Reconsider The Zombie Movie - Harper's BAZAAR November 2019

With the release of two new undead epics, Alexandra English discovers the genre isn’t the brainless entertainment it might appear

ALL ME A SCEPTIC (or a lapsed Catholic), but I’ve never bought into the idea of the undead. My horror film knowl- edge is entry-level at best (I know the basics of how to kill your average movie monster), and zombie flicks always seemed more gory-for-the-sake-of-it than an intelligent metaphor for the downfall of modern civilisation. What’s more, the only people I know who go to see zombie movies are diehards (pun unintended).

This year’s The Dead Don’t Die changed all that. When I first heard about Jim Jarmusch’s latest, it was the cast who appealed more than the assumed content: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Tom Waits, Iggy Pop ... (The film’s tagline, “The greatest zombie cast ever disassembled”, is right.) Hot on its heels is Zombieland: Double Tap, the sequel to Ruben Fleischer’s 2009 Zombieland. The killer ensemble includes original cast members Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin and Bill Murray, and the survivors have picked up cool-girl newcomer Zoey Deutch (who stars in The Politician with Gwenyth Paltrow and has a thing for Dior and Miu Miu) along the way. Could I have been wrong? Are zombie movies actually cool?

“Zombies are the ultimate movie monster,” says Richard Kuipers, programming director of Sydney Film Festival’s Freak Me Out program, which screened Jarmusch’s film. “They look like us, and that’s what gives them their terror and psychological [power].” For some, the appeal of zombie films lies in assuming you’d be one of the survivors; for others, Kuipers opines, it’s because the movies provide a safe space to explore primal fears such as isolation, losing loved ones and running long distances (cardio is so important in the apocalypse).

Melbourne-based director Isabel Peppard says that while zombie movies tap into our deepest personal angst, each is also a reflection of societal concerns. “The earlier ones show slavery, brainwashing and disease,” she says. “Now, it’s capitalism and war.”

“Zombie movies do tend to crop up when the world is troubled economically, socially, politically,” Kuipers adds. “There aren’t many zombie films of the 1950s, because that was a time of economic prosperity, but it’s no coinci- dence that Night of the Living Dead was made in 1968 as a metaphor for the Vietnam War.”

It seems the zombie movies of the late 2010s will forever be attributed to how futile our efforts to stop climate change feel: the apoca- lypse in The Dead Don’t Die is triggered by polar fracking, a not-so-subtle comment on our environmental woes. Then there’s Endzeit (Ever After), a German film by Carolina Hellsgård, which was also shown at SFF, featuring a nearly all-female cast and crew. As the protagonists escape, they encounter the personification of Mother Earth. “For a female-driven movie like that to come out at this moment is [poignant],” Kuipers says.

So while we’re out here fighting the daily horrors of our news feeds, perhaps zombie films can be an unlikely source of comfort. Fleischer’s latest, for one, is a comedy, its char- acters surprisingly upbeat during the total upheaval of the world as they know it. Call it wilful ignorance, but maybe we’d do well to heed the words of one of its protagonists: “life is about more than just survival”.

Zombieland: Double Tap is in cinemas from October 17.

NECESSARY VIEWING

Prepare for the apocalypse with three seminal zombie flicks

WHITE ZOMBIE (1932)

In Hollywood’s first feature-length zombie film, Bela Lugosi (the go-to horror actor of the time, who played Dracula just one year earlier) plays a witch doctor named Murder who attempts to zombify a young woman.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

Arguably the most important zombie film made, yet the word ‘zombie’ is never mentioned. This is the film that established the rules for all future zombie movies: they are reanimated corpses that feed on the flesh of the living and can only be killed by destroying the brain.

SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004)
A precursor to Zombieland, this was the first film to prove zombies could be funny as well as terrifying. It’s a commentary on modern Western society that manages to be hilarious without breaking any of the classic zombie genre rules.

This story originally appeared in the November 2019 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR magazine. Image: still from The Night of the Living Dead (1968); Alamy.