This is just a placeholder for a thought that’s still developing in my head, but The Crazies, a recent remake of a 1973 George Romero film, makes clear the line that connects Night of the Living Dead (and thus, the whole modern zombie genre) with the Cold War/Red Menace vein of sci-fi horror.
The most popular example of that genre is Invasion of the Body Snatchers (which has an echo of grave robbing in the title, even if there’s nothing really undead about it), but it can be traced back to the first film version of Robert Heinlein’s story “The Puppet Masters” - which was called, oddly enough, The Brain Eaters.
So the brain-eating thing goes further back than Return of the Living Dead, and had more to do with subversion than conformism, at least originally. But it was still based on mistrust of the establishment. That seems to be a central principle of this whole complex of sub-genres.
(Oh, and The Crazies is pretty darn well done. It shows up in the “zombie” area of Netflix, but storywise is even less straight-zombie than 28 Days Later, and has more in common with David Cronenberg’s Rabid. Sick people go crazy, start killing, and the army gets called in to make things so much worse.)
“And for those who want to go deeper into the zombie mythos, the way the undead can be killed speaks volumes about the rules that govern their unnatural existence. More than a werewolf or vampire, zombies beg for a rational explanation of how they function. In a body that is rotting on the bone, what part of the brain needs to be destroyed to put them down for good, and why?”
The zombie has a political dimension in all of its forms. The same horror in Sugar Hill rises up elsewhere. It looks different, sometimes, but it always feels the same.
It’s funny, but it’s hard for me not to read this song (or song-as-zombie-story) as Buddhist on some level. Attachment to the physical - to cruelty and materialism - leads inevitably and necessarily to suffering. There are Buddhist meditations on death that are every bit as grisly as Night of the Living Dead. And they pack a similar punch to Exuma singing about Dambala’s justice. Awareness in the grave.
From Edward Conze’s Buddhist Meditations:
If the disciple sees (1) a corpse, thrown on the charnel field, dead for one, two or three days, swollen, blueish and festering, he draws along his own body for comparison, and thinks: ‘Verily, also this body of mine is subject to such a law, is going to be like that, and has not gone beyond this.’
And he thinks the same when he sees (2) a corpse eaten by crows, hawks, vultures, dogs, jackals, or many kinds of worms; (3) a chain of bones (skeleton), with some flesh and blood remaining, and held together by the tendons; (4)a chain of bones, without flesh, but smeared with blood, held together through the tendons; (5) a chain of bones from which both flesh and blood have departed, but still held together through the tendons; (6) bones unconnected, scattered in all directions - here a bone of the hand, and there a bone of the foot, a shin bone, a thigh bone, the pelvis, a vertebral bone, the skull; (7) bones white, similar in colour to shells; (8) bones, more than a year old, made into a heap; (9) bones which have gone rotten and have become dust.
…
For just like the dead body, so also the living one is an abomination. And since it is concealed by adventitious adornments, this mark of abominableness is not clearly perceived.
To me, this isn’t so far from the awareness Exuma is calling down on the unenlightened:
You slavers will know
What it’s like to be a slave
A slave to your hearts
A slave to your heads
A slave to your souls
A slave to your friends
You won’t go to heaven
You will go to hell
You remain in your graves
With the stench and the smell
I’ll melt down your walls
I’ll melt your steel guns
I’ll make you dumb
I’ll make you blind
Dambala send demons
Dambala send angels
Dambala send fire
Dambala send water
- Straight talk from Exuma the Obeah Man
[song from aleisurelybreakfast]
For the sake of human survival, please share this! Reblog, tweet, post on facebook, whatever you can do, do it! The fate of humanity is in your hands.
—
We have learned that many reports of the zombie pandemic that are being broadcast in the media or on social networks are false or exaggerated.
Gamification, most basically, involves the constant, subtle incentivizing of everyday life, often in a digital or technological manner. If you go for a jog in your Nikes, say, a chip in your shoe posts how many calories you burned on your Facebook page. …
The writer, academic, and game designer Jesse Schell gave a talk at a 2010 game-industry conference in which he laid out the many ways in which Gamification is poised to invade modern life, largely through Facebook and other social-media platforms. In the talk, Schell imagined a future world in which we might get achievement points for doing things like brushing our teeth or working out. A lot of people, including the esteemed game thinker Ian Bogost, have since recoiled in horror from this future, but others have proved more enthusiastic proponents of Gamification. Probably the most prominent of these is Jane McGonigal, whose book Reality Is Broken makes the argument that games have become so enticing precisely because real life is so comparatively drab. Anyone who finds real life lacking when compared to video games has basically given up on life.
Basically, I think that when a film reaches a certain critical mass of disjointed incompetence, it ceases to be subject to conventional expectations and judgements, and takes on a new life as an endlessly rewarding piece of outsider art. ‘Zombie Lake’ was just about hitting that level.
I guess watching it is a but of a rite of passage for fans of..this sorta thing, and I was doubly overdue for a viewing considering it was actually lensed by one of my favourite filmmakers of all time.
