Around the World with Zombies!

Some time last winter, the incomparable sj and I decided to do a deep dive into zombie movies from all over the world. I have a hobby horse about how egalitarian zombie movies are: They are the soccer of cinema, able to be made on a shoestring and an iPhone. They don’t necessarily require much in the way of acting, and can be shot on abandoned lots and in your nana’s backyard.

While this is true of post-apocalit in general, zombie movies are also incredibly local affairs, once the lights go out and the phones stop working. People either bunker up with their neighbors in a crisis situation which is bound to show the societal fractures in sharp relief, or head out onto the road, contemplating the blood-soaked landscape as it spools by. I tend to be real irritated with the American D-grade zombie movie — all that American exceptionalism, gendered violence, and authoritarianism sets my back — but I’m not as familiar with other countries’ stupid national ideals. Largely, these films were made (or became available to an American audience) in the last 5 years — I’m not trying to catalog all foreign zombie movies, but more hit the ones being made now, which speak to more current national hopes and fears. This is why I’ve included Peninsula, but not its predecessor, Train to Busan: more recent, more better.

So in the interests of international inquiry, let’s go around the world with zombies!

Canada/Mi’gmaq First Nation

Blood Quantum

Alright, teeechnically we watched this before we’d formally decided to go around the world with zombies, but it is nonetheless a) from not-America and b) completely flipping awesome. As far as I’m aware, Blood Quantum is the first Native zombie film ever made, and it’s absolutely perfect. It hit a lot of themes about colonialism that I wanted from Betaal — an (East) Indian series that features locals/aboriginal people against the ghosts of British imperialism — but Betaal ended up squandering its premise. Which is not to say that Blood Quantum isn’t uniquely, perfectly attuned to the concerns of Native America, instead of some generic colonialism theme.

Blood Quantum is set on the fictional Red Crow Mi’gmaq Reserve in Canada. It opens with a Native fisherman trying to gut salmon that refuse to stay dead, an image that becomes a little more freighted with meaning if you know the backstory of the decades of both legal and literal violence surrounding Mi’gmaw fishing rights. The film then follows Tribal policeman (and the fisherman’s son), Traylor, as he navigates his way through both the beginning of the zombie apocalypse and pretty messy family drama. Both of his sons end up in jail “on the other side of the line” (i.e. white people jail), and he leaves them to cool it while he deals with events peripheral to the oncoming zombie apocalypse. His sons are very clearly set up as oppositional but entwined: Lysol was the son Traylor had too young and too fucked up; Joseph clearly had a more stable home, but almost idolizes Lysol and his tough luck posturing.

After this establishing opening, the movie jumps to the future several months later. Native Americans are immune to the zombie virus — though they are not immune to getting torn apart by zombified white people — so they’ve cut the bridges to the reserve and are riding out the zombie apocalypse the best they can. They are taking in non-zombie non-Natives, but that’s hugely problematic: white people are being dicks, as usual, attempting to recolonize the reserves now that their already colonized land is a shitshow. Traylor’s two sons come into increasing conflict: Lysol doesn’t want to take in any more white people, while Joseph and his pregnant white girlfriend keep bringing home survivors. The inevitable bloodbath is gleefully gory, and while the ending doesn’t go full nihilism, it’s still pretty damn grim.

(And not that this has anything to do with anything, but there are a ton of Native actors in this film who were also in the Twilight series. When I was a lass, you could play 6 Degrees of Separation of Native America with the late 80s movie Powwow Highway; basically every working Native actor was in that. Probably the next movie to perform this function was the 1998 film Smoke Signals. So it’s funny to see fucking Twilight kind of functioning that same way with the new generation. I can entirely see Blood Quantum being this kind of movie going forward, which is perfect.)

French Canada

Ravenous

I’ve now watched Ravenous (or Les Affamés, in the original French, if you prefer) twice, and while I really really enjoyed it both times, I also think I’m missing something entirely in the film. Ravenous is more the road trip kind of zombie film, where it moves around a locale taking the pulse of the community in extremity. The locale here is a remote village in northern Quebec. I think the film is talking very specifically to and about a French Canadian audience. Given that I know basically nothing about French Canadian culture, the types and tropes are often illegible. That said, Ravenous is musing and odd, with striking, beautiful landscapes and a downbeat ambiance. Much of the action takes place as a group of survivors make their way through the countryside, and I was earnestly impressed the way the filmmakers managed to make wide open spaces, like fields or a stretch of highway, feel claustrophobic. The zombies are also powerful strange: they group together building these strange towers of domestic items — chairs, appliances, a desk — the purpose of which is never explained. Also, dolls where you pull the string on their backs and they cry are totally horrible.

Straight Up France

The Night Eats the World

The Night Eats the World has a set up reminiscent of the German zombie movie Rammbock: Berlin Undead, which I have not included on this list because that was made more than 10 years ago. In both, a guy tries to return the artefacts of their relationship to a now ex-girlfriend. In The Night Eats the World, the dude shows up while the girlfriend is having a pretty epic party. She understandably brushes him off in the middle of said rager, and he retreats to a quiet bedroom to sulk. When he wakes up, the apartment is empty, disheveled, and with blood smears on the walls. He does eventually find the ex-girlfriend, now zombified, and barricades himself in her apartment to wait out the zombie apocalypse.

The Night Eats the World is incredibly musing and introspective for a zombie movie. What little action there is is mostly seen from a distance, and the most (sort of) human interaction the guy engages in is with a zombie trapped in a barred garden entrance. When I first watched this movie, I thought it was a little boring, but I watched it again a couple months into the epidemic. Whoo boy, did it hit different. The way the main character manages his isolation and low key terror felt uncomfortably familiar. The Night Eats the World definitely captured the mood swings, melancholy, and anger of quarantine, and the ways we can both hunger for human contact and viscerally fear it. Yeesh.

