Karl Marx, Fascism, And The Living Dead

I got burned out on zombies several decades ago when serving as part of Joe Bob Briggs’ Board of Drive-In Experts (i.e., reviewers for his newsletter). 

While I bear no animosity to the genre, I just saw one zombie flick too many and, like eating nothing but pistachio ice cream for a month, I got to the point where I didn’t want to face another one.

So I was a little surprised to have an extremely detailed zombie movie dream last night, not a nightmare, but rather a zombie movie playing out before me (i.e., I was a spectator of, not a participant in the dream).

It gave me an insight into the evolution of the zombie genre, and how the same reflects on us culturally.

So buckle up, buttercups, we’re going in for a deep dive…

. . .

First off, while I haven’t seen a new full length zombie movie or TV series since the last century, I have absorbed a lot of what’s going on in the sub-genre through sheer osmosis.

People write about these things all the time, the trailers are all over YouTube, images appear everywhere, Wikipedia supplies countless synopses, etc., etc., and of course, etc.

And while I wouldn’t count myself informed enough to comment on any specific new zombie film or TV show, I think I’ve been able to observe the sub-genre’s evolution pretty well as an outsider, not a fan.

Next to mad slasher movies, zombie films are the easiest horror movies to make:  All you need are some old clothes and some garish make-up and voila, instant zombie.

That’s what burned me out, the seemingly endless non-variations on a theme by independent / semi-pro /amateur / total fnckin’ incompetent film makers that I needed to wade through.

I give many of them credit for ingenuity and the occasional oddball twist.  One film maker staged a zombie invasion by putting six friends in make-up, driving to Washington DC in a van, hopping out in front of several landmarks, and quickly filming his buddies staggering around the Capitol, the Lincoln memorial, the Washington Monument, etc. before the cops chased them away.

Added a lot of production value to what otherwise looked like a $1.98 production.

But enough is enough,
know what I mean?

It’s important to note all these zombie flicks were inspired not so much directly by George Romero’s paradigm shifting approach to the sub-genre but indirectly after being filtered through the lens (literal and figurative) of various Italian rip-offs, many helmed by Lucio Fulci.

Fulci directed over 50 films in his career, all of them in some exploitation genre, but he hit his sweet spot with his gruesome-bordering-surrealistic zombie flicks, starting with Zombie 2, an unofficial remake (i.e., plagiaristic rip-off) of George Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead (released in Italy as Zombie).

Fulci’s stylistic touches proved easier to emulate than Romero’s more thematic approach, but ironically this resulted in what’s called “bad truth” by many low budget film fans; i.e., a film that, because of speed and budget restraints, provides no filter to the film maker’s persona, and whatever results is a more honest glimpse into their mind and soul than a better made film with a bigger budget and longer shooting schedule.*

As a result, most zombie films became the very thing that Romero was commenting on.

. . .

Let’s start at the beginning:  The true origin of the zombie mythos. 

Zombies do exist, albeit not in the highly stylized form found in movies and pulp fiction.

As Wade Davis pointed out in his book, The Serpent & The Rainbow, Haitian shamans were known to produce a cocktail of near-toxic and mind-numbing substances that first reduced a victim to near-death physical status then, once revived, obliterated the ability for their mind to function at any but the most rudimentary level.

Needless to say, while the shamans could do this, they never did it on a scale approaching that in popular fiction, and actual cases of zombies are very few and very far between but it did happen, thus spawning the myth we have today.

Europeans learned of zombies in the early 19th century, but they really didn’t hit their stride until the 1930s when they began popping up in pulp fiction.  The movie White Zombie (1932) is considered the first zombie movie (although revived corpses appeared earlier in other movies).

In addition to being a really good classic horror film, what makes White Zombie of particular importance is that it presents the original raison d’etre of the zombie mythos:  Cheap enslaved labor.

While the zombie mythos drew on inspirations from around the world, Haiti remains the focal point, the time /place / culture that presented it full blown to the world.

