By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies

"Back to back, belly to belly
I don't give a damn, I done dead already
Oho back to back, belly to belly
At the Zombie Jamboree"

-- "Zombie Jamboree," Rockapella

In the hierarchy of horror movies, zombies usually come in dead last. Ambulatory corpses lack the glam of vampires and demons, witches and werewolves, and it's devilishly difficult to project personality through all that putrefaction, especially when your fleshy bits keep dropping off. Mostly, zombies just shamble and chomp, activity that falls somewhat short of the meat-and-potatoes of high-class drama.

It's no surprise, then, that movies about the ravenously resurrected are mostly just gore- and munch-fests, designed to appeal to the unsavory appetites of teen-age boys and older, solitary fellows who devour DVDs in their parents' basements. Little substance or subtlety gets in the way of these effects-heavy banquets of blood and, yes, sex -- in the form of naked, busty girls getting knocked off in titillating ways.

Most cinematic gore-machines (Fulci's "Zombie" and "City of the Living Dead," Rollin's "The Grapes of Death," Ossorio's "Tombs of the Blind Dead," Stuart Gordon's "Re-Animator," etc.) sport massively decayed and mutilated, black-blood-spewing, boiled-eggs-for-eyes, gray- or blue-skinned carcasses. Thumbs-up (or off?) ratings hinge on the flick's gross-out quotient -- dismembered body parts that won't die; zombies cut in half; zombie body applying its severed still lecherous head to nude woman's body; ad nauseam.

But what is it about zombie movies that transcends the monotony of "Grand Guignol," -- films, that invite us to get up close and personal with why we're so fascinated by re-animated, rotting, cannibalistic cadavers that we keep going back for seconds ... and thirds? Those rage-infected zombies in "28 Days Later" (2002) really rocked, but now we're hungry for "28 Weeks Later," the second bloody chapter in England's desperate effort to wipe out a virus that resurrects the dead. While we wait for the main course, let's snack on some zombie-movie appetizers.

Never Dis a Zombie
The best horror fiction delights in disinterring the stuff we've buried down in the darkness behind the brain, exposing the scary shadow side of how we live and what we believe and feel. Going to the movies to get scared stiff by bloodsuckers and flesh-eaters can be as cathartic as dreaming: if we face our baddest selves and worst fears in these mad-house mirrors, we can acknowledge their power and give them proper burial -- so they don't come out to play for real. Zombie movies tap into our primal fear of the dead, our dread that the deceased are so hopping mad at being cut off from life and light, they might return to take revenge on the living. Our traditions of respect are partly rooted in that age-old desire to placate those who have passed away.

In the late Bob Clark's "Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things," a bunch of '70s hipsters desecrates a cemetery, using an old man's corpse as a plaything. The sociopathic leader of the gang reviles man as "a machine that manufactures manure" and dubs the dead as quintessential "losers." Shot on a shoestring budget and amateurishly acted with a barely functional script, "Children" still mines authentic terror out of a brand of careless nihilism that reduces both the quick and the dead to "meat" -- and turns the whole world into a slaughterhouse for ravening zombies.

MSNBC: They want to eat your brain: Zombie attack

Our myths insist we're more than meat by promising immortality and resurrection of the soul. We have a long history of ritually sacrificing and consuming our gods in the hope of guaranteeing everything from good crops to immortality. Zombie movies turn such hope topsy-turvy in an awful mockery of our appetite for divine flesh and blood. Seen through this mirror darkly, the dead, as bad seeds, rise to make food of us, enabling them to shamble on forever in a grotesque imitation of life.

Such gruesome resurrections sometimes pack a double whammy: Zombies rub our noses in the repulsive physical decay we can never escape--no matter how much time we spend at the gym--while mocking the way we trudge through regimented days, pursuing health and wealth on the treadmill of our lives. Edgar Wright's superbly satirical "Shaun of the Dead" (2004) mines hilarity out of zombified human behavior before Z-Day hits. Shaun's deadpan step dad comes to emotional life only as he slips into true zombiehood, and his sweetly addled mum so often lapses into vacancy that it's hard to tell whether or not she's jumped the grave.

Next: More Zombie Movies