Belgium

Yummy

This Dutch & English language film follows a woman, her mother and boyfriend to a sketchy Eastern European cosmetic surgery clinic. The young woman (who is stacked, yo) wants a breast reduction, and her kinda trashy mom is there for a smorgasbord of cosmetic treatments, including, ahem, anal bleaching. I kinda don’t need to say more than “sketchy Eastern European cosmetic surgery clinic”; the zombie outbreak is basically inevitable. I was fully expecting a dumb but fun time — not that there’s anything wrong with that — but Yummy ended up being a cut above. For one, the cinematography is absolutely freaking gorgeous, and that’s not something I’m used to seeing in American zombie films. (I think the landscape picture road trip kind of zombie movie can be prettily shot, but even those can go the 28 Days Later shitty digital video route.)

A lot about Yummy ended up being legitimately surprising. I’m pretty resigned to the whole gamut of shitty gender roles in zombie narratives: sexism, toxic masculinity, sexual violence, &c. For example, the otherwise beautifully shot, well acted, and introspective zombie movie, It Stains the Sands Red, is almost fatally marred by a lovingly documented and wholly unnecessary rape scene midway through. Given the nexus of bullshit you can find, semiotically speaking, surrounding plastic surgery, I really expected Yummy to perform a lot of said bullshit. They regularly subverted my low expectations, which might sound like the damns of faint praise, but I really don’t mean it that way. That was legit well done. The filmmakers also came up with a whole fake language, called Balkanese, that the clinic workers speak to keep it from being tied too specifically to any given country. Which, that’s so awesome. Although Yummy is pretty high on the splatter/gore scale, which is unsurprising given the setting, the scene that legit made me cringe was when someone gets their fingers crushed by a manhole cover. That was horrifying. Plus one all around.

Austria

Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies

Now this horror-comedy set in the Austrian Alps WAS dumb but fun. Lederhosen Zombies is deliberately campy, and occasionally delivers the kind of gloriously silly gore that only the unserious can deliver. There are, for example, zombie deer. The film opens with a bunch of professional snowboarders (or somesuch) yelling woo and doing their thing. Also the owners of the ski chalet fuck around and find out with some sort of chemical in the snow machine. This is an incredibly rompy movie, with set pieces that are evenly split between honestly inventive and the dreary usual. Like, the leads kill so many zombies with their snowboards because Chekhovian snowboard. I was amused and bored in equal measures, but full points for all the Austrian national costumes, sight gags, and silliness.

Germany

Sky Sharks

I just, everything about this movie sounds right up my alley. There are zombie Nazis riding on flying sharks, just as a premise, and it only gets sillier from there. The production value is high, and there are even character actors I heart, like Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, in key roles throughout the movie. There’s at least one extremely well-done animated sequence (maybe two?). Unfortunately, the plot, such as it is, is so disjointed that who even knows what the stakes are, why anything matters, or what even is going on. In addition to the plotlines involving Nazi Germany experimenting on sharks and/or zombies, there was also a subplot with the Vietnam War (and zombies and maybe sharks?) which I legit didn’t grok. In true B-movie style, there are several grindhouse style sex scenes which end in huge boobies covered in blood. I suspect mood might have a lot to do with my irritation with this movie, as I had serious playback issues the entire time. As it stands, much of it felt pandering or impressed with itself, too busy trying to one-up itself that it forgot to build any kind of through-line, either emotionally or narratively speaking. That said, I can see a situation when I was all on deck for Sky Sharks, and it’s possible with another viewing I’ll change my mind. I don’t want to warn anyone off, because Sky Sharks is so weird it deserves a viewing by any undead enthusiast. Maybe it’ll work for you.

Israel

JeruZalem

JeruZalem is pretty questionable as a zombie movie, because the monsters herein aren’t very zombie-like, but I’m including it as a contrasting edge case. The movie follows two Jewish American girls, Rachel and Sarah, on their trip to Israel. They had planned to stay in Tel Aviv, but after discussion with a fellow traveler called Kevin, they head instead to Jerusalem. Probably not a huge surprise that a creature feature set in Jerusalem, a city vitally important to the three major Abrahamic religions, would lean into religious mythology. (I just learned that Baháʼí is also Abrahamic, which is neat.) Rachel and Sarah bop around Jerusalem, hanging out with the Muslim hostel owners, flirting with Israeli solders, sightseeing, clubbing, etc. On Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement and repentance, the girls are startled by an explosion and fighter jets flying over the city. (The film keeps referring to as Yom Kippur as “judgment day”, which is technically correct but maybe a little histrionic — I see what you’re doing there.) They first assume a terrorist attack, but when the dead start rising and attacking people, it becomes clear this is sectarian violence of a much more biblical kind. They then race to get the hell out of Jerusalem (literally! har har) before the gates close and they are trapped in the walled city.

The principles in JeruZalem do refer to the creatures therein as zombies or the undead, and there are a couple zombie-like attributes: the affliction is transmitted by bite, and the turned then turn on the living in mobs. But they also have freaking wings, and, in one expository video from 30 years before, appear to be able to be exorcized from the host. Zombie narratives are by and large secular affairs, even despite the occasional invocation of religious idiom. (Like the line from Dawn of the Dead: “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead walk the earth,” or the graffiti scrawled in 28 Days Later: “Repent, the end is extremely fucking nigh.”) Zombie narratives tend to be stories of the end of modernity, not a biblical or metaphysical end, but then JeruZalem is, kind of neither? Honestly, I’m not precisely sure what the take-home of the film is. There is some discussion of Jerusalem syndrome in the film, which is when visitors to the holy land become convinced they are either messianic or biblical figures. Jerusalem syndrome affects members of all faiths; for instance, David Koresh had it. It would be possible, given what happens to Sarah in the end, to read the movie as an allegory for how American Jews are sometimes radicalized by return to Israel. I don’t know, maybe not. Either way, the zombie-like creatures in JeruZalem are doing something decidedly different, metaphorically speaking, than your traditional Romero zombie.

