White Zombie (1932) is considered to be the first "mainstream" zombie film. Starring Bela Lugosi (who many may remember for his famous portrayal of Dracula in the 1931 film of the same namesake), the film follows a couple who are to be married under the roof of Charles Beaumont (played by Robert Frazer), a man set on making the bride-to-be his property. He enlists Lugosi's character to make her a "zombie", regarded in this context as an undead slave with no ability to speak and limited/slowed physical movement: he achieves this through the use of a "potion" and, interestingly, the power of telepathy, an aspect we don't really see anymore.
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| White Zombie (1932) |
Back in the 30s, zombies were still structured under the origins of Haitian folklore, wherein a "zombie" was the living undead, brought back to life through ritualistic voodoo or magic: this was a trope that remained true for the next 20 years in other films such as I Walked With a Zombie (1943) and Teenage Zombies (1959). However, this changed significantly with the arrival of Night of the Living Dead (1968) in the late 60s when George A. Romero decided to up the ante.
Night of the Living Dead was Romero's magnum opus: one of the first cinematic pieces to show gratuitous violence on-screen and depict the zombie archetype in a truly revolutionary way. In comparison to White Zombie, this film showed them to not only move a little quicker but also look undead, featuring gaunt expressions, blood around the mouth, sunken eyes and gaping wounds. Lastly, the most important factor and one we take for granted now in 2018 is that the zombies are cannibals.
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| Night of the Living Dead (1968) |
Romero's inspiration for such stemmed from the Richard Matheson novel I Am Legend, which featured man-eating vampires as the antagonist. Romero's zombies are almost a homage to Matheson's instantly recognisable and monstrous creation, blending two types of evil to make something terrifying, a villainous idea that would scare the pants off movie-goers in the midnight screenings. These zombies weren't created by voodoo, though: they were created by radiation from a satellite returning from Venus, introducing a more new-age and technological aspect to the horror genre.
So, by the late 60s, we had bloodthirsty, slow yet menacing zombies. It's groundbreaking, and somewhat scary, but how can it be expanded upon? Can it be expanded upon at all? Of course it can. And it was in the mid-80s with the arrival of Romero's ninth film Day of the Dead (1985) and Re-Animator (1985). Whilst Re-Animator leans more into the biopunk subgenre of sci-fi horror, it still stands true as a zombie film, in that the dead characters become undead pretty swiftly; what the two films share in common, however, is their evolution of the zombie archetype. In these films, zombies are able to speak, to use logic and reasoning, albeit limited in most cases.
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| Day of the Dead (1985) |
Between 1985 and 1999, the horror genre spiked in many different directions, and the zombie route seemingly became more haphazard and comedic. Most notably is Dead Alive (1992) directed by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, a wonderfully dark and disgusting comedy about people becoming infected by a Sumatran rat-monkey, and consequently transforming into zombies that ooze, bleed and bloat. Less terrifying, yes, but definitely more gross.
Fast-forward to the 21st century and you have the zombies we know today or, more realistically, genetically enhanced and pathogen-ridden people. In the early noughties, we were treated to Danny Boyle's incredibly violent 28 Days Later (2002), a film fixated on a society overrun with zombies caused by the "Rage virus": the zombies have bright red eyes, dark and congealed blood spilling from their mouths and insanely fast movement. In essence, a zombie you most probably wouldn't be able to outrun, which is arguably much more frightening than previous models.
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| 28 Days Later (2002) |
What made the 28 franchise special was that it played off the victim's transformation psychologically as well as physically: it's noted that writers Alex Garland and Danny Boyle wanted the virus to be reflective of "social rage" and that it "amplifies something already in [everybody], rather than turning them into something entirely Other". This made for an incredibly unique social commentary on contemporary British life and a very different depiction of zombies entirely. It was, in my eyes, more intellectual than the traditional route.
A lot of other countries hopped aboard the viral pandemic train, as it were. This includes staple horror films such as REC (2007) from Spain, Train to Busan (2016) from Korea and The Night Eats the World (2018) from France. These films centre around the nuanced trope of viral infection, one which we understand to cause zombie outbreaks in modern cinema, and something I'd argue has become outdated. I believe there are some films (such as Train to Busan) that can still make it engaging and still cajole the audience into wanting the characters to survive, however I've found in my experience that in later years, these films are becoming a minority and much harder to find.
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| Train to Busan (2016) |
It's hard to say where zombies go from here. Films like Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Zombieland (2009) adopted their 90s counterparts' comedic value and films like the Resident Evil franchise (2002-2017) still encompass traditional aspects of the zombie sub-genre, but I think it's going to take something truly exceptional to break the mould.
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