This is a great Cliff Notes of the undead by Matt Zoller Seitz. Am especially pleased with the montage that crosscuts Penelope Wilton’s death with Roger’s resurrection in Dawn Of The Dead (’78 natch). The latter is one of my favourite zombie moments.
Also much respect for the clips from LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE - hugely underrated and my favourite non Romero zombie film.
“You know, I don’t think I’ve got it in me to shoot my flatmate, my mum, and my girlfriend all in the same night,” says Shaun, one of the beleaguered non-ghouls in Shaun of the Dead. That 2004 film is a send-up of zombie movies, but you know what they say about every joke containing truth.
Ever since director George A. Romero released his 1968 shocker Night of the Living Dead—which reimagined zombies, the dark magic-entranced slaves of voodoo folklore, as shambling fiends that crave warm flesh and can only be offed with a head shot—the zombie genre has displaced the western as cinema’s most popular and durable morality play. As the video essay “Zombie 101” demonstrates, while the genre’s superficial appeal is the spectacle of torn and mangled flesh—living and dead—its deeper resonance lies in its portrait of ordinary people struggling to survive in extreme circumstances.
Matt Zoller Seitz | http://www.movingimagesource.us/
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