New Zealand

Last of the Living

This ridiculously low budget zombie movie follows three dudebros as they bop around the zombie apocalypse. After a beginning which finds them “bantering” in a mansion, I was real worried I would seriously fucking hate these guys, but they end up not as awful as anticipated. (Though still objectively dorks.) With a budget this small, the film has to rely more on dialogue than zombie thrills, which is a problem for two reasons: the actors suck, and the script is reheated leftovers. Which is not to say I didn’t end up laughing at both the intended and unintended comedy. The sequence in the record store was legitimately funny (which in turn shouts out to the band who wrote the theme song — God save us all.) Extra points for a pretty seriously nihilist ending — usually this kind of scrappy garage project can’t bear to give its dudebros anything but the happiest of endings.

Last of the Living kind of reminded me of this terrible zombie movie my aunt was in, called I Am a Middle Aged Zombie Too. Shot entirely on location in Washburn, WI, it features an all-local cast and some hilariously awesome Wisconsin accents. But, legit, I wouldn’t like the movie half so much if my Aunt Kristen weren’t in it as a zombie who gets killed by some Rad Hat ladies; it’s just too dumb and local. Which is kind of my thesis for why zombie movies are so great, so I’m being a little contradictory here. Oh well. 

South Korea

Peninsula

Peninsula was styled as Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula when it was released in the States, as Americans might be too dumb to understand a sequel that doesn’t have any character continuity with its predecessor. Set some time past the events of Train to Busan, the people who have escaped the zombie apocalypse on the Korean peninsula are now a people in exile and diaspora. The opening sequence follows Marine Captain Jung-Seok and his family — a sister, brother-in-law, and nephew — as they race through the countryside. They end up abandoning another family to the zombies, but make it onto a ship out of Korea. When a shipmate zombifies, Jung-Seok is forced to bolt his sister and nephew in a room full of zombifying passengers. The brother-in-law, Chul-min, survives to remind him of his shame forever. We then check in with him & Chul-min in Hong Kong several years later, following them through negotiations with gangsters to head back to Korea, basically to commit a heist. (Which, that kind of sounds like Army of the Dead a little, now that I think of it.)

As per all heist narratives, everything goes to shit once they get hold of the truck full of money, and the crew is either scattered or killed. The family Jung-Seok abandoned turns out to be still alive. A Warriors-style gang self styled as a militia unit captures Chul-min, which is where my least favorite part of this otherwise entertaining film takes place. The militia has one of those zombie cage-match situations, and I am so bone-tired of that trope. I just feel like it’s something like narratively lazy, playing out a meaningless spectacle full of sound and fury that signifies nothing. Once past this irritating sequence, Peninsula gains both plot and emotional momentum, and that ending is an absolute edge-of-the-seat nail-biter with very real stakes.

#Alive

I’ve gone back and forth whether to include this South Korean film, because, best I can tell, both this and an American film called #Alone were developed from the same script at roughly the same time. #Alive’s release is a less than half a year before #Alone, which I assume means they both had to be in production at the same time, though admittedly Covid-19 played havoc with the 2020 release schedule, among other things. The set up isn’t dissimilar to the The Night Eats the World, in the sense that the focus is on an individual isolated in an apartment due to a zombie plague. The key difference in both movies is that the main character continues to be connected through the Internet to the rest of humanity, at least until the power goes out.

The Korean adaption more clearly emphasizes the isolation and despair of its lead, the way doomscrolling stands in, poorly and imperfectly, for actual human interaction, both lifeline to the lonely and impediment to real connection. #Alive also is much nuanced in the way it uses media — the ways we construct a version of ourselves for public consumption, and how we consume other people’s closely cropped identities in turn. The lead papers over the windows to avoid the horrors outside, an then invites them right back in through the computer screen. While these same overt actions happen in #Alone, I just didn’t feel the same freight of meaning, I think partially because the lead in #Alone is a Taylor Lautner type who spends an inordinate amount of time with his shirt off. There are ravening zombies, dude, maybe cover some of that bitable skin. The Korean version also deemphasizes the romantic element of the lead’s interaction with the neighbor, which causes unnecessary drag on the momentum in #Alone.

I think #Alive is much more successful that #Alone, but there’s one sequence I prefer in the American version. In #Alone, Donald Sutherland lends his regretful gravitas to a zombie trope found in both films: the grieving relative feeding live people to a zombified family member. I find this trope incredibly distasteful, but Sutherland does elevate the proceedings somewhat. Additionally, the zombies in #Alone are often repeating the same things over and over, and the characters theorize this is because some part of them is still aware, but they are driven by their violent compulsions. In the scene with Sutherland and his now-zombified wife, she’s both begging them to kill her and trying desperately to attack them, and it’s pretty gutting. I don’t remember the zombies in #Alone doing this, though it’s possible that’s due to the limitations of subtitles. That detail notwithstanding, #Alive still seems more relevant to our Zoom-mediated realities & life in lockdown, and coherent in its storytelling.

