Zombie Ups and Downs
In these parables from the dark side, we are often of two minds. We want the dead to go away, to stay down where they belong. And, no matter how much we crave to live forever, there may come a time when we wear out and want to rest. How awful is the thought that we might find ourselves creaking and crawling back to half-life, driven to endless, unsatisfying consumption? Think of George Romero's mall-seeking zombies in "Dawn of the Dead" (1978) or the pathetic "stenches" in his "Land of the Dead" (2005), mindlessly aping the lives they used to lead in Smalltown, USA.

On the other hand, who, in the throes of grief, hasn't dreamed of bringing a lost loved one back to life?

Few TV or big-screen fictions have dealt as ambitiously with the raw reality of physical death as did two episodes from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer": "The Body;" and, "Forever" (Season 5, Episodes 16 and 17). We share Buffy's shock when her mother turns corpse -- when warm, loving flesh becomes cold meat. Xander's demon girlfriend, Anya, unschooled in human realities, nails down death's killing absurdity: "But I don't understand! I don't understand how this all happens. How we go through this. I mean, I knew her, and then she's ... there's just a body, and I don't understand why she just can't get back in it and not be dead anymore!"

The hard fact of mom's altered state comes hideously home to her other daughter, Dawn, in the morgue, while crouching under the autopsy gurney on which the sheeted, violated body lies. It's unsupportable -- a primal outrage -- that a life should come down to this. Dawn then turns to magic to raise her mother from the dead. Waiting with Dawn, we hear the slow, heavy tread of something outside the house, something we realize we don't want to see, no matter how much we ache for reunion. A knock on the door ... the spell's lifted ... and, thankfully, our visitor is gone.

Black, White and Shades Between
Some classic films make virtual poetry of such graveyard tales, visualizing the quick and the dead, innocence and evil, as shifting zones of light and shadow. In "White Zombie" (Victor Halperin, 1932), the gaunt, black-clad zombie master (Bela Lugosi) pauses between two lamps in a dark, tropical garden, as the candles within create a luminous oasis of light. Extinguishing one, the brute lasciviously carves it into the shape of a lovely girl he plans to enslave, then plunges the white wax into the flame of the other lamp.

Above, in a bedroom, the young woman stands stock-still, clad only in wisps of white satin, as her long wedding veil, already suggesting a shroud, curves around her ankles. During her subsequent interment, we share her terrifying point-of-view as her body and the camera withdraw into the darkness of a tomb, revealing two mourners silhouetted in a receding frame of light. Once Lugosi resurrects the girl, the libertine who hatched the plot can't satisfy his lust on this will-less wraith, whose dull eyes hold no light.

"I Walked with a Zombie" (Jacques Tourneur, 1943) crawls with baroque shadows that infect anything that lives in the light. As the Byronic master of a West Indies sugar plantation bitterly declares, here beauty is just a mask that death wears. We watch beautiful "ghosts" -- a brunette in black and a long-haired blonde in white -- as they drift through a dark tower and rustling fields of head-high cane to confront a towering, emaciated zombie with faint phosphorescent eyes. We also witness a maddened lover put a brain-dead woman out of her misery and carry her into a nocturnal, foam-flecked sea. Who can resist the hypnotic spell of a movie that's mostly a waking fever dream?

George Romero's groundbreaking "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), prototype of the modern zombie movie, opens in a remote cemetery where two young people have come to put flowers on their father's grave. Romero's rural Pennsylvania appears as an old black & white photograph, perhaps a newsreel, illuminated by a sickly, almost toxic glow. That haunted light eats away at the normalcy of the scene, though it's still possible to hope that the gaunt figure lurching into view is just a creepy caretaker. Yet, the thing is death, and it has come out of the ground to make a banquet of the living.

Next: More Zombies | Back