Zombies, eh? Those flesh eating, arm losing, exploding headed scamps, with their monosyllabic conversations, blank eyes and remarkably sharp teeth. Don't you just love 'em?
Much-loved during the 70s and 80s, practically ignored by everyone in the 90s, and now the nation's favourite way of making a point about the decline in society - from Shaun Of The Dead and 28 Days Later to the very recent Dead Set, we just can't get enough of the little toerags, it seems.
Received knowledge is that the modern zombie (e.g. the flesh-eating scruffbag raised from its grave by an enormous governmental fuck-up) was invented by George Romero in 1968 for his Barbara-baiting monochrome monster mash-up Night Of The Living Dead. Before this, movie zombies tended to be much more traditional in scope - and were usually simple blank-eyed slaves, raised from their graves to do the bidding of some over-acting pillock indulging in a spot of voodoo.
Flesh eating wasn't particularly high on the agenda, the main zombie job was more likely to involve looming menacingly out of the shadows. Their whole scariness seemed to consist of the simple fact that they were dead...but alive (a bit like the contestants on The X Factor this year... woo, little bit of satire there). Ah, simpler times.
And 'tis true that it wasn't until Romero needed a cheap and cheerful monster for his social commentary on a shoestring that the zombie as a cinematic icon really hit the ground shuffling. But he was actually beaten to the punch by another, less well known film, which just so happens to be British (which means I actually know something about it).
Plague Of The Zombies (1966) was Hammer's only real attempt at a zombie film. It is based on those Haitian potboilers of yore (in this instance a Cornish tin miner decides to circumnavigate the unions by employing the recently deceased as his workforce, with predictably unfortunate results), but is also notable for a couple of sequences which were a direct influence on Romero and his ilk. In one, an entire graveyard erupts with suddenly-frisky cadavers. In another, Servalan from Blakes Seven meets her maker for a second time when her zombie self is decapitated quite spectacularly with a handy spade.
So you could argue that Hammer started it all, although it's pretty obvious that Romero's film (and its astonishing sequel) was the template for all that gut-munching undead fun which poured out of Europe in the following decades, went straight to Betamax, was promptly banned by our somewhat over-sensitive government, disappeared from public sight for 10 years or so, re-appeared towards the end of the century on DVD, was re-watched and denounced as "shite" by just about everyone with half a brain.
As Romero discovered, zombies are cheap. And cheap was what the makers of all those spaghetti-horror nasties were after. Take an out-of-work extra, dress him in some charity shop duds, stick some ping-pong balls over his eyes, shake some talcum powder over his bonce and douse him in a liberal helping of raspberry syrup. Hey-presto, one zombie. Repeat until the streets of Barcelona are bereft of down-and-outs. It's that simple - and if they're prepared to wade around in some rancid offal for a couple of hours, so much the better!
Indeed, in 1981's Zombie Creeping Flesh, the make-up man's art was put a bit too closely under the microscope, with one of the protagonists wondering who " the guys with shit all over their faces" were.
Many of those films have a kind of shoddy charm, and there is something genuinely unsettling about that whole "Ha! Look at how slow they're moving - I can get away from them easily! Oops." Shambling, unstoppable army idea.
But they had their day, and it really wasn't until us Brits took up the zombie baton in the early 2000s that they came back from the celluloid grave (as it were).
There's obviously something in the nation's psyche that loves post-apocalyptic nightmares, and when you link that with our obsession about the nation "dumbing down" and filling up with shopping-obsessed violent halfwits, it's no wonder that there was an immediate audience for Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's Shaun Of The Dead (2004) and Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 28 Days Later(2002).
28 Days Later came first, and has pretty much acted as the template for everything that followed, including anything Romero has produced since. Because the shaky camerawork and grainy picture has been done to death now (it's a good way of hiding a shoddy effect, after all) it's easy to forget that when 28 Days Later came along it was utterly astonishing. It's also amazing to think that no-one had thought to do it before. After all, the entire premise is that it's a zombie film - but the zombies can run like Russell Brand chasing the bus from the local young ladies' finishing school. This makes them triple scary.
Much of 28 Days Later's charm comes from the scenario - like the wonderful novel Day Of The Triffids, the disaster has already happened. The UK is an empty wasteland, and it's down to the few survivors to make the best of a bad lot and not get chomped on. There is always something beguiling about seeing the streets of a big city sans the general public, and the makers of 28 Days Later knew this - therefore much of the first half of the film sees the main protagonists wandering around the empty city in a state of shock.
