Few movies have had such a profound and long-lasting impact on me as George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978). For a kid already revved up about the horror genre, this film was like a supercharger. I was too young to appreciate the subtext and social satire, but the zombie lore Romero created (essentially vampire mythology crossbred with cannibalism and the traditional ‘voodoo’ zombies) fascinated me at the same time as it was scaring me witless. It’s no coincidence that my short story bibliography includes three tales of the walking dead, with a fourth due to appear in Andromeda Spaceways later this year.
About a week ago, I consulted the free-to-air TV guide app on my phone and saw that Romero’s zombie sequel Land of the Dead (2005) was about to screen. It was one of those movies that had slipped through my viewing net because it premiered around the time I was made redundant from my first tenure as a film critic. I’d absorbed enough about it via osmosis, however, to know it hadn’t reviewed so well. At any rate, I tuned in, eager to form my own opinion about it.
Before I divulge that opinion, let me offer another opinion about the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. I considered it a well made and well scripted movie that was on the whole respectful of the source material. But where it failed, I thought (as did many other people at the time), was with its running zombies.
As some other pundit once pointed out – although I’m damned if I can remember who – the whole appeal of zombies as monsters is that they’re ineffectual. They’re slow, they’re dumb, they can be thwarted by a fence or a door or a window. Without these qualities, they might as well just be serial killers or vampires or werewolves. It’s only their mindless persistence (and their vast numbers) that makes them a threat.
So I was pleased to see that in Land of the Dead, Romero had not bowed to the trend of the time (28 Days Later was essentially another running zombie film) and had kept his zombies at walking pace. But then the godfather of the modern zombie flick blotted his copybook…
To serve the class warfare allegory of his film, Romero had his zombies become more human and even become objects of sympathy. It was a classic case of the thematic tail wagging the storyline dog and the results were predictably woeful. Zombies are terrifying because they are a force of nature, as inexorable, merciless and unfeeling as a tsunami. If you start trying to paint them as a kind of separate species evolved from humans, with as much right to live and be happy as everyone else, what have you got?
Full disclosure now: I’ve messed with Romero’s zombie lore a couple of times myself. In fact, in a story called ‘Flesh Sandwiches’, I went down a path not dissimilar to the one Romero did in Land of the Dead. To a degree, such deviations are unavoidable if one hopes to create an original zombie tale. But the difference is that my more human zombie serves story, not allegory. The dog is still wagging the tail.
This feeds back into my central thesis that story, be it in film or literature, must come first. Story is the Christmas tree and literary elements such as theme and subtext are the tinsel and baubles. A Christmas tree is still a Christmas tree, even if it is not decorated. Tinsel and baubles on their own, however, are just shiny clutter. A movie like the original Dawn of the Dead is a Christmas tree tastefully decorated with just the right amount of tinsel and baubles. It’s something that people will stop and admire. Land of the Dead has lots of decoration, but the tree beneath is… well, dead.
Much of the criticism levelled at Land of the Dead back in 2005 suggested that Romero was too heavy handed with the social commentary, but I beg to disagree. As Romero himself noted, the social satire in Dawn of the Dead is “right there in your face”, but the difference is that Dawn of the Dead would still work as a story if the anti-consumerist elements were removed.
In the end, that was Romero’s great sin with Land of the Dead: he was so busy trying to make a point about social injustice that he disrespected both his story and the universe he had developed so brilliantly in the first three Dead films.