I’m glad I took the time, if only because ‘Orloff Against The Invisible Man’ seemed like an audacious piece of cinematic wizardry in comparison.
I’m kinda fascinated by these Eurocine horror films - on the surface they’re all incredibly cheap film-eighty-minutes-of-whatever-and-it’ll-sell-if-it’s-got-naked-chicks nonsense, all from different directors and scriptwriters, but there seems to be some mysterious hidden hand at work, ensuring that they all have these perplexing similarities…
A morbid obsession with ponds, lakes and similar bodies of water.
A long, lugubrious flashback sequence at about the thirty minute mark that completely ruins the pacing.
A certain kind of drab, fecund cinematography, with lots of overcast skies, bright green undergrowth - shots of rainy gardens gently zoom lensed from inside living room windows, that sort thing.
And lots of absurdly gratuitous nudity of course, but that’s more easily explainable at least.
Oh, and Howard Vernon is in them all too. I guess they must have done good by him.
From the Times-Picayune of New Orleans, 2 November 1937:
Thrill—The inside story of zombies, Haiti’s “living dead,” will be dramatized as Charles Martin’s “thrill of the week” on the program over NBC-WSMB at 7 p.m. And the first zombie ever to broadcast, Juano Robez, will be presented at the microphone.
Apparently, was part of the show “Johnny Presents…”, a precursor to the Philip Morris Playhouse, produced by WMAQ Chicago. One listing here, as a PDF.
“Johnny” was a clear-voiced bellhop - the “smallest bellboy in the world.”
But wasn’t very well archived, alas.
It bugs me that I don’t know what this is.
It looks like a record cover. I HOPE it’s a record cover.
I hope the pictured ladies made the record. I hope it sounds the way I imagine it might sound…
After being plunged into the dream world of Shock Waves, I sought out two of its thematic descendants: the campy Norwegian Dead Snow and the creepy Scottish Outpost. Both take the premise of Shock Waves - Nazis have survived in a horrible semi-life, emerging silently to exact terrible revenge on the living - and I’ve gradually come to a conclusion about the whole underwater Nazi zombie sub-genre.
These aren’t actually zombies at all. (Technically, the creatures from these two films aren’t underwater, either, but they might as well be - emerging from deep snow drifts or muddy warrens as if either terrain were the mangrove lagoons of South Florida, every bit as liquid and dream-like.) These have more in common with the pirate crews of John Carpenter’s underappreciated The Fog or Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl than with the shambling flesh-eaters of Dawn of the Dead. They might be called zombies within the films. They might look like zombies. But they don’t act like them and they don’t fulfill the same narrative function. These are agents of a misguided revenge. They’re hateful, embodied ghosts. There’s even already a word for what they are: revenants.
The term revenant comes from the French, “one who returns,” (re+venir, to come - just as “revenge” is re+vengir) but it seems a little too appropriate that the word contains “reve”, a dream. They are creatures of recurrent nightmares. The folklore of the revenant is spread across Western Europe - in Germany, similar tales are told of wiedergänger, “those who walk again,” who in turn seem to descend from Norse draugr. In any case, they’re all ghosts who happen to have bodies and who return to the world of the living to exact retribution on those who have slighted them. They’ll walk down Main Street, stinking with rot, spreading disease to any who made them suffer in life.
The central difference between zombies and revenants is one of motivation. Revenants have one. Zombies are utterly mindless and absolutely starving. They don’t plan out their days - they just fall on things and eat them. Revenants have things to do. They have goals. They might not write it down, but they each have a list. In Dead Snow, the list is nearly identical to the one in The Fog -
- 1. Find lost gold.
- 2. Punish those who took it.
Shock Waves and Outpost seem to share a list, too:
- 1. Complete the mission.
- 2. Defeat all surviving Allies.
Most tellingly, none of these Über-wiedergänger are particularly hungry. They are cold. Disciplined. When they stare at the living fools who disturb them, the stare is not vacant; it’s icy. The enemy is not a meal; the enemy is merely a wrinkle in an otherwise smoothly progressing plan. The thrill of watching Outpost is, in part, the guilty, hypnotic fascination of concentration camp imagery - only gradually do we realize that the emaciated stacks of bodies in the one horrible sealed vault are not victims (or not merely victims) but also perpetrators. This is not a horror of biology, but a horror of civilization - not even of unintended consequences, but of intended ones. Outpost in particular joins the horrors of war (gunfire in a dark clearing, boring hours punctuated by sudden deaths) with the greater horrors of war’s motivations - Auden’s “huge imago” that drove a culture mad.
What’s frightening about the Toten Korps isn’t that they want to eat you. It’s that they don’t even care that much. You’re grit in the cogs of their machine… and it’s that machine that’s hungry. The ideology is the ghoul here - the underwater Nazi zombie is merely an obedient messenger. Our systems will eat us alive, they warn. Obey and become food for the empire.
Zombie Identification Chart.
