then populated by monsters more or less extraterrestrial and more or less human, a new, provocative image forcefully inserted itself, a new breed of the damned so close to our human race that it was separated from it only by a small, negligible detail: death. It is no accident, in fact, that Romero himself never particularly strived to find an (ir)rational explanation for the birth of his creatures. Whatever the cause (radiation from space, epidemics...) it was in any case a marginal phenomenon compared to the most brutal of aberrations: man killing himself, society as a bearer of truth and progress, civilized and evolved society (or at least convinced of being so), which degrades itself and revolts against itself, as in the most classical and banal of quarrels with one's neighbor, resolved with the barbaric massacre of the man next door.
Thus was born a new figure of terror (drawn from the myths of voodoo religion according to which a person can return to life after death and respond to the will of the one who has bewitched them), a new figure that detached itself from the classical iconography of cinema and more generally from the literature of horror, to become a dark representation of the decay of our society. And it is no accident that the zombies invented by Romero are a chilling metaphor for the human race, also devoid of will and guided by primordial animal instincts, despite feeling itself to be a bearer of reason and truth.
Success is unexpected, so striking as to confine Romero himself in a creative cage that will condemn without the slightest hesitation any of his future productions: it will be precisely his most devoted fans (hungry for zombies just as zombies are hungry for us!) who will not forgive the director any foray into the cinematographic world far from his cursed creatures.
In any case, whether or not one appreciates horror cinema and Romero in particular, zombies have now become an integral part of our imagination, figures that in a few years have had the honor of sitting alongside the (sacred?) monsters of horror, with the indispensable merit of having shifted attention to the dramatic everyday reality of human life. No longer fantastic situations at the boundaries of reality, at the boundaries of myth or fairy tale, but a terror that arises like a disease among human beings themselves, forced to fight against their own kind in a struggle without winners or losers. This was Romero's innovative and brilliant idea: to hide horror in the heart of a consumerist and respectable society, made of myths and values empty of meaning.
And his provocative and at the same time ironic vision (of a black irony that could not be blacker), manifested itself in the choice of the hero-antihero of his film, a character that overturned all the canons of cinema: in addition to being black, he was despotic, so convinced of his superiority in managing the situation as to be clumsy and punctually ineffective, killed at the end so "stupidly" as to make us smile, mistaken for one of those demonic creatures that he himself had tried to confront all night. Killed without anyone noticing the difference between him and the monsters he was fighting: a provocation within a provocation, we might say, a demonstration of how there are not and cannot be, in any conflict, neither winners nor losers.
But the true essence of the zombie myth is, in my opinion, contained in the central part of the film: the survivors inside the house besieged by zombies cannot find a concrete solution to their problems of coexistence and, despite being alive and endowed with the capacity to understand and to will, they prove to be completely identical to the creatures devoid of intelligence that surround them. Incapable of living together with their own kind and devoted to massacre even when their own lives are in danger.
A Zombie for Every Occasion...
One could analyze infinitely the depth of the idea at the basis of the cinematographic birth of zombies (we like to believe, beyond any possible explanation and deepening, in the magical alchemy of Destiny and Chance), but what we can ask ourselves today almost 35 years after their genesis, is how much has remained of the profound critique of society that Romero wanted more or less consciously to launch.
It is undeniable how, since that distant 1968, zombies have literally invaded the world of imagination, protagonists of films, books, comics and video games, but more than once we have wondered how much has remained of those hidden meanings that made Romero's film a dark and dramatic photograph of society in those years. The answer is not simple, at least not immediately. What is certain is that zombies, due to their terrifying and at the same time spectacular nature, have sometimes inevitably emptied themselves of their profound meaning, to become pure artistic exercise for makeup artists and special effects magicians: all this is not at all to be condemned, but is to be considered as a transformation, a natural evolution both of the cinematographic medium and of society itself. The myth of zombies was indeed taken up with vivacity and passion by directors, writers, screenwriters, who sought to shape its deeper meaning to the needs of the story they created around it.
In the cinematographic field, beyond the trilogy made by Romero (which sought to keep its underlying message unchanged), zombies appeared in very different forms: among the most successful works we can mention films such as "Re-Animator" by Stuart Gordon (1985) or "Braindead" by Peter Jackson (1993), two films that left their mark for their high dose of blood but also for their biting irony.
While in "Re-Animator", loosely based on the story Herbert West, Reanimator by Lovecraft, the living dead, fruit of the manipulation of an unorthodox and perfidiously diabolical doctor, loses part of its soul of denunciation to become pure and amusing entertainment, in "Braindead", rightly defined as the most splatter film in the history of cinema, the figure of the living dead renews and completes itself at the same time. In Peter Jackson's film in fact, although humor and dementia are pushed to excess, zombies become a vehicle for a profound psychological analysis of the characters in the story: motherhood, analyzed both in the relationship of dependence between the protagonist and his mother (linked in part to the sense of guilt experienced for the presumed guilt of having killed his father), and through the first, disconcerting zombie pregnancy, which brings to light a newborn as violent as it is unbearable.
