The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The zombie film is one of the most popular sub-genres of the horror film. A zombie is a reanimated corpse that has returned from the dead, slow, shuffling and lacking will. In the modern incarnation, the zombie has become a creature ravenous for human flesh.
The idea of the zombie comes out of African religion. The first ever zombie film was White Zombie (1932) and for the next 36 years, the zombie remained in the province of Voodoo, occasionally a creature of mad science or created by alien invaders. There it was slow, shuffling reanimated corpse but never more than that.
The modern zombie film began with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), an apocalyptic film about the dead risen and laying siege to the living in a farmhouse. This made the zombie into a flesh eater and created the popular mythology about it only being able to be killed by incapacitating the head. This created a number of imitators but the true popularity of the zombie film grew in the 1980s following Romero’s sequel Dawn of the Dead (1978), which added copious gore and splatter to the mix. There were a number of enthusiastic imitators in particular from Italy. The 1990s saw the first zombie comedies.
The zombie film underwent a revival in the mid-2000s with a series of works that remade or homaged Romero’s films and others that claimed to be spurious sequels. This was followed by a vast shuffling horde of mostly low-budgeted zombie films. During this time, we have seen zombie films from almost every film-making country in the world.
These low-budget copies soon revealed that the number of original plots available to the zombie film was limited. This period also saw an upsurge in the zombie comedy and by the 2010s this evolved to a series of gonzo takes where filmmakers mixed zombies up with the most absurd title or conceptual mashups. By the end of the 2010s, the gonzo zombie film too had started to run out of ideas.
The greatest distinction this has is that it was released on a double-bill with I Drink Your Blood. While I Drink‘s vision of rabid hippies was highly entertaining, this is a dreary and uninteresting voodoo film
This has become legendary as the Worst Film Ever Made. Maybe it is but the audience that celebrates its technical gaffes, the purple prose and bizarre bheind-the-scenes stories has contrarily made it one of cultish fascination
A B budget 1950s alien invasion film that cuts cost by having the invasion represented by stock footage and the resurrected dead in a series of images that prefigure Night of the Living Dead
A zombie film back from the days before zombies wanted to eat brains and could only be despatched with a bullet in the head where they were instead figures out of voodoo – in this case undead sailors guarding a treasure. A mildly interesting if never entirely standout B movie of the era
Atomic became the explain-all buzzword for almost every monster movie of the 1950s.This is the novelty of the one and only atomic zombie film, although at heart is no more than a 1940s mad scientist film
A Bela Lugosi comedy in which two inept press agents are ordered to obtain a zombie for the opening of a club
One of the key films from the legendary Val Lewton, this exploits a topical interest in voodoo. As with Lewton’s films, this sits in an ambiguous place that leaves the actuality of the supernatural uncertain
An entry from the great era of mad scientist films wherein George Zucco turns his assistant into a zombie so he can steal his fiancee. Despite a wonderfully mad performance from Zucco, the effort is prosaic and routine, while the zombie gets to do almost nothing throughout
Low-budget film with Bela Lugosi as a respectable psychology professor who disguises himself as someone running a soup kitchen from which he runs a criminal operation and keeps zombies
The 1939 Bob Hope comedy remake of The Cat and the Canary was a big hit; here he and Paulette Goddard are put through the same in what is all but a sequel. Hope is on top form again
From the brothers who made the classic White Zombie, a similar film about an expedition to Cambodia to find the secret of creating zombies