All you need is a girl and zombie

The truth about zombie films is this…they mean nothing. They are mere blanks given meaning by the very people who they terrorise, as empty as the re-animated corpses that frequent such films. They shamble along, or at least they used to, embodying whatever anyone wants to see in them. They are the dregs of the film world; dependent on the dark deeds the watcher can bring to them.

Voodoo black magic animating the workers at the mill, Nixon’s silent majority, your boss Bernie - whatever. Put bluntly if anybody has ever disagreed with you there’s a zombie film for you somewhere. And this is exactly the problem. At the beginning of last year's Dawn of the Dead remake as the world goes to hell in montage you see the briefest glimpse of a mosque. The film was made post 9/11 so what the hell is going on here? What are these studio filmmakers daring to tell us that Homeland Security haven’t, that George Bush hasn’t? That the modern day bogeyman, the terrorist, is really a zombie? No, they tell us nothing, instead filling this weary remake with the ambiguity the zombie movie thrives on. If that weren’t enough this movie dares to have two endings. George Romero’s four zombie films were all made either during US Republican administrations or in the run up to the next Republican election victory - does this carry meaning?

Post Voodoo and Bela Legosi, a young Pittsburgh upstart called George Romero ‘stuck it to the man’ in the late 1960s by unshackling the zombie releasing him, by making a guerrilla horror film that revolutionised the genre. Night of the Living Dead was a horror film for horrified times, and as such all previous bets were off. Made in 1968, the world had been on the brink since the Cuban Missile Crisis and the baby boomers were all grown up and angry. Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement were in full swing, the Prague Spring was about to be crushed and the barricades were going up in Paris. In George Romero’s world nothing could save you and nothing would save you. Family could no longer save you. Love could no longer save you. Science could no longer save you. The government could no longer save you. You would squabble with your fellow survivors before you let the masses devour your still twitching flesh; even a happy ending would be denied to you.

Romero had unleashed his zombies upon the world by relinquishing control of them all. Baron Samedi no longer held sway and the future was open. The horror film had grown up at last, and other directors were breaking through the decaying censorship laws and channelling the bleak mood of the nation. Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven and all the rest would follow. It was as if the War Poets from the Great War had made films instead of poetry before clambering out of the trenches to fates unknown.

Think Corman not Cassavettes: the true indie heirs are the horror films lurking in our video stores. Exploitation cinema (or video or DVD) will never go away provided the price stays right. Zombie films are a particular favourite because they’re cheap to make. Forget Godard telling us “all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl” all you really need are some friends, some white paint and lots of offal. Romero showed that anyone could make a cheap genre-busting masterpiece.

Night of the Living Dead also made a lot of money for somebody, certainly not Romero. Investors took note and the horde of inferior zombie films slowly gestated, given yet more impetus with the release of Dawn of the Dead, Romero’s superior sequel. Exploitation Italian style had grown tired of Spaghetti Westerns and crime flicks, the age of the video nasty had arrived and Lucio Fulci led the bloody pack further into torrents of blood, guts and gore. Parody followed in the 1980s with Return of the Living Dead and The Evil Dead culminating in the films of Stuart Gordon's Reanimator series and the work of Brian Yuzna and Peter Jackson, who’s film Braindead took the butchery to its logical extreme - hysterical, in every sense of the word, comedy. Since then an intriguing blip has been direct social diorama of Les Revenants, a French film where the government grapples with the social logistics of the living dead. Elsewhere the zombie stumbles virtually on in Racoon City (Resident Evil), in Silent Hill (Silent Hill), on Mars (Doom) and in the depths of the void (System Shock). Many of the most terrifying computer games to date have involved the zombie.

But why should Romero suddenly make a zombie film now? Day of the Dead, the second Night of the Living Dead sequel, was the neutered offspring of budgetary restrictions scaled down from surviving human communities waging war by zombie in the grim apocalyptic aftermath to just one sole community: soldiers versus scientists all alone with the dead. The movie development arc had turned yet another of those thirty-year revivals and the 1970s were back in vogue thanks in part to Peter Biskind’s ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’.

Suddenly 1970’s horror was back too, with remakes of both Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead and Eli Roth’s low budget shocker Cabin Fever. The studios were trying to make horror films that captured that cheap 1970’s nihilistic look. Reality horror had arrived also with the world's biggest live action horror yet - 9/11. The Hindenburg had been put to shame, as had all the colour television footage from Vietnam. Millions watched those towers topple knowing there was nothing they could do but watch. Military campaigns followed in Afghanistan and Iraq all brought to your screens by endless 24 hour rolling news. BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera all rushed in to capture the bloodbath on camera. The opposition, terrorists, insurgents, freedom fighters - call them what you will, fought back by making snuff films and posting them on the Internet. Vietnam was back via Iraq, 1970’s horror was back and, of course, zombies were back.

And if Romero has made another zombie film it means everything. Because just that one time in a million, just that once upon a time, somebody, somewhere gets the formula right and makes a zombie film that means something. Blood, guts and gore add up to something more than the moneymen clearing up yet again. The ghouls emerge from your multiplex or video store, after watching some tacky little bloodbath and return to that dead-end job instead of tooling up and ‘going postal’. If George Romero has made another zombie film then something is surely wrong in the world and all the best intentions won’t put it back together again. Only flesh can.