As much as I love zombie movies, especially George
Romero’s dead trilogy, and Lucio Fulci’s Zombie, The Beyond, and House
by the Cemetery, I haven’t really been excited about the recent popularity
of the walking dead. Now that zombies are everywhere, they’re not as
interesting. While I’m glad that Netflix has given me easy access to hundreds
of obscure horror movies, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the days of
scouting out video stores and flea markets hoping to discover an old VHS tape
with lurid images of the living dead on its cover. I still have vivid memories
of the day I found the Spanish zombie film Bloodsucking Nazi Zombies
(aka Oasis of the Zombies, aka The Treasure of the Living Dead)
at the Barnyard Flea Market a short bike ride away from my parents’ house. It
didn’t matter that the movie was almost unwatchable; the thrill was in the
discovery, in knowing I’d unearthed an obscure zombie movie to which other
horror fans didn’t have access. Now it’s too easy, and when the movie is bad,
as most of them are, I can’t even console myself with the thought that I’m one
of only a select few who have seen it.
Another reason I’ve lost interest is that now too
many zombies run. Real zombies don’t run, and they aren’t the result of rage
viruses (although they can be created in labs by mad scientists). They are
reanimated corpses that stumble around mindlessly and eat the flesh (and
brains) of the living. When controlled by a competent director, they can swim
and wrestle sharks (Fulci’s Zombie), and they can begin to think
rationally (Romero’s Day of the Dead and Land of the Dead), but
they can never run. They must also do at least some of the following: bite a
large gory chunk out of a living human’s arm, leg, or neck; grunt; have rotting
flesh; stumble; run into things; rise from the dead and bite one of their
friends thus turning him or her into a zombie as well; and feast on the organs
of a living human. If none of this applies or if the being exhibiting these
traits runs, it’s not a zombie.
Recently, however, I watched The Dead, a 2010
film by British writers/directors Howard and Jonathan Ford, and it has
rekindled my interest in the walking dead subgenre. The Dead ranks among
the best zombie movies ever made, and it demonstrates that the Ford brothers understand
zombies better than anyone who has made a movie about the living dead in the
past several years. Set in an unnamed West African country and filmed on
location in Ghana and Burkino Faso, The Dead focuses on two main
characters, Lieutenant Brian Murphy, an aviation engineer in the U.S. Army, and
Sergeant Daniel Dembele, a soldier from an unnamed African country, and their
struggle to survive as they attempt to make their way through savannah and
desert to a military base where Brian hopes to find a way home and Daniel hopes
to find his son. The Ford brothers portray this struggle with a grim realism
that makes the film seem less like a movie about the undead and more like the
brutal horror films of the 1970’s, such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The
Hills Have Eyes, and Last House on the Left, which are so terrifying
because they seem so real.
The Dead doesn’t
waste any time with comic relief, a love story, or attempts to explain why the
dead have started to walk and feast on the living. This is simply the way
things are, and the characters must deal with it. They don’t spend much time
talking about it either as the dialogue is sparse, and the Ford brothers rely
almost entirely on visuals to tell their story. What makes The Dead so
believable is that it focuses on the character’s struggle for survival,
portraying not only their passage through the harsh landscape in an old pick-up
truck that seems always on the verge running out of gas, overheating or blowing
a tire, but also their difficulty in meeting basic needs such as eating,
drinking, and sleeping. Moreover, it presents the zombies as another aspect of
the harsh landscape, as a force of a nature rather than as something
supernatural that can appear only in a movie.
All the classic elements are here. The zombies groan
and stumble around on broken limbs covered with rotting flesh. One even crawls.
When they catch their victims, they bite large gory chunks out of them and
feast on their flesh. Early in the film, Daniel watches as a woman from his
village dies and then attempts to bite him before he shoots her in the head,
leaving viewers to wonder whether he might have to do the same to Brian (or
vice versa) before they reach the military base.
The Dead also contains some welcome changes to the walking dead formula.
Unlike every other character in a zombie movie, Daniel and Brian seem to know
instinctively that the only way to stop a zombie is to destroy its brain.
Another nice difference is that rather than becoming a greater threat to their
own survival than the zombies, the living humans in the movie work together. If
you’re concerned, like I was, that Daniel and Brian will make it to the army
base only to learn that they were better off with the zombies, you’ll be glad
to know that this doesn’t happen. The biggest difference, of course, is the
setting. Most zombie films take place in cities where the characters are left
to deal with the collapse of civilization. By setting their film in a place
where daily life was already a struggle, the Ford brothers offer a completely
different take on the zombie film. The horror is more intense for Brian, who,
in addition to running from zombies, must navigate a harsh environment and an
unfamiliar culture. Daniel, on the other hand, is more equipped to survive, and
without him, Brian wouldn’t make it very far. The setting thus enables the Ford
brothers to emphasize the story's survival aspects. If there's a political
message here, it's a subtle one; the film avoids distracting from the horror by
preaching to its audience.
While innovating in ways that leave their movie firmly rooted in the walking
dead subgenre, the Ford brothers have shown how to keep the zombie film
interesting. The Dead doesn’t try to shock with excessive amounts of a
gore, trick the audience with bizarre plot twists, or make its zombies do
something they can’t. It succeeds by creating horror so intense that you forget
you’re watching a movie about the undead and believe that the events unfolding
could really happen.
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