Philippines

Block Z

Much as I love zombie movies, they don’t all that often catch me right in the feels. I go into them at a reserve, emotionally speaking, because I know that few, if any, of the characters are going to make it out alive. Block Z managed to break through my arms-length emotional stance, and did it while delivering some seriously harrowing thrills. It’s honestly one of the best traditional zombie movies I’ve seen in the last while. The movie opens with a father dropping off his daughter to her med school rotations. (This is the titular Block Z — it’s a wing of the hospital.) Their relationship is strained after the death of her mother, &c. There, she plays nurse to a bitten woman with a small daughter. The mother dies, she comforts the girl, taking her away from the death. Then the mother reanimates and begins to attack the nursing staff and other patients. From there, the zombie plague spreads through the hospital and out into the city.

The opening has a compacted sequence of establishing relationships with the med student’s colleagues, teachers, and patients, and it’s pretty impressive how many relationships they sketch in such a short period of time. A lot of the plot of Block Z is melodramatic (in a good way!): fathers disconnected from daughters, children grieving mothers, rich assholes lording their wealth over others, cops and colleagues, friends and enemies, all fighting their way through a situation they aren’t prepared for. The zombies are the Eastern kind, with jerky, almost insectile movements, screaming, and fast. I find them much more alarming than the Western kind: slow, stupid, and moaning. Several times, people sacrifice themselves for others, and it never feels cheap or exploitive. Once, a child throws herself at her zombie mother, and it’s heartbreaking. Block Z knew exactly where to get me. Good job.

Malaysia

KL Zombi

This was pitched to me as Malaysian Shaun of the Dead, which is accurate on some level. There are several sequences where the half-assed “hero” of this film, a guy called Skinny, kind of bops around the zombie apocalypse completely oblivious to the zombies all around him: he delivers food and snatches the money from a zombie’s hand through a gate; he plays field hockey with zombified teammates not understanding that their attempts to tackle him have a more dangerous purpose. Really more a series of vignettes than a full-on narrative, KL Zombi — the KL stands for Kuala Lumpur — vacillates between funny and tiresome. For example, there’s a sort of Shaklee salesman slash televangelist called Bro Khalid who factors in one of the side-plots, and everything having to do with him was aces. The third act gets especially tiresome — there’s the zombified son of a cop and a bullshit ethical dilemma surrounding him — but then some ointment made by Bro Khalid ends up de-zombifying people. Which, I get why a comedy would seek to make everything ok in the end, but that kinda ruined all the stakes? In addition to not making sense? The sexual politics are often questionable, especially in the opening and closing sections, though thankfully it’s just the garden variety chauvinist kind, not the sexual assault kind, a thing I see far too often in zombie movies. KL Zombi is not essential viewing, but it definitely had the feeling of a passion project with a group of people super into it. That goes pretty far for me.

Japan

One Cut of the Dead

At this point, I’m going to try to get One Cut of the Dead onto every zombie roundup I do: It is suuuuuch a good movie. Unfortunately, this movie has such a massive conceptual spoiler at the first act turn that I can barely say anything at all about it. While a film crew is filming a zombie movie, they are attacked by real zombies. The opening 30 minutes or so are done in one single, continuous take, which is all the more impressive for how much ground they cover. This isn’t Wallace Shawn and André having dinner in a fixed location. I recently watched George Romero’s fifth zombie movie, Diary of the Dead, which has a similar set up: college students making a horror movie start living one. Much as I love Romero, Diary of the Dead really suffers in comparison, though I do acknowledge that horror and horror-comedy are different animals. Romero’s social commentary feels like a Boomery indictment of internet culture which fundamentally misunderstands how that works, and the delivery is dreary and leaden. One Cut’s milieu is the film industry, and it’s an affectionate sendup of the types and tropes one encounters as a journeyman in the industry, in addition to being just a whole lot of fun. I can’t recommend it enough.

The Big Bite: Raising Stony Mayhall by Daryl Gregory

This was originally written in July 2011

I was talking with my husband the other day about Ragnarok, the Norse Armageddon, and kind of jokingly saying it was the first alt-history. Ragnarok is this really specific telling of the last days of the Norse Gods, a catalog of who will kill whom and how. It’s understood to be told in the future tense, something that hasn’t happened yet, but will, with exactness and finality. He was like, but isn’t that prophesy, like Revelations? I admit my knowledge of Revelations is a little crappy, but I don’t think that Ragnarok is quite the same. It’s less a story of what we humans should watch out for, so we can head to the underground bunker or whatever we’re supposed to do when the End Times are upon us. It’s not a manual, or a guide. It’s just a story about the inevitability of when certain kinds of personalities – large, inhuman or metahuman personalities – come into conflict with one another. It’s a chess game, not a chess guide. History, even history of the future, isn’t so much not to be repeated as embraced as the stories are told.

So, when I was in high school, I had this great assignment where I had to do a research paper about some public happening that went down in the year I was born. I was born in 1974, so I duly went to the microfiche and scrolled through the local headlines. Those older than me will shake their heads, but I was like, OMFG I CAN’T HANDLE ANY MORE WATERGATE. It was too much, too complicated, even though it was the thing that defined the year, and years on either side: the growing scandal, the series of indictments and resignations, the pardon – oh, the pardon. Fodder for a thousand research papers, a thousand books and movies. Certainly more than I could handle in 5-7 double-spaced pages.

So, I found Patty Hearst. Patty was an heiress of the Hearst newspaper empire – William Randolph Hearst being the subject (mostly, though the protagonist was an aggregate of several personalities) of Citizen Kane. She was abducted out of her apartment by a post-Helter Skelter cult called the SLA – the Symbionese Liberation Army. (I still have no idea why that name, and I can’t really remember their goals, which were a stew of 70s revolutionary cliches and “free love”, which was code for cult leader gets to bang whomever he wants.) (Also, she was at home that night with her upper class douchebag fiancée, a guy whose name was Stephen Weed, I shit you not. Pynchon couldn’t have named him better.)

