When There's No More Room in Hell: Zombies and Post-Sept. 11 Horror
by Tony Nigro
The Dawn of the Dead remake could not be timelier. The incumbent presidential candidate plays the "war president" card as the death toll continues to rise at alarming rates in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. Tragedy lingers in Spain, and assassination has escalated the ever-present tension between Israelis and Palestinians. Real-life horror is out there in spades. Meanwhile, an unassuming zombie movie remains in the box office Top 10 for a month. Call it the residue of fear, confusion and divisiveness.
Why would anyone want to dwell on such things? In "Danse Macabre," his nonfiction overview of the horror genre, Stephen King writes, "Every 10 or 30 years [horror movies and novels] seem to enjoy a cycle of increased popularity and visibility. These periods almost always seem to coincide with periods of fairly serious economic and/or political strain, and the books and films seem to reflect those free-floating anxieties ...." Likewise, film scholar Noël Carroll writes in his book "The Philosophy of Horror," "If at present we find ourselves in a horror cycle, by hypothesis, we could attempt to explain its provenance and tenacity by isolating the sources of social stress and the anxieties with which the cycle correlates." So it pays to look at today's political climate, both at home and abroad, before dismissing a horror film as brainless fodder for suburban teens on weekend trips to the multiplex.
For the current horror cycle, all signs point to Sept. 11, 2001. Last summer, the British neo-zombie sleeper 28 Days Later found a US audience to the tune of $45 million. In production before Sept. 11 and edited during the anthrax and SARS scares, 28 Days Later gave us zombies that were "infected" rather than undead. Their disease was, simply, "rage," and it proved incredibly contagious. Unlike the lumbering living dead of George Romero's classic Dead trilogy, 28 Days Later's infected moved quickly and appeared more human, both physically and in theory, because they were still alive. Nonetheless, as movie zombies are wont to do, the infected traveled in mobs and terrorized innocents with chaotic fury. Presciently, 28 Days Later suggests that the question of infection is somewhat moot; anyone can succumb to rage, whether they're chasing down uninfected Londoners, flying planes into buildings or dropping bombs on cities.
Preceding 28 Days Later and directly following it, respectively, were the less effective zombie videogame adaptations Resident Evil and House of the Dead. Since horror became profitable again, other movies have cropped up as hits — such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy vs. Jason — but the one monster absolutely swarming the post-Sept. 11 horror landscape so far is the living dead.
Which brings us to Dawn of the Dead, a loose remake of the second movie in Romero's notorious trilogy. (The first was 1968's iconic Night of the Living Dead.) Romero's original film uses its shopping mall setting to the best satiric advantage and reinforces the tradition of zombies and humans being alike. The zombies presumably flock to the mall's commercial paradise out of "memory" of what is "comfortable," in the same way that our heroes claim it as their sanctuary. The point is clear: Once a consumer, always a consumer. The new Dawn of the Dead, however, has a different agenda. The mall environs remain, but the satire does not. The lines about zombie memory and being comfortable are spoken, but they have no resonance, as the movie aims to contrast humans and zombies — barely explained by way of some new "infection" — rather than compare them.
The movie was shot in Toronto during SARS's summer of 2003, so infection fears were timely. But, as edited and released, the story leans heavily on the zombie/human distinction. It's best summed up by Matt Frewer's big scene, as an infected and dying man whose life is spared by our heroes so that he might retain his pride and live out his final hours as a human, only to be put down after he becomes a zombie. Other hints follow, such as when our heroes take pot shots at gathered zombies from the roof of the mall. Sarah Polley's nurse character protests the inhumanity, but the macho faction, headed by Ving Rhames, reminds us that these things aren't human, so it's all good.
"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth." This end-of-days mantra exists in both Dawn of the Dead movies and, moreover, easily could have been excerpted from a speech by President Bush (or even Mel Gibson) in one of his more apocalyptic moods. And what is more apocalyptic than war? At their most primal, zombie movies are war movies, stories of us versus them. The zombies of both 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead bring war-torn chaos to the fragile world as we know it. The London of 28 Days Later is littered with prescient "Have you seen me?" flyers that easily could have been posted in Lower Manhattan. The anarchic Milwaukee seen from the air early on in Dawn of the Dead could be a country at war — or maybe one occupied by foreign military. As images go, both play to our massively confused consciousness.
But the films' visions of "us" and "them" contradict one another. 28 Days Later takes the more Romero-inspired path of inverting "us versus them" into "us versus us." An argument is made about human fury, and it becomes even more poignant in the wake of the supreme rage infection of recent memory. Ironically, the Romero remake maintains that the enemy is different from us — like an inhuman terrorist — which only makes it easier for us to take them out. The concept could be worked into a general's pep talk, and it's only fitting that Dawn was made in the shadow of war in Iraq, after "major combat" was declared complete. In this light, Dawn of the Dead almost becomes a pro-war propaganda film. But war against whom? Our heroes are, to use neoconservative newspeak, "insurgents." They won't give in to the zombie armies who have overtaken their home. They'll fight to keep the last shreds of their humanity, regardless of whether any sign of hope exists. Who are the zombies: terrorists or government officials? Who are the heroes: soldiers or Bush-haters? Answer as you will, because any way you slice it, the scenario is all too familiar.
In the 1950s, giant bug and alien movies externalized Cold War paranoia about atomic power and communism. The late '60s and '70s horror flicks featured demonic children, literal spawns of Satan, while real-world youth countered culture. Indeed, the King/Carroll theory about horror cycles holds water. Hence, the fear and loathing of today, including (but by no means limited to) terrorism and war, is manifest in horror films by way of the zombie sub-genre. Whether it's people fighting people or people fighting what President Bush calls "evildoers," the zombie movie's rudimentary story — "We're under attack! Fight or die!" — leaves room for timely metaphor.
E-mail Tony Nigro at tony@superheronamedtony.com.
— graphic by Matthew Forsythe
