Whether you want to admit it or not, zombie movies are becoming passe. Animated zombies films, however, are still pretty cool. If you need evidence of this, scoot on over to Zombie Info for a bunch of hi-res images and an exclusive interview with the creators, who hope to turn the awesome trailer below in a feature length film

The animation looks fucking sick. It’s dark, gritty, and heavily stylized, and the zombies have that emaciated, freshly-risen-from-the-grave-and-ready-to-eat-some-humans looks about them that is criminally underutilized in live-action zombie films. The beauty of this is that animation opens up so many more doors in terms of what can logistically be done with the way the zombies look without compromising the overall look of the movie (i.e. shit CGI).

“Zombies don’t run.”

Well, why the fuck not?

With Zack Snyder’s plot-hole ridden and downright hilarious re-imagining of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, convention was turned upside down and the commonly accepted notion of the slow zombie was thrown to the wind. Fast zombies, heretofore relegated to more comedy-themed horror films such as Return of the Living Dead and Dead Alive, became a brute force within the horror genre. Zombies were now coked-up speed demons after a bender on Red Bull, and the only thing that could stop them was a bullet to the brain. Or a door, I suppose.

As the decade progressed, factions were born. Some accepted fast zombies with open arms, while others remained steadfast in their devotion to Romero’s creation. There’s even a blog devoted to the supposed “classic” zombie called Zombies Don’t Run. The heart of the argument lies in the notion that Romero created the modern conception of the zombie, and to deviate from the mythology that made zombies one of the most beloved creatures in film is a sin akin to blasphemy. But Romero didn’t create the zombie, and for us to consider the shiftless flesh eaters sacred is to laugh at progression and to spit in the face of evolution.

Nothing is sacred in film.

Whether zombies run, walk, or do the fucking Charleston as they seek their next meal, it’s simply the natural order of things. In film, zombies started out as a Vodou creation, making their first appearances in films such as White Zombie and I Walked With A Zombie. Then in 1968 the tides changed and we were introduced to the zombie everyone knows and loves. His interpretation and restructuring of their mythology, advanced over 40 plus years and six films culminated with zombies learning the ability to use firearms (Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead are essentially prequels) for Christ’s sake. To make a fuss over zombies running is a God damned waste of time.

We could get into an argument over Romero’s zombies not being the first zombies in film, but even I can concede to the notion that he is responsible for zombies as we know it. Throwing upon him the same claims supporters of slow zombies foist upon Snyder’s creation is a foolish endeavor. In the end, fast zombies haven’t done anything to sully the good name of slow zombies, they just opened new avenues to explore in horror movies.

Embrace change. Nothing is sacred, nor should it be. Without change, we would not have Romero’s zombies, and none of these stupid arguments would even be taking place.

WrongCards.com, an e-card website for those who feel sarcasm and humor is better than genuine affection, has a wonderful collection of zombie-themed e-cards to send to those special loved ones you feel need a little more zombie in their lives.

I’d like to see a zombie film that has nothing to do with survival and everything to do with panic. In the end, the zombies are merely secondary to the overarching theme of Holy shit we’re all going to die.

Am I the only one who thinks a zombie apocalypse would be awesome? It’d be every wannabe-survivalist’s wet dream.

A witty catch phrase just before you mow down a rampaging horde of the undead will only enhance your coolness.

I think this was the only one on the website that could actually be used as a meaningful e-card.

The rest can be viewed here.

“Brains we can believe in.”

I suppose with the recent passing of Easter and all things zombie Jesus, an article on the walking dead is appropriate.

If there’s a social hierarchy among monsters, zombies are not at the top of the list. They may not even be on the list. They’re not cool like werewolves. There’s no Warren Zevon song about them. They’re not classy like Dracula and Frankenstein, who can trace their lineage back to respectable 19th century novels. All zombies have is a bunch of George Romero movies. – Lev Grossman, Time Magazine

Really? That’s all they have?

Lev Grossman’s article gives us an abbreviated glimpse at the seemingly sudden surge in popularity of zombies in popular culture and what the future has in store for the walking dead. Citing the recent popularity of Twilight, Grossman considers vampires to be the “IT” monster of the past few years; suave and debonair, they’re more appealing and certainly less frightening than zombies, what with their rotting flesh and uncontrollable desire to eat human brains; but one mustn’t overlook the beautiful irony inherent in Twilight’s success: Stephanie Meyer’s poorly-written, romanticized look at teenage vampires has turned a nation of tweens into mindless zombies. J. K. Rowling may have begun the trend, but she is at the very least mildly competent as a writer. To quote Stephen King, “Stephanie Meyer can’t write worth a darn.” Yet despite the success of Twilight and a few other modest vampire repositories (Let the Right One In, for example), vampires have never been as popular as zombies, especially in recent years. In between fleeting moments of celebrity, vampires have played and always will play second fiddle to zombies.