And the zombies - when they appear, running like bastards - are like a breath of fresh air after decades of Romero-esque shufflers. Of course, I'm sure the makers would like me to point out that they're not technically zombies, but are, in fact, living people who have been infected by a fast-acting virus called "Rage". But they can stick such pretensions up their collective bottoms - however annoyed I was, it's unlikely I'd suddenly decide that a lump of raw ex Emmerdale actor should immediately be on the menu. And you'd have to be pretty peed off to continue thinking about lunch after being on the receiving end of a well-aimed petrol bomb. So, zombies they are.
Despite the gore, the shocks and explosions of action, 28 Days Later is almost an exercise in restraint - it's a carefully plotted, heartbreaking exercise in love and loss. Its sequel 28 Weeks Later is slightly more ambitious, and although it has a similar look and feel, you can tell that the zombie shocks this time come with a hefty injection of American cash. So the set pieces are huge - the rage virus spreads through a massive crowd; snipers are told to pick off the infected at will, not really knowing who's got it and who hasn't; and in one astonishingly over-the-top moment of cinematic madness, a helicopter is used like an enormous garden strimmer. It lacks the emotional punch of the original, but it is still a great film. And I understand that 28 Months Later is in the works. Can't wait.
At the other end of the scale, and much more Romeroesque, was the terrific Shaun Of The Dead. Shaun is Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's love letter to Dawn Of The Dead, taking the zombie action and setting it in a very recognisable modern Britain complete with Cornettos, Renault Meganes and cricket bats. The undead in this film are proper zombies (although Pegg's character won't allow them to be called as such), complete with missing limbs ("his arm's off!") and an irrepressible urge to eat anyone with a pulse. Shaun is almost a perfect film - it somehow manages to mix extreme gore with a very funny script and performances in such a way that everyone loves it. How Pegg and Wright managed this is anyone's guess - but it's a safe bet that it's unlikely to happen again for a while.
Shaun, more than 28 Days Later, wears its roots on its sleeve and is undoubtedly influenced by Dawn Of The Dead. But it's still very much a British horror film. 28 Days Later, in contrast, actually batted the zombie ball back across the Atlantic and became the template for the reasonably successful remake of Dawn Of The Dead.
But I'm getting bogged down in influences and counter-influences here, and I'm the last person to try and explain who did what or when. It took me half an hour just to find out where the line about blokes with shit on their faces came from (John Martin's marvellous book on video nasties Seduction Of The Gullible, if you're interested).
We now come bang up to date (last week, in fact) with an astonishing thing - a genuinely unsettling, balls-to-the-wall zombie epic, played out on British television over five harrowing, entrail-strewn evenings. Dead Set is acerbic Guardian writer Charlie Brooker's entry into the genre, and it's a worthy companion piece to both Shaun and 28 Days Later. How it got made at all I have no idea - Brooker isn't exactly known for his subtlety when waxing lyrical about television (his reviews are nearly as funny as mine), and his previous attempt at writing telly, Nathan Barley, wasn't exactly well received. And Dead Set was about as subtle as... well, a zombie munching on your ball-bag. And what's more, it's not only a film about the end of the world - it's a biting satire about the soul-destroying, life-sucking, cancerous polyp that is Big Brother. On the channel which puts aside half its output over the summer to Big Brother. You've got to give E4 some points for doing that.
There's a university thesis waiting to be written about Dead Set. The basic premise is that as the latest series of Big Brother gets underway, strange things are happening on the nation's streets. Some kind of virus is spreading, making people act in a rather irrational way. Before they know it, the Big Brother house is surrounded by cannibalistic nut-jobs. At first I thought it would be a typically Brookerish meditation on the idiocy of the people who go on Big Brother, and that they would continue acting like berks for the cameras despite the carnage going on outside. But that expectation was immediately squashed, because by the end of the first episode the zombies are in the house, and the housemates are more than aware of what's going on.
With people getting bitten left, right, and centre, and the virus (or whatever it is) spreading faster than, well, Russell Brand after those schoolgirls again, Brooker piles on the social commentary. We see zombies staring at television screens, just as they always did in life. The only television left in the UK is E4's live feed of the BB house. The producer of the show is seen butchering the corpse of one of his ex housemates for his own selfish ends. The zombies seem strangely drawn to the studios. A police officer is seconds away from killing an Asian housemate when he recognises him "from off the telly" and spares his life. Every scene, every plot twist, takes another dig at reality television - both the people who make it and those who watch it. Like I said, astonishing that it was made with Channel Four's money. Even former Big Brother housemates appear, as does a zombie Davina McCall.
Grim, gritty, incredibly gory for a television show, and occasionally very funny, I hope that Dead Set gets the credit it deserves as a genuine high point in British horror. It seems there's life in the old zombies yet, if that sentence makes any sense at all.
Written by Chris Wood of www.britishhorrorfilms.co.uk
