*NON-REVIEW #1: ZOMBIE FILMS EXPLAINED*

After an interesting discussion with a friend, as well as a quick read of the latest Cineaste Magazine, I decided to put my opinion out there as to why there has been a recent trend of zombie films, and what draws the viewers to participate in what could be viewed as such a barbarically brutal branch of cinema.

Simply put, and without delving too far into the philosophy of human nature, something draws us to the physical contest - unarguably evidenced modernly by the widespread popularity of football, rugby, hockey, etc., but even more so by martial arts, and the recent emergence of mixed martial arts, heralded by the globally recognized empire of the UFC. This physicality, brought forth very prominently in such films as The Matrix trilogy, the Transformer films, and most viciously in the Saw series to name a few, serves to satiate these physical, even violent, tendencies we gravitate towards. Whether they're robots, artificial intelligences in human form, or just sick and twisted torturous individuals, the movie-going public returns again and again to see these characters maim and destroy each other. Unfortunately, however, each bullet fired, each kick to the face includes the harsh reality that it takes some form of conscious intent, whether by the antagonist or the protagonist, to hurt someone else. This purposed harm brings with it that childhood guilt, no matter how latent, and the societal understanding that violence is unacceptable and worthy of punishment. Immune to negativity associated with cinematic violence, zombie films - a carefully crafted niche - live by a different set of standards that have succeeded in justifying this brutal violence.

First, zombies - whether dating back to Romero's original, Night of the Living Dead, in 1968, or to the most recent comical iteration, Zombieland - are wholly zombies. They are not fragmented humans, they are not mostly gone with small traces of humanity, they are entirely and irrevocably different than their former selves. Vampires are aberrations, or in some stories, evolved humans. Werewolves are cursed monsters that eventually change back into their human selves. They still have traces of humanity, but zombies are emptied humanoid shells replaced with only rage, hate, and depending on which film you reference, the need for human brains. There is NO humanity left, and thus is the crux of it. Somewhat like the punching bag with the schoolyard bully's picture taped to it, zombies allow us a placebic form of violence. These zombies look like people, walk and move about almost like people, but are 100% void of those social, mental, and most importantly, emotional characteristics that make them really human, thus allowing us to blow them to pieces. Looking at Shaun of the Dead, one of the crucial moments in the film is when, after spending almost the entirety of the film attempting to rescue her, Shaun's own mother turns into a zombie. Though he hesitates slightly, the frame of his mother recalling their former emotional connection, he lifts his gun and kills her, recognizing that all that was once his mother was gone as soon as she became a zombie. The zombie culture, progressing steadily for a solid forty years now, has created this loophole that lets us take out our rage - by viewing our favorite on-screen protagonists blow the heads off of raging zombies - without a guilty conscience.

In the end, the key to guilt-free, double-tapping, satisfyingly brutal disembodiment of zombies relies on the manner in which zombies become zombies. Though somewhat unexplained in the genre's early years, more recent zombie films, such as Resident Evil, 28 Days Later, and even Zombie Strippers! provide infection as the catalyst for zombified humans. This unintentional corruption leads to the understanding that zombies aren't moral beings; they didn't make the choice to become zombies, and as stated above, all that they once were has been replaced by 'zombieness'. This absolution of moral responsibility extends both to those infected, as well as those that remain human, because more than anything, violence can be justified when used as self-defense - and taking everything that has been said thus far, killing zombies seems to be the most straight-forward and acceptable form of self-defense there is. As viewers, it seems that we are quick to understand and accept these terms to justify the violence we crave.

I assume it can be safely said that if there's a raging, flesh eating zombie racing towards you, and you just so happen to have a sawn-off shotgun in hand, you wouldn't hesitate to raise it to your shoulder and fire away. Even more so, after the adrenaline wears away and you're left looking at a sickly corpse of a zombie, you won't feel remorse for ending its life. You would understand it as a necessity, and move on. Thus it is with us as viewers - we have this desire for physicality - yes, of violence - a release of strong emotions, maybe, and because of the molded situations in which zombie movies are created, we can justify absolute gore and wretched dismemberment. This justification occurs through the either the conscious or subconscious recognition that besides their human appearance, they are anything but human, and the recognition that all violence perpetrated on them is pure, unadulterated self-defense. There are those outliers, those writers, directors, filmmakers that purposefully defy the genretypes, but I know that I've never watched a zombie film and afterwards turned to the person next to me disheartened and said, '...but what about all those poor zombies?' That would be counter to the very purpose that zombie violence has attempted to achieve in its forty year history, and as ready as I'd be to fight an infected to the death, I'm not one to fight with a genre as rich as the zombie flick.

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1/16/2010