And then, as many have noted, the rejection of death by zombies becomes in this film, increasingly categorical: no longer sufficient are blows to the brain (and looking carefully, of brain, Jackson's demented zombies seem to have none at all!), now even the parts of the dismembered body come to life and continue their feast of blood. The figure of the living dead is thus embellished with new cinematographic finds, with a new atrocious visual violence, well distant anyway from the crudeness of Romero's film, capable of digging much deeper into the dark part of the human soul.
In the field of literature, zombies have had proportionally much less work compared to the big and small screen, also due to the revolution inherent in the origin of their birth: the living dead are in fact the first great horror icon born exclusively for the big screen and from the big screen they have hardly managed to break free. An episode certainly worthy of being mentioned is "Pet Sematary", one of Stephen King's greatest novels, a book that addresses with chilling ruthlessness, one of the most ancestral dilemmas of the human mind: what if it were possible to resurrect a person dear to us? Better the painful memory of a son and wife now dead, or the impossible coexistence with their resurrected body without the light of reason and hungry for violence? Highly recommended to anyone who has forgotten to read it.
Last brief mention is certainly deserved by our national horror comic par excellence, which gave some magical moments to its devoted readers before losing itself a bit in banality and excessive Italian moralism. How can we not remember the first, mythical issue of Dylan Dog, "The Dawn Of The Living Dead", perhaps the most beautiful issue of the entire series, where the homage to our dear zombie friends is so sincere and respectful, passionate and faithful, as to move even after fifteen years from its publication?
Resident Evil: When Zombies Become Fashionable
As much as they are loved by an increasingly large slice of the public (let us not forget the enormous worldwide success that Romero's film had), as much as they are present in an increasingly modern way in the nightmares told by numerous authors, writers and directors, zombies have remained strictly for the use and consumption of their most faithful and intransigent enthusiasts. At least until a few years ago, exactly until the explosion of the "Resident Evil" phenomenon, the video game that brought the horror of the living dead into every home in the world.
Beyond the purely technical analysis of the video game, what struck longtime fans was the ease with which young generations were conquered by the myth of zombies, the ease with which from a phenomenon of more or less cult status, the world of the living dead became a real mass phenomenon. The success was so high as to create a paradox far from negligible: from a simple video game inspired by Romero's masterpiece (from which it honestly takes almost everything), "Resident Evil" had such a high public response as to make evident the commercial necessity of a film adaptation. And so, for young generations who never had the pleasure of enjoying Romero's films, zombies in cinema are nothing but the banal adaptation of a successful video game. And so from "video game citation of the myth", we have arrived with despicable simplicity to "myth citation of the video game", subverting the spatio-temporal rules in the world of horror imagination.
Further affront to the more "elderly" enthusiasts was the removal from the "Resident Evil" film project of the man who more than any other would have had the right to put his hand to it: George A. Romero himself. Without detracting from the skill of director Paul Anderson, a young talent who had already impressed with the semi-unknown (to the general public) "Point of No Return", Romero's removal from the project says a lot about how the myth of zombies has profoundly changed over the years. Too sharp and too dark, too sarcastic and too critical of society, Romero's vision was discarded, in favor of a more disposable plot, more modern and ruthlessly commercial. Genetic experiments, super-technological laboratory, big pieces of attractive women wandering around the screen (that, to be honest, is not displeasing!), everything was studied at the table to transform the video game into reality, with few, too veiled homages to Romero's masterpiece.
The film is nonetheless pleasant, an hour and a half of zombie-based entertainment is quite gratifying (even if a bit more blood would not have hurt), and some truly well-executed scenes remain impressed in the viewer's memory (the walk of the zombie dragging the axe on the ground and advancing limping on the ankle, with the broken foot bouncing helplessly on the floor, is a blast!). But it is too little. And above all it is a sacrilege. It is true that the message launched by Romero in the seventies, the criticism of irrational consumerism and the mass stupidity of our society, has not completely disappeared and it is also true that looking carefully the themes of denunciation have remained and have been updated (the ethical rules related to genetic experimentation, the rebellion of machines and computers against man), but what is disconcerting goes beyond the more or less "politically correct" message of the film. What is striking is to see the living dead, children of nonconformism and denunciation, play the role of a mass phenomenon, a Blockbuster phenomenon, all popcorn and festive children in the theater, become a new icon of consumerism and commercial success. Romero cries for vengeance!!!
The latest news speaks of a fourth film about zombies, so black and desecrating as to remind everyone of the real origins of the myth of the living dead, so pessimistic and hopeless as to not be able to be made in such a dark period for humanity (could it be just an excuse to hide the lack of confidence of any producer in a new Romero film?).
When and if it arrives, only Romero's film will be able to restore order and give the living dead their true nature back: otherwise all that will be left to do will be to go in a few years to Blockbuster to rent "Resident Evil 7", perhaps telling our children that zombies were born with the PlayStation.
Comments