The perceived rise in popularity of the zombie has been slow and steady, not sudden like Grossman suggests. We have indeed been inundated with zombies in a variety of mediums over the past two years or so; but this trend began years ago. Zombies have always been popular in video games (Resident Evil), and with Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later in 2002 and Zach Snyder’s re-imagining of Dawn of the Dead in 2004, zombies began their slow, lumbering climb to the top nearly a half decade ago. It didn’t come out of nowhere, it just took a while to gain the level of popularity it holds today. With the recent success of World War Z, zombies are poised to take over the literary world as well.

Grossman spends a good portion of his article on Seth Grahame-Smith, the auteur behind Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, who states “There are these large groups of faceless people somewhere in the world who mean to do us harm and cannot be reasoned with. Zombies are sort of familiar territory.” One can deduce he is referring to extremists, in whatever capacity; comparing zombies to religious fundamentalists is hardly new territory, however unspoken it might be. The recent Easter holiday gave to anti-theists much fodder for the comparison of religion to mindless acceptance, the latter of which an appropriate mantra for both zombies and fundamentalism, religious or otherwise. So from this Grahame-Smith is saying, and Grossman presumably agreeing with, that the inherent qualities of zombies that make them so terrifying – their insatiable hunger and mindless tenacity to destroy – is parallel to those who wish to do us harm. Maybe a bit of a stretch on my part, but credible in its own right.

This notion of tooling with and reworking classic literature (or in this case, the epic bore that is anything by Jane Austen) is not entirely unique, though it has certainly never been met with such fanfare before. Kim Paffenroth of Gospel of the Living Dead has utilized his background as a religious studies scholar by “reworking” Dante’s Inferno so that zombies serve as the poet’s inspiration. Another book exists that attempts to rewrite history, citing zombies as the impetus behind several major disasters and events throughout time. If only I could remember the name. A gold star for whomever can find it!

As the article progresses, Grossman shifts gears and relates the tenacity of the zombie to mankind’s perseverance and ability to survive the tumultuous period in which we’re currently living. Zombie-as-metaphor hasn’t been this popular since George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, yet Grossman attempts, albeit tenuously, to draw a parallel between the rise of the revenant’s popularity to the principle conflicts in which our nation has become embroiled: economic turmoil and foreign conflict. As a blogger writing under the guise of a disillusioned academic, I think the association of zombies with more than mindless entertainment is nothing more than a desire to make them more relevant than they really are. One can extrapolate metaphor from the walking dead just as easily as they can Frankenstein’s monster or the Creature from the Black Lagoon; the parallels between their mindlessness and mankind’s is obvious (e.g. Shaun of the Dead). Unfortunately, the zombie has long since lapsed into parody, and has become nothing more than mindless entertainment.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1890384,00.html

Zombies are universally known as a monumental pain in the ass. It’s true. They smell, the by-product of that whole being dead thing; they’re ugly, again, a by-product of that whole being dead thing; and they have this weird, insatiable urge to eat your brains, a by-product of George Romero’s weird little mind. Annoying in their own right are Nazis. They don’t necessarily smell and, if we’re to believe Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, can be quite attractive; and they have an insatiable urge to kill Jews, not eat brains. An amalgamation of the two is a terrifying prospect; zombies are a big enough nuisance as it is, but Nazi zombies…well, why don’t we just give them rocket launchers and let them loose in Times Square?

But wait! How can we make them worse? Imagine these Nazi-Zombies have the ability to teleport, or, if that doesn’t make them scary enough, possess the capabilities for astral projection; or maybe they’re just ghosts. You’re never really told, but either way we’re now dealing with unstoppable, undead, transporting members of the Third Reich who have nothing better to do than kill the shit out of anyone unfortunate enough to stumble into their little makeshift base camp in the middle of Eastern Europe. This unlikely combination of terrifying characteristics somehow collided and formed a black hole of logic that materialized into the 2008 horror film Outpost, the directorial debut by Steven Barker starring everyone’s favorite fictional Roman freedman, Ray Stevenson.

As is customary for Stevenson, his role is that of a brutish military figure named D.C., a Royal Marines Commando-cum-mercenary hired by a mysterious businessman in a dank bar. D.C. is tasked to assemble a ragbag team of miscreants to accompany him to the middle of nowhere to scope out an old World War II bunker. It is assumed that the motive is gold, as Nazi gold is a wonderfully appropriate catalyst for manned explorations into what is soon to be seen as the unknown remnants of the Third Reich.