Haiti became the first enslaved colony to free itself and declare independence in 1804; in 1819 the first reference to zombies appeared in an English language work.

Haitians, recently freed yet still crushed under a huge financial debt imposed on it by France, naturally embellished stories of zombies to include the victims being used to serve as virtually free unpaid labor for plantation owners.

As noted, while zombies do exist, they are few and far between.  From a return-on-investment angle they are woefully labor-intensive to create with a high risk of failure.

The few documented cases of actual zombies suggests the motives may have been personal, with the victim’s enslavement just an additional degradation doled out on them.

White Zombie puts the concept on an industrial scale, with villain Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi in one of his last good roles) using a battalion of enslaved zombies to operate his sugar cane plantation.

It’s a striking mundane yet simultaneously politically deep motive.

The late 19th and early 20th century saw a great conflict around the world at local and national levels between the proponents of socialism and / or communism and the forces of capital.

In particular, socialism (and to a lesser degree communism) gained a foothold in American culture following the Great Depression, and when White Zombie was made in 1932 the thought that corporations and business owners would willfully enslave and work their laborers to death was not the slightest bit removed from recent history, much less far fetched.

And while zombies in pulp fiction and comic books might have a variety of other origins, even there the financial angle typically proved the overriding motive for their creation.

For the next three decades, in films like King Of The Zombies (1941), its sequel Revenge Of The Zombies (1943), the Val Lewton classic I Walked With A Zombie (1943), Creature With The Atom Brain (1955), Invisible Invaders (1959), and Plague Of The Zombies (1966), this remained the central conceit in the way zombies were portrayed:  Enslaved labor serving evil masters.**

George Romero overturned all that.

. . .

While zombies as enslaved labor remained the dominant paradigm of the sub-genre, there were alternate interpretations galore.

Some are zombie movies by default; i.e., the previously mentioned revived corpse movies where sometimes the victim was revived for altruistic purposes, sometimes for personal desire, sometimes just to have somebody handy to do all the heavy lifting.

Regardless of motive, this inevitably ended up badly for the resurrectionist.

While there had been a few movies like Zombies Of Mora Tau (1957) in which zombies operated independently as reanimated corpses, these were more in the lines of traditional ghost stories where the dead either protected or haunted a relic or holy site.

Romero shifted the classic zombie paradigm quite significantly not once, not twice, but three times.

The most frightening thing about the zombies in Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead (1968) is they are no longer under control.

As frightening as a cadre of shuffling living dead might be, they become even more terrifying when one realizes there’s absolutely no way to stop them short of their utter annihilation.

There is no evil witch doctor or mad scientist guiding their attack, there’s no off switch to be thrown. 

Rather, Romero’s zombies are a force of (super)nature, absolutely unstoppable en masse.

They are incomprehensible because unlike the enslaved labor of earlier zombie films, there is no rational guiding motivation behind them.

I grant you “rational” is doing a lot of work here, but it’s not inappropriate.  No matter how crazy the witch doctor or mad scientist may be, they’re motivated by a desire to fulfill their personal agenda, whatever it may be.

That their method and objective might both be utterly insane is beside the point, the zombies are merely the means to the end.

But as noted, Romero’s zombies in Night Of The Living Dead possess no meaning.

They exist simply to devour.

Romero expanded on this greatly with his sequel, Dawn Of The Dead (1978), this time hammering the point down hard:  Zombies are the ultimate consumers.

They create nothing, they produce nothing, they do nothing, they simply destroy and eat those who do.

By setting Dawn Of The Dead in a fortified shopping mall besieged by zombies, Romero made a sharp cultural satire on modern consumer culture.

The Fulci inspired imitators who flooded screens with zombie movies after this didn’t merely miss Romero’s point, they did so by confirming his underlying thesis.

Without understanding, without actually creating anything new, they feasted on what others did before them.