Anyway, after a several months of rape, imprisonment, and a good dose of Stockholm Syndrome, Patty helped rob a Hearst bank with the SLA. Oh, the pregnant symbolism! I don’t remember all the details, but press releases were issued proclaiming her new cult name of Tania – still with the Pynchonian names. Public opinion was wildly against her. How dare she turn against her robber baron family money? Being raped and terrorized was not really credited in understanding her motivations. Again, I don’t remember all the details, but it turned into months – maybe years? – of the SLA playing cat-and-mouse with law enforcement, ending in a Waco-style shoot-out with fire and the death of most of the cult. Not Patty though. Somehow she survived.

So Patty is a fascinating American character. She later renounced all her SLA stuff, but it wasn’t enough to keep her from getting convicted of armed robbery. Her sentence was later commuted by Carter, who probably found the defense’s argument compelling about how she had no live ammo, and that most of the SLA guns in the robbery were trained on her, not the bank officials, and the fact that she’d been abducted, brutalized and raped into these actions. (Like me; I admit my bias.) She’s later been a regular fixture in John Waters films — including one where a woman is abducted into a film cult bent on bringing down the military-entertainment complex — seriously, Pynchon is like the patron saint of American history.

So, point being — and seriously, I have one — even history is an alternate history. There’s the stuff that screams from the headlines day after day, then there’s the stuff that goes down on the sidelines, which is no less meaningful, in terms of national identity and symbolism. I talked with my folks a lot about this project – in fact, I’m pretty sure one of them pointed me toward the Hearst story in the first place – and it was fascinating to hear them talk about the paranoia of the time, the sense of the end of it all. Night of the Living Dead premiered in 1969, and it was this perfect encapsulation of the times, written in horror. Kennedy may have been shot down in ’63, but it wasn’t until the murder and assassinations of the late 60s — Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dr. King — that we understood that our post-War dream of enforced middle class domesticity was tearing at the seams, letting out blood into a colonial conflict that, strangely, only Nixon could end, even while he shat all over executive privilege and the Presidency. (And, I have no patience with all of the mealy-mouthed talk of him being “controversial” when he died a few years back. Only if you find treason controversial, and not criminal.)

So. Alternate history. Here we are again in America, at the end of it all. Maybe we’re always at the end of it all. Maybe the millenarian instinct is in our DNA, in our constitution, and I totally mean that as a double entente. The 2nd Amendment is a hedge against the [zombie] apocalypse, something I always think about when I consider my neighbors from two doors down, who are avowed gun nuts with a racist caricature of Obama hanging in their window. I’d be over their begging for guns in heartbeat if zombies descended on my city, and it’s amusing as all get out to me that I’ve even considered the possibility. Cuz I have, American that I am.

At the opening of Saving Stony Mayhall by Daryl Gregory. John is found at the side of the road by an Iowan family. His mother is dead, and he is an undead, bubbling infant. It’s the late 60s, and in this mildly alternate beginning, the zombie uprising in Pennsylvania that is chronicled in Romero’s “documentary” is fact. Though this is a slightly histrionic comparison, the terror of the Twin Towers had been located 50 years earlier, so America was building its Gauntanimos and security state apparatuses 50 years earlier, to work against the undead threat. (Though we’re always building against a threat. We’ve always seen our threats as twinned — coming from within and without — fear of the Soviets and the Red Scare; Al Qaeda as well as that home-grown shoe-bombing idiot. Heck, lots of Americans think the Twin Towers was the result of the CIA, not Bin Laden, as we work against ourselves or something. I’m not really interested in getting into a big thing about this, I just want to point out that we have this headline narrative, and then a whispered narrative, whatever the truth may be.) John, or Stony as he comes to be known, is a zombie anomaly — zomnomaly? see, I am shit for portmanteau, unlike Mike who coined the term ‘zombildugsroman’ for this book — he grows from zombie infant into zombie boy, and then, as most of the story is concerned with, into zombie man.

The rest of the undead are bitten breathers, who, after a nasty, murderous incubation period of 48 hours or so, wherein they bite and kill like we have all seen on tv, they resolve into people who are not dissimilar from the ones the were when they were breathing. Some forget themselves, having their memories wiped by death. Some don’t. Stony moves from his claustrophobic but largely idyllic childhood on the plains of the Midwest into a graduation of the larger, undead community. The undead play cat-and-mouse with the Feds, reluctantly, not so much a cult as a folk group of the damaged, with their own folk myths and legends, political factions, schismatic religions, and personalities. As their numbers dwindle through attrition and active attacks, they ponder the Big Bite, a Ragnarök of starting the zombie apocalypse so that their number will replenish, and they can stop living in fear of the living. As the living live in fear of the dead.

I don’t even know how not to be all spoiler about this, but certain things are inevitable. You can’t write a zombie story without that sense of the End Times, it just matters whether you think the End Times are about warning or historical understanding. This story is about Patty Hearst, not Watergate, even though those things are twinned, bubbling out of the same cultural stew. Like Patty, Stony’s story is personal, personal enough that I can remember her stupid fiancé’s name when I have no idea the name of Spiro Agnew’s wife. (Hell, even Nixon’s. What was it? Francine? Imelda?) Patty’s story is fascinating because of all the familial symbolism, even while it intersects with Presidents and filmmakers, Patty an abducted lighting rod for a bunch of symbolism about class, privilege, politics, religion and on and on. Stony is a bit of the same, sorta, a simple Midwestern boy but for the fact that he doesn’t breathe, caught up in the times. Stony is a reluctant protagonist, like we all are reluctant protagonists, and the mythology, the explanations he lays out in this novel have the exciting frission of a good retcon. Not the kind that sucks, and restarts everything wiping out the past, but the kind that takes the past into account, and writes its exegesis. There’s a lot here for a zombie nerd to love, a catalog of genre ticks made sensible. And sensibility is this book’s heart.

