Undead Cinema:The Essential Zombie Films by Stephen Hoover

Author:Stephen Hoover [Hoover, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2014-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

An Interesting Twist

In Romero’s first two films, the action is really about the survivors trying to battle back the zombies. There are shades of personal and social breakdown in both, but those things are much more the focus of Day of the Dead.

Dr. Bowman, though it’s not developed much in the plot, is working on a way to reverse the zombification process. Frankenstein believes that he can domesticate the zombies and, at least going by his work with Bub, he seems to be correct in that. Bub shows an increasing level of intelligence, culminating in not only showing anger over the death of Frankenstein, but also figuring out how to use a gun and holding a grudge against the men responsible.

In this regard, Romero’s zombies start to show signs that they’re evolving. They may not be doing so among themselves but, exposed to a system of basic rewards for good behavior, they seem to catch on.

The zombies also seem to remember who they were and to carry with them the skills they learned in their former lives. This is an interesting twist on the zombie, as most of them are portrayed as being utterly mindless.

The real monsters in this film, in fact, are the human beings. The soldiers become increasingly violent and hostile toward the scientists. Eventually, they decide to abandon their mission and to leave the scientists behind, though they’re foiled in this when the base is overrun with the living dead.

Frankenstein also shows a very gruesome personality flaw, or set of them. He conducts exceptionally morbid experiments, at one point having dissected a zombie so that only his brain and brain stem was visible above the neck. He seems enchanted with what he finds when doing so, even though his other research is indicating that these zombies, in fact, do have some humanity left in them.

Bowman and her two compatriots seem to be the only real human beings left in this entire mix. Salazar may have been at one time, but he’s gone so far into hopelessness that he ends up being a liability to all of them and, further, is the cause of the base being completely overrun with undead.

John is also interesting in that, at the beginning of the film, he comes up with the only plan that really makes any sense in the scenario everyone is in. He suggests that they just leave; fly away to some island somewhere.

That makes perfect sense, given that they can’t communicate with anyone who would be in charge of their mission and that there doesn’t really seem to be any survivor presence. For all they can tell, they’re among the last people left on Earth, so what they intend to do if they succeed in their mission really isn’t clear. If Bowman managed to reverse the zombification process, they’d still have to distribute whatever cure she came up with and it’s not clear how they’d do that. If Frankenstein succeeded in domesticating zombies, he’d have billions of them—presumably—to domesticate, making his work, essentially, useless.

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