It's been 41 years since George A. Romero brought zombies from early Hollywood voodoo films and set them loose on American audiences. In the decades since, zombie culture has, ironically, taken on a life of its own.
The zombie genre holds the distinction of having generated an entire subculture (a decidedly nerdy subculture, but you take these things as they come along) from a mythology that first found its throaty, moaning voice at the grind house. From its humble, low-budget outset the zombie film has been rightfully inherited by the geeks of today; the zombie film belongs to them.
And wouldn't you know, they've done something with it. Toronto's yearly Zombie Walk has become the city's "most photographed" event. Game developer Valve has just released the sequel to last year's immensely popular "Left 4 Dead," which tasks players with blasting through hoards of undead to survive the zombie apocalypse. Attendance for Zombiecon 2009 grows year after year. Zombies have become both a bankable commodity and a pop culture powerhouse, and yet they owe everything to the grainy, no-budget splatterflicks of yesteryear.
But the genre has stumbled (shambled, you might say) during its foot-dragging ascent to the top. The zombie film has gained notoriety, especially in recent years, for using the undead as a platform for social critique. As some important guy probably said, there are only a handful of human stories that are told over and over; if that's true, the zombie film narrows the lens even more. The zombie apocalypse can certainly make for a clear statement, but it rarely makes for a very nuanced one. Disapprove of the war? Use zombies. Down with institutionalized racism? Use more zombies.
As long as there are zombie films, there will always be the pensive but maladroit "they're us" moment halfway through, and there will always be the guy afterward who insists that moments like that are somehow necessary ("No, see, in tearing out that policemen's intestines and eating his spleen, they're actually tearing out the intestines and eating the spleen of rampant consumerism! Where are you going?").
As a morality play, the zombie film is a joke. But aside from being eye-rollingly heavy-handed, this type of rhetorical window-dressing distracts from the style of giddy yet guiltless brutality that only the zombie films can provide. The popularity of recent offerings like "Zombieland" and "Dead Snow," which both play the spooks for outrageously gory laughs, suggests a pervasive pulling back on the ideological throttle and a reinstatement of the macabre mayhem that popularized the motif in the first place.
The zombie genre may be boxed in by its own narrative conventions, but there will always be room to innovate, to explore, and to avoid the stagnation of banality. It's a good thing, too, because in a category defined exclusively by flesh-eating corpses, you either get busy reanimatin' or you get busy dyin'.
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