Zombies are irrational, unscientific. Dead is dead. My husband always tries to placate my zombie freak-outs with the utterance, “But…physics,” but which he means that zombies violate the rules of physics and can’t exist. This book takes but…physics seriously, building an alt-history predicated on the impossible, relying on an alt-physics of will and psychology, coming down to a End Times of inevitability which is or is not inevitable, but happen[s/ed] anyway, based on the rules of the future tense, the future tense of all national stories. I don’t want to make this story sound mythic, though there is discussion of how the personal narrative transmutes into folk legend. It’s complicated and personal, much more so than the headlines might suggest, so much sadder than Revelations, so much quieter than Ragnarok. Damn fine.

P.S. I often write myself out of saying stuff like this, because it doesn’t fit in the standard 5-paragraph essay, but there’s a lot here that’s funny as shit, but slyly, like an undead character based on Col. Sanders, and a random aside about the undead mascots who schill for various products, like the Sinclair dinosaur. Charlie the Tuna wants you to eat his dead flesh ahahahahaha. Gross. Clever.

An Incomplete List of Oddball Zombie Movies I’ve Enjoyed

I finally caught the companion film to South Korea’s Train to Busan, the animated Seoul Station. It wasn’t nearly as affecting as its live action antecedent, but I completely appreciated how Seoul Station went in unexpected directions, and focused on relationships not normally detailed in either zombie movies or, like, regular cinema. This got me thinking about more obscure zombie movies I have known and loved, stuff that either goes straight to video, or only hits a theater or two in LA or New York. Many of these movies hail from other countries and cultures, which lends grist to my pet theory about zombie movies being largely about national character, much more so than other monsters.

The vast majority of zombie movies, high or low budget (but mostly low budget), are produced in the United States. There’s a lot of reasons for this: the US produces many more films, in general, than the rest of the West. Also, the United States (and Pennsylvania more specifically) is where the modern zombie was created in Romero’s game-changer, The Night of the Living Dead. I know there were zombie films before this, but Romero so utterly changed the landscape that they’re as different as chalk and cheese. In the same tradition, yes, but it’s like comparing the ghouls in the 1932 film Vampyr to modern vampires: similar in name only.

The ways zombie fictions ruminate on class, race, consumerism, and the nuclear family was set within an American film tradition, and not always or often in a good way. So much of the long tail of American zombie movies — the sort of thing found in deep dives into “if you like this, then” on your streaming platform of choice — is fucking trash. Americans can’t help but America, cinematically speaking, so the instinct to fascism, spectacle as unearned catharsis, and violence as morality pervades a lot of American zombie movies, regardless of budget. TL;DR: many American zombie movies are Libertarian (if not outright fascist) garbage fires, with a sideline in diseased gender roles. (This is somewhat ironic, given how Romero’s zombie films were always brutal social commentary against exactly that.)

Apocalypses in general are local affairs, once the lights dim and the communication systems blink out. The world narrows to the distance you can travel on foot — at least once the gas runs out, and you leave the car behind — the skyline streaked with the smudges of burning urbanity. But zombie narratives go a step further, reanimating strangers, neighbors, family, and friends in the subtle tweaks and twists of national character gone feral: slow or fast, cunning or mindless, diurnal or nocturnal, contagious or endemic. These monsters show what we become in the 24 hours and three meals from the end of it all.

Warning: possible spoilers in the film descriptions.

USA:

Maggie

What makes Maggie notable in the context of American zombie movies, a film that collects together Arnold Schwarzenegger, Abigail Breslin, and Joely Richardson, is its taunt, Gothic rumination on the parent-child bond. It opens with Arnold traveling into a disease-ravaged LA to collect his daughter, Maggie. She’s infected with a zombie-ish plague, half-dying and half-alive in some overrun city hospital. All the small cues tell you she left because they were estranged — hard to say whether it was the normal estrangement that finds children growing into adults, or a deeper one. When they return home to the family farm, it’s clear it’s both: she’s a normal teenager fed up with her Boomer father, and then also he’s got a new wife and small children who have supplanted her in some ways. I have some autobiographical reasons for why this resonated hard. Anyway. 

Maggie muses in a sometimes overly self-serious way about coming home. Maggie, the character, does a retrospective of her adolescent relationships — complete with teen party with a bonfire on the beach — just short years, or long months, after she leaves home. When her step-mom leaves with her half-siblings, it leaves her alone in the house with a dad who can’t even begin to understand, but is turning himself inside out trying. The ways they never quite connect, right up to the bitter end, are shattering, the kind of thing that set me sobbing, an outsized emotional response to what is largely an understated and grayed out emotional landscape. This the best, most finely detailed work Schwarzenegger has put to film in his latter day career. 

UK:

The Girl with All the Gifts

When I first learned they changed the race of Miss Justineau, the living teacher of an undead classroom in The Girl with All the Gifts, from black to white, I was worried. In the novel by M.R. Carey (aka Mike Carey, for all you Hellblazer heads), Miss Justineau was black, and the undead child who cleaves to her white. The film reverses this, and it actually works really well, almost better in places. Making Helen Justineau a non-malignant version of the Nice White Lady ministering to children whose humanity is completely denied, and who are black [same/same] says something very different from the reverse, especially with how it shakes out in the end. (And unrelated aside: it’s notable to me how many of the films on this list started life — or undeath muahaha — on the page, and how successful their adaptation. Not everything is World War Z: The Less Said the Better.)