Upon arrival to the bunker, they discover hidden deep within its myriad of hallways and rooms a lone, mute survivor amidst a pile of bodies that, if you have seen any pictures or footage of concentration camps, resemble a pile of dead prisoners. How fortunate for them. It is soon revealed that the bunker was a Nazi hideout designed for occult-like experimentation on soldiers to unlock the secrets and harness the powers of reality shifting and reanimation. Of course, they succeeded in a weird, roundabout way, and our men are beset upon by seemingly corporeal Nazi ghouls.

It’s bad when I have to cite the relatively lack of believability in a zombie film as its most detrimental aspect, but Outpost manages to inject monumentally egregious gaps in logic throughout the second half of the film. Though not zombies in the purest sense of the word – the term revenant would be more appropriate, as it carries less Romero-esque qualities with it – the undead Nazis so central to the film have an annoying tendency to act more like ghosts than they do zombies. Their ability to appear and disappear without warning is never explained, though one can suggest that this is merely assigning a physical representation to the fear that is no doubt surrounding the mercenaries; in essence, a really cheap ploy at foreshadowing or, if you’d like, teasing the viewer with what’s to come.

Despite this, the movie was still quite entertaining. It possessed an air of Neil Marshall-like qualities, its cinematic equivalent being Dog Soldiers, though more in terms of theme than plot. Both films center around a group of soldiers who come across an unexpected and very deadly adversary in a heavily wooded area and are picked off one by one until a final stand. Though Barker’s film doesn’t quite possess the same attitude Marshall’s does, it’s execution and style mirrored Marshall’s, and it kept you hooked with its motley crew of characters and their creative and absurdly creepy deaths.

What it lacks in logic it more than makes up for with its endless entertainment, absurdly dark plot, and ingenuity. You’re never bored and it subverts convention in a way that makes the gaping holes in logic seem inconsequential. This makes the film a success in its own right, even when you disagree with the way it plays out.

Zombie Girl.

Zombie Girl is a documentary about 12-year old Emily Hagins. Unlike most 12-year old girls, she recently wrote, directed, produced, and edited her own feature length zombie film called Pathogen. In an age where kids are taking camcorders and throwing together loose short films with a modicum of effort, she’s taking it a step further and owning the ever-loving shit out of every aspiring filmmaker under the age of eighteen far and wide. Shit. I don’t even think I knew what the word ‘pathogen’ meant when I was twelve, let alone have the guts and drive to make a feature length film. I think I was just interested in boobs.

The maddest of props to you, Emily. Trailer below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoAYyr2DxEM&hl=en&fs=1]

By way of Tor.com, Sean Bieri gives to us the 12 Days of Zombie Christmas. You may remember Sean Bieri as the man who gave us the hilarious “I feel stupid for ordering brains now” comic I blogged about a couple of months or so ago.

By way of Tor’s member bio:

Sean Bieri is an illustrator, grapic designer and long-time minicomics creator perhaps known best for his comics mash-up of Popeye and the New Testament, The Gospel According to St. Segar. His work has appearied in Jim Ottaviani’s Two Fisted Science, the anthology True Porn and elsewhere. He is the art director of Detroit’s free weekly paper Metro Times and lives with his wife in the tiny urban enclave of Hamtramck, Michigan.

Day 2 appeared today, but I won’t provide it in an effort to encourage you to go spend some time at Tor.com, a magnificent blog devoted to “science fiction, fantasy, the unvierse, and related subjects.”

If you head on over to this post at And Now the Screaming Starts, you’ll find not only a very informative and well-written review of the zomcom (he prefers the portmanteau “zombedy”) Fido, but a fairly vitriolic critique of the current state of zombie films and the necessary, albeit tongue-in-cheek, steps to quell the surge of esoteric zombie plots that have begun to plague the silver (grey?) screen.

He makes the case that the impact Fido has made in this current climate of “self-referential parodies” would have been much greater five or six years ago, as the past two or so years the zombie genre in all its facets has been inundated with obscure plots no doubt constructed by manatees in an attempt to drift ever so subtly outside the mainstream of contemporary zombie films. All that we need then, he states ever so passionately, is a zombie films that remains true to convention but is actually made without “filling in the gaps and lacunae” with absurd plot devices.

Appropriately referencing “cop buddy pics” as analagous to zombie films and their tendency to be the same ol’ thing over and over again (do we really need another Lethal Weapon?), I can’t help but think that Shaun of the Dead and, though not a zombie film, Hot Fuzz, are perfect examples of this combination of genres being utilized in a way that are still parodic in nature but still offer something original and clever to the consistently drab world of zombie films.

