Major Acid's E-Rag
Movies with the Major
ZOMBIES I HAVE KNOWN
Shaun of the Dead
The last time I saw a screening of Night of the Living Dead, the
soundtrack was not properly synchronized with the visual, and the result
was, well, comedy. Unintentional, of course. The latest zombie film,
Shaun of the Dead, is funny on purpose, which in itself is remarkable.
Comedy is the hardest art, only made the harder by the temptation to
take the easy route, the one littered with all the cheap jokes.
Happily, Shaun avoids the easy route, for the most part. From a pacing
point of view, for wider audience reach, for breaking tension (and even
in a comedic horror the tension needs occasionally to be broken) the
easy jokes are handy. It’s balance that makes the film, and Shaun
requires balance. It is billed, after all, as a “romantic zombie
comedy”. The best single moment, and non-cheap I might add, is Shaun’s
mother practicing to sound like a zombie (so as to walk safely among the
shambling dead) and behaving exactly as she has been in real life. It is
one of those wonderful and rare small moments that help make a film a
success.
The “romantic zombie comedy” mix may be unusual, but zombies are not.
They’ve been around in film almost as long as film has been around. As
golems and mummies or even androids – zombie analogs – the idea of
reanimated flesh has fascinated film-makers for generations. What’s
curious is why they are almost always evil.
Androids gone bad, and mummies, and other zombie forms tend to
compulsive evil. But why? Why should Frankenstein’s monster behave so
violently? Why should more modern zombies be so consumed with the need
to eat the living? Payback, of course, the righting of the moral
balance. The violent monster balances cosmic good and evil by taking
down the living monster – in ethical terms – who created him. Mummies
visit retribution on those living beings whose egos and greed cause them
to disturb the dead, to violate, in effect, the afterlife.
Moral lessons require thought on the part of the zombie creators, of
course, something many films do not have – thought, that is. The zombies
in Night of the Living Dead just come alive. Any moral lessons in that
film, or its many offspring, rest with how people behave after the
horror has begun. There is no playing god (Victor Frankenstein’s
supposed sin) to justify the terror that follows. All that moralizing
gets in the way of the bloodletting, especially in film with its
restricted time.
Still, some films at least make a passing attempt at the moral setting.
The Resident Evil films are driven by nasty scientists experimenting
with DNA and/or viral bio-engineering, with predictable results. In the
1950s it was nuclear power with its own devil, radiation, although as
often as not the result was giant bugs rather than zombies. The carnage
was the same – bugs have to eat, just like Evil’s assortment of
reanimated people, dogs, and genetic frights.
Sometimes, however, the zombie becomes the moral centre of the tale.
Frankenstein’s creation is a morality seeker, and one modern variant of
zombies – the reanimated soldier – tends to produce moral beings, which
is Jean Claude Van Damme’s fate in Universal Soldier. This reversal is
not evident in Shaun of the Dead. Indeed, whether any moral centre
exists depends on whether or not one believes that deciding to live
life, rather than just being carried along by life, is a moral
imperative. The ending of Shaun casts that lesson in doubt with a nicely
circular revisiting of the opening scenes.
In time limited feature films, there’s only so much dead weight that a
zombie film can carry around, so it helps in Shaun that the reanimated
are no more than insensate horrors and easily vanquished. It allows the
humour and the romance to take over. The task would have been harder
with more animated, passionate zombies, like vampires.
Romantic vampire comedies are hard to come by. George Hamilton and Susan
Saint James in Love at First Bite were more successful than their
counterparts in Buffy the Vampire Slayer the movie, with Hamilton
creating the most tanned vampire on film, and Saint James the most …
well, happily sexual of the Count’s countless victims. Oh, those ankles!
Although Buffy the film failed, the television show was quite
successful. That probably has to do in part with time again; all the
hours of a long-running weekly show allow for the subtleties that
successfully coalesce into a workable mix of horror and romance and
comedy.
The Count, by the way, is dead. The TV Buffy finished him off even as
Buffy itself is banished to re-run afterlife. Still, there’s lots of
life left in the vampire version of the zombie. The third installment of
Blade is due shortly. The title character is himself a zombie, one of a
different kind, a sort of cross between the living and the dead. Perhaps
it is that human part that makes him ultimately a hero, not a monster.
He is trying to become more human.
In that way, Blade is like many zombies, at least those of the more
sentient kind. Angel in the Buffy franchise is bent on atonement, and
Data the android (another zombie variant) of Star Trek fame was bent on
his own quest to be more human until he managed to blow himself up in an
entirely human act of self-sacrifice.
Data’s emotionless archetype, Spock, had a long and ironic arc beginning
as a living being intent on releasing himself from the thrall of
unreasoning emotion, only to prefigure Data’s ultimate self-sacrifice.
Before his death, Data created his own progeny, a luxury that Spock did
not have. Spock had to be reanimated at the hands of a science that was
designed to create life but was stolen for the purposes of ultimate evil
– people again playing god. One of those playing god was Captain Kirk’s
son, who paid the same price as Frankenstein, but this time his efforts
were not entirely in vain. His playing god brought Spock back to life.
The Star Trek franchise has never been overly burdened with deep
thoughts, so very little thought is given to how Kirk must really have
felt about the price of Spock’s rebirth – the death of Kirk’s own son.
Similarly, Shaun of the Dead is not heavily burdened with deep thought,
although it makes an effort at some social commentary. The opening
montages, both pre-zombie and post-zombie, of life in dead end, working
class London are truly scary only made palatable by being presented
humourously.
That’s the central, distressingly apt point of Shaun of the Dead – so
many of us are already zombies, lurching thoughtlessly, unfeelingly
through daily routines that the shift from selling candy in a corner
store, or selling electronic equipment from a rote script, to eating the
flesh of the living is hardly noticeable.
Shaun, the hero, ultimately wakes to the challenge and chases romance
(and life itself) rather than going through its motions like the walking
dead, all in response to the sudden zombie horror. In adversity, the
saying has it, one’s true character finally shows. But I am not so sure.
I believe that Shaun is, after all, reborn in the film, becoming thereby
a metaphysical zombie, and Shaun’s rebirth, like Spock’s, comes at a
price – the death of Shaun’s mother at Shaun’s own hands.
And for what? What really changes? It may be that Shaun’s rebirth fails
in every way, and that is the truly terrifying thought – that if there
is life after this one, it won’t be any different in any meaningful way.
I don’t know if that’s what the writers (Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg)
had in mind, but the film is so well written in general, that I’d like
to give them the benefit of the doubt. That makes them and their film
one scary enterprise.