And mind you, I’m not yucking anybody’s yum.  Some of these imitators are interesting in their own right and I begrudge no one their pleasure.

But like all the imitators of Quentin Tarantino who fill their movies with oddball characters, quirky dialog, outrageous situations, and over the top violence, they imitate the style but not the substance.

With Dawn Of The Dead, Romero gave us something to chew on.***

And Romero’s third paradigm shift?

It wasn’t obvious at the time, and it’s taken a while to blossom, but he introduced that in Night Of The Living Dead as well:  The bigots among us will quickly justify any reason to attack the other.

. . .

=SPOILER for those of you who haven’t seen the original Night Of The Living Dead yet.=

Ben (Duane Jones), the sole survivor of the besieged farmhouse, emerges only to be shot by a posse of good ol’ boys hunting zombies.

Ben is African-American, which in 1968’s political and cultural climate was pretty radical casting.

The good ol’ boys are seen earlier on a TV broadcast in Night Of The Living Dead, gleefully hunting down and destroying the zombies (called “ghouls” in Romero’s original version before he acquiesced to audiences’ preferred nomenclature).  “When we find 'em, we can kill 'em…they're dead.  They're all messed up,”

One may argue for several reasons that Ben’s death at the end of Night Of The Living Dead is intentional irony, that it’s the last tragic card laid down in a losing hand. 

Indeed, had a white actor been cast as Ben (according to Romero, Jones won the role on the strength of his audition, not his ethnicity), the film’s ending would still play out.

But Ben as an African-American adds a whole new dimension to the climax suggesting he wasn’t killed in a tragic mistake but rather simply because to the good ol’ boys, he wasn’t a normal white guy like them but rather one of The Other.

So how does all this tie into my zombie movie dream?

In the dream movie, it’s shortly after the collapse of civilization in the aftermath of a zombie onslaught.  The protagonists in the dream were looting various abandoned buildings, taking what they needed.

The zombies provided little direct threat.  There was the sense if one got too close they could be trouble, but basically they weren’t as strong as humans, not as fast, and certainly not as intelligent.

While some of the protagonists simply sidestepped the zombies, others killed them even when the zombies posed no threat.

Those protagonists enjoyed hunting and killing zombies.

When I woke up, I realized the dream illuminated a third stage of evolution in cinematic zombies, as radical a change as Romero’s earlier ideas. 

And I grant you, doubtlessly not an original insight on my part, but one I probably gleaned subconsciously from online exposure to clips from 28 Days Later (2002) and Resident Evil (2003) and Shaun Of The Dead (2004) and World War Z (2013) and the TV series The Walking Dead (2010 – 2022):  As troublesome as zombies are, the real problem is us.

. . .

The evolution of screen zombies:

• Labor unjustly enslaved by evil masters for sinister purposes.  While scary, these zombies are no threat in and of themselves.  It’s only when they’re directed to take action by their overlords that they become dangerous.  In many ways they can be pitied. 

• Uncontrolled consumer culture.  Essentially our neighbors and fellow citizens (indeed, the running joke in all zombie films are the vast array of different types of zombies -- farmers / doctors / cheerleaders / etc.).  They consume without thinking, destroying every living thing they come in contact with, animated but not really alive. In short, the ultimate bourgeoisie.

• The Other.  Bigotry / authoritarianism / fascism needs an identifiable enemy to hate and destroy.  There needs to be a monster to be slain in order to feel like a hero, but too often the slain are painted as monsters in order for the slayer to justify their own behavior.

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” -- Friedrich Nietzsche

© Buzz Dixon

* “Bad truth” also encompasses films made by directors who are such box office giants that no one dare say no to their slightest whims no matter how bad those ideas are (looking at you, George Lucas)

** The 1952 serial Zombies Of The Stratosphere featured no actual zombies; rather the term is used almost as an ethnic slur by the protagonists against the Martian invaders.

*** This one’s for you, Uncle Forry.