While I agree that zombie films have become more like romantic comedies as of late, putting a stop (or cap) to their production might prevent a talented writer/director from making a film that keeps the genre fresh and tolerable. This is a tenuous argument, but I’ve been up since 6:30 AM and don’t have nearly enough coffee coursing through my veins to make any real sort of sense.

What I would like to see, however, is an end to the ubiquitous “…of the Dead/Damned/Living Dead/Zombies” line of films. Possessing no relation to Romero’s eponymous trilogy quadrilogy however many there are now, these films are generally low-budget fare lacking any sense of creative vision or, well, talent, and usually harbor premises that can be summed up with “a group of teens at [insert generic teen hangout] encounter flesh eating zombies and must fight to stay alive!” A comet is usually involved. I’m a firm believer that any idea, no matter how unoriginal, can be done well, but even I’m getting sick of the whole “survivors banding together” premise. This isn’t because it’s played out, but because it’s never, ever done well.

What’s in the future for zombie films? The Norwegian zombie flick Dead Snow, which showcases what happens when Nazis feel like they haven’t quite lived up to their repuatations as total assholes, has been a hot topic on the interblags. The film no doubt carries a ridiculous premise and fits so snugly within the confines of self-referential parody, but one can’t help appreciate its ridiculousness. The same goes for Worst Case Scenario, stuck in development Hell but possessing two of the greatest teaser trailers for a zombie film I have ever seen (not just nazi zombies, but AQUATIC Nazi zombies).

Yeah, fuck you shark. You’re really fucked now.

A month or two ago I wrote a review for The Passion of the Christ, making the assumption that Mel Gibson really intended for it to be a zombie film. Since then I became obsessed with discovering how far back zombies actually go in history, and whether or not they share any specific characteristics with Romero’s vision of zombies or the less-than-popular in the film world Haitian zombies, which really aren’t zombies as we know them but zombies in the sense that they’re still alive but under the control of the witch doctor who put them into their “undead” state.

So basically they’re puppets.

Semantics aside, I started doing some research and came up with some startling little factoids. The earliest known written evidence for zombies in their truest sense: corpses rising from their graves to attack the living, is found in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Ishtar, the babylonian goddess of fertility, love, and war, is angry over little Gilgy rejecting her marriage proposal in what amounts to a humorous gender reversal. Never one to admit defeat, she goes complaining to the high god Anu, demanding the Bull of Heaven, presumably so it can go all China Shoppe on Gilgy’s ass. To enhance her chances of getting the Bull, she threatens to…

…knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
…smash the doorposts, and leave the doors flat down,
and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!

What a bitch. Earlier in her mythology she threatened to do the same thing if she were to be denied entrance to the underworld, an act that cost the whole of humanity the opportunity to get down and dirty with each other until someone had the foresight to go revive the ho.

Fast forward a thousand or so years and we’re treated to a zombieriffic treat from the Bible. Ezekiel 37: 1-14 details the rise of a zombie army that, though devoid of the sort of nastiness that makes zombies so appealing, is still a fucking zombie army in the Bible. Details such as “…and as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them” make for potentially stellar animation and a way to creep kids out in an animated version of the Old Testament, which is sure to be more frightening than any horror film.

There are of course more, such as the Norse draugr and the medieval conception of the revenant, emerging in Western Europe during the High Middle Ages, but I won’t delve into them here.

Given the wide range of zombie films being released today, I find it quite surprising and rather disheartening that no one has chosen to utilize these fantastical stories for the purpose of horror, either by culling the plot directly from the source material or, in the case of the draugr, loosely adapting its more appealing characteristics. Clearly to have any sort of discernible impact these adaptations would have to wear their intentions on their sleeves, as these stories, and the many more that have gone unmentioned in this post, are not well-known among the movie going populace (or so I presume).

As an aside, I strongly urge everyone to check out And Now the Screaming Starts, a blog upon which I can not heap enough praise. In addition, please make way to Castle Vardulon and read his ongoing critique of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and the Friday the 13th comic series. You shan’t be disappointed.

The written word is far more powerful than any moving image, so it comes as no surprise to find a massive rise in popularity of zombie fiction. It broke into the mainstream with Max Brooks with his Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, both of which remained on the New York Times best sellers list for weeks. Others, such as former religious studies professor Kim Paffenroth, have written extensively on zombies, both in the context of film and literature.

This is the trailer for The Living Dead, an upcoming anthology of zombie fiction with contributions by some of the greatest science fiction and horror authors alive today, including George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Clive Barker, and my personal favorite, Neil Gaiman.

Most zombie films aren’t really that scary, but this simple minute long trailer is pretty damned freaky. If the book is half as good as this is, it will be a monumental success and definitely worth a look see.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raNWFhPxi5Q&hl=en&fs=1]

Source: Tor.com