The Girl With All the Gifts is one of a teeny tiny trend of fungalpunk horror, of which maybe the most successful was the Area X trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. Carey’s story found inspiration in the nightmarish real world story of zombie ants infected by a fungus which drove them to uncharacteristic behavior, after which the fungus would fruit out of their ant heads. The images of ants with fungi protruding from their head carapaces legitimately freaks me out, and I don’t necessarily empathize with insects all that often. The film hews closely to the plot of the novel, a road trippy rumination on a ruined Britain. The girl who plays Melanie is wonderful, playing her smitten child with a sense of resigned sobriety that gives her an out-sized presence. Glenn Close delivers a quietly seething version of the amoral scientist, which is an interesting twist on a trope that tends to oily bombast (e.g. Stanley Tucci in The Core, which is hands down the best version of this ever put to film.) I love both iterations.

Canada:

Ravenous (or Les Affamés)

Sometimes I find the cultural context of specific foreign films so baffling as to render the “meaning” — insofar as that’s a thing — quite opaque. The French-Canadian Les Affamés falls into this category for me, but in a still strangely satisfying kind of way. Much of Ravenous falls into the mode of the zombie road trip, stopping occasionally to eavesdrop on the dead and their inscrutable machinations, or to enact the living’s more visceral conflicts. (And the dead in Les Affamés are truly strange, piling up teetering obelisks of domestic stuff in a clearing in the woods, or here, or there.) There’s this old saw for writers that “dialogue is action” and that almost reductive aphorism maps onto zombie narratives in this weird way. The drama in Ravenous is all in its dialogue and tense standoffs between survivors; the zombie attacks are almost a relief.

Pontypool

The source material for the film Pontypool, Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess, is both typical and an exemplar of his work. Burgess excels at either elevating pulp to high art, or elevating high art to pulp — because he somehow manages to write deeply philosophical works using absolutely sick imagery, while not prioritizing either. (See also: The Life and Death of Schneider Wrack by Nate Crowley.) This is not an easy thing to do! In fact, I can only think of a couple writers who successfully use the vernacular of both highfalutin literature and pulp styling without denigrating either.

Anyway! Point being: Pontypool is somewhat loosely adapted from the source novel, and in the very best ways. I can’t imagine a film version that somehow cut that impossible middle distance between high and low art that the book does; this will not translate to the screen. Instead the film is a taunt, almost stagy locked-room drama which focuses tight on a couple few characters. Some aspects of the film have become quaint — the whole concept of a “shock jock” has been superseded by media twisted into propaganda by authoritarianism — which takes a little sting out of the proceedings. It’s still an excellent film.

Denmark:

What We Become (or Sorgenfri)

Many of these movies — at least before they are translated into English — have locations in their titles, like the aforementioned Train to Busan. The Danish zombie film Sorgenfri — named after a Copenhagen suburb — was retitled in English What We Become. Sorgenfri means “free of sorrow”, in an almost obnoxious irony, but we will give writers some latitude to be obnoxious when place names are this on-the-nose. I fully expect places like Minneapolis suburb Eden Prairie to become hellish pit stops on the way to apocalypse because come on.

Anyway, What We Become makes full use of its suburban locale, which I don’t necessarily see all that often, Dawn of the Dead notwithstanding. There’s some hot-neighbor-next-door, community-cookout action before the infection locks the suburb down. Each McMansion is swathed with plastic, (almost like in the quick-and-dirty Spanish film series [rec] — more on this later), and if they try to push back against the impersonal authorities in their gas masks and machine guns, quick and brutal violence ensues. If this was an American film, I’d accuse it of 2A essentialism: we need guns to fight teh gumment!!!! But … it’s Danish, so that can’t be what it’s about. Or … not entirely anyway.

Much as Americans like to paint Denmark as some sort of socialist utopia (and don’t get me wrong: America’s fucked), there’s the same cultural, social, and economic stresses like any other part of the EU. I have Danish cousins, and the amount of chauvinism I’ve seen expressed about, say, Turkish immigrants is notable. And that’s not even getting into what they say about straight up Muslims, Turks or no. What We Become taps into a very (white) middle class, very (white) suburban fear of intrusion by the other, and also the fear that the other is already there, hidden within. These kind of insular communities are always predicated on fear: on the other, on themselves — what have you got, I’m afraid of it. In Night of the Living Dead, Romero murdered what should be the romantic survivors, in addition to the nuclear family. What We Become lets some of its characters survive, but only after putting you through some brutal familial self-annihilation.

France:

The Horde (or La Horde)

When I first saw The Horde not much after its 2010 release date, I thought to myself, there is going to be a real and bloody reckoning in France about how the treatment of France’s immigrant population. I knew just a very little about the French attempts to legislate the bodies of Muslim women — for their own good, natch — and it was years before the Charlie Hebdo shootings. But the bloody spectacle on display in The Horde was enough to make me prognosticate doom. Pulp fiction tends to tap into the societal hindbrain, and The Horde was doing that in the goriest, most bloody way possible.

The Horde follows a group of corrupt French police on a vendetta into what reads to me like the projects — low income housing that warehouses the poor and undesirable (same/same). There’s some back story about some drug dealer or whatever killing a cop, but none of this really matters. The fight is between two rival gangs, one of which wears badges and speaks “good French”, and the other have accents and dark skin. There’s a racist old codger (I think maybe even a veteran, but it’s been a while) and a couple other residents to round out the group. The combatants end up trapped in a old apartment building while the horde presses against doors and windows. And of course, several end up bitten, turning at the worst possible moment.

The Horde‘s zombies are faster than Romero zombies, and often a lot fresher, the blood still red and the zombie vigorously intact. As we approach the endgame, one of the cops is given a lovingly detailed last stand, and even more intimate horrific death: standing on the top of a car in a basement parking lot, he shoots and hacks until he’s overwhelmed by hundreds of zombies, and boy howdy do they not pan away. I know this was shot later, but the framing of this sequence reminds me of the season three ender of Game of Thrones, which found Daenerys Targaryen crowd-surfing a horde of anonymous browns. It’s notable to me that the image of a white lady receiving adoration for liberating brown people and a white guy heroically hacking at a mob until he’s overwhelmed are shot virtually identically. I’m sure something like The Pedagogy of the Oppressed has something to say about this, but it’s been some years since my theory-reading days.

The Night Eats the World (or La nuit a dévoré le monde)

The Night Eats the World begins with a musician dude, Sam, coming to his ex-girlfriend’s flat to retrieve some cassette tapes he left after the breakup. The sequence at the party with its byplay and character development between the people marked as protagonist and the inevitably disposable partygoers reminds me of the opening to Cloverfield (and, weirdly, the Netflix series Russian Doll.) Sam crashes out; when he awakes, there’s blood on the walls and everyone is either gone or a zombie.

The Night Eats the World is light on zombie kill thrills, if you’re into that sort of thing, much more focused on Sam’s solitary existence and worsening metal state as he holes up in his ex-girlfriend’s for months. The film manages to find some unexplored corners in the zombie apocalypse: this portrait of fearful loneliness in a teeming city. When I first saw The Night Eats the World, I have to say it didn’t affect me much. My enjoyment was largely intellectual: oh, huh, this is almost a silent film; who even does that? But almost two weeks into my family deciding to shelter in place, the detailing of Sam’s mental state as he rattles around the same couple hundred square feet and considers the death just outside the door: well, this is suddenly, horribly relevant.

Germany:

Rammbock: Berlin Undead

Like The Night Eats the World, Rammbock opens with a dude going to his ex’s apartment to transfer some stuff, and also maybe sorta to rekindle their relationship. She’s not there, but two plumbers are; when a zombie outbreak overtakes the neighborhood, ex-boyfriend and the plumber’s apprentice ride out the zombie apocalypse in the apartment. With other monsters, writers can get a little schematic. This is especially true with vampires. You often see complex list of rules about what a vampire can and cannot do, and then, of course, inevitably how to break those rules. (The most recent Dracula limited series, first from the BBC and now on Netflix, exemplifies this sort of thing.)

Zombies, though, they don’t tend to go this way. The rules are simple: a person dies, they reanimate, then they hunger for the flesh of the living. Oh, I suppose there are some other conditions that may or may not come to bear: does killing the brain kill the zombie? are we all infected or is it contagious through a bite? fast or slow? But these are more set-dressing than, like, necessary for the storytelling. Rammbock‘s zombies, by contrast, are photosensitive, a detail it takes the principles some time to work out. Then when they do, they work towards exploiting this detail in order to save their own lives. Rammock is, again, maybe not the most exciting zombie film ever made, but the location, relationships, and the weird taxonomy of zombies make it worthwhile.

Spain:

[REC]

This scrappy Spanish found footage horror film was so successful it spawned a movie series and an English language remake (which was retitled as Quarantine.) (The Spanish series has diminishing returns: the second relocates to an airport, which is fine, while the third goes eschatological in a way I did not appreciate at all. Oh, and there’s apparently a fourth I never saw, REC 3: Apocalypse which is by the filmmaker of the first two, but not the third, which is promising. ) REC follows a Bridget Jonesy reporter on a ridealong with some firefighters. They head out to a call in an old apartment building with six or eight units. One of the residents has gone murderously feral; they contain her, but not before one of their number is bit; when they panic-run to the exit it turns out the building’s on some sort of horrible lockdown.

The film ends up being a locked room horror show as various people get infected and infect others. There’s also apparently a plot where it turns out the authorities are evil, but who even cares. It’s obvious they were evil when they locked an entire apartment in to die. Again, this film had certain meanings back when I watched it whenever, but in the middle of a global pandemic, things read a little differently. The willingness to sacrifice first responders stands out, as does the bickering in the doomed apartment building about the motives of those that locked them in. That the outbreak is legible, with known origins and therefore, potentially, a cure is another fun aspect of fiction. It turns out that real life is much more bleak, which is saying something, given the end of REC.

Japan:

One Cut of the Dead

Frankly, One Cut of the Dead is the best godamn zombedy produced since Shaun of the Dead, and in some ways it exceeds Edgar Wright’s most excellent film. Filmed on a budget of $25,000 (JFC), the film relies on what could be a gimmick, but ends up being just a beautifully written script. The first half hour or so of the movie is one continuous take, telling the story of a low budget zombie movie lorded over by a tyrannical director which is then attacked by real zombies. (Not dissimilar in setup to Romero’s 5th outing into his formative zombieverse, Diary of the Dead, but that reads pretty Boomer-y these days.) After this impressive feat of film-making is a crazy bananas twist that had me all-capsing to my viewing partner, the indomitable sj, for at least the next half hour. It’s just … the whole thing is so well done it makes me tear up a little.

The trouble with talking about One Cut of the Dead is the several spoilers in serial that happen in the second act. All that aside, I can say that the shifts in tone in One Cut are masterful, running from comedy to terror and back again without even a blink.