#30 Hotel Rwanda: What Are We Afraid Of?

Site updates have been a bit patch for the last couple of months, mainly because circumstances forced me to move from my conveniently placed zombie fortress and I'm now having to secure a whole new building. However, now that everything's to my satisfaction, we're going to be seeing updates much more regularly here from now on, and I've got some great stuff lined up for this month alone. Starting with this blog entry.

A couple of days before Halloween I travelled down to the University of Winchester (so called because they have a rifle above the Student Union bar, I assume) for their first Zombosium (for those wondering, yes, the plural is Zombosia). It was an interesting day that involved studies of the zombie survival strategy debate on Mumsnet,  examinations of The WalkingDead and Dead Set, and some great theories about ways to zombie-proof people’s homes. While there, I gave the following talk on a subject I've been working up to writing about on the blog for a while.

What are we Afraid of?: Hotel Rwanda as a Zombie Movie

I’m going to start off with a couple of things that ought to go without saying, but I’ll say them anyway. Firstly- It is not the intention of this talk to be in any way flippant about the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Secondly- The focus of this talk is the movie Hotel Rwanda, not the events it was based on. I am going to argue that in terms of its plot structure and themes, the movie has a lot in common with movies in the zombie apocalypse genre. Fans of science fiction and horror like to say that our genres of choice deal with the big issues. If that’s the case, I think it’s worth comparing the way a historical biopic and a sub-genre of horror movie approach the same themes.

The Genocide

Before we get onto that however, I think it’s important to remind ourselves just what the historical events were that the movie was based on. Over 100 days in 1994 between half a million and a million people were massacred.  The targets of the massacre were the Tutsi people, an ethnic group that had been given positions of power during Belgian colonial times because the colonialists believed that they had more Caucasian features. During the genocide rape was systematically used as a weapon and men, women and children were murdered with machetes.

While this was happening, in the Rwandan capital city of Kigali Paul Rusesabagina of the Hôtel des Mille Collines was able to shelter 1,268 Tutsis, including his family, by bribing the militia and army with money and alcohol.

It’s Paul Rusesabagina’s story that is told in the film Hotel Rwanda. However, no matter how truthful director Terry George wanted to be in telling this story, it was a necessity to change some details. Multiple real life people were combined to create composite characters. Events that took place over a number of days instead happened in a single scene, rough edges were smoothed. Because he was telling a true story dramatically, the tools available to Terry George were the same tools available to any fictional film maker.

So what we’re going to do now is go through the movie, look at those tools, and see how the same tools are used in zombie movies.

Everything is Normal

The opening act of Hotel Rwanda establishes our characters and the world they live in. We see Paul talking to businessmen and running his hotel. We see the pleasant suburban neighbourhood he lives in, the kids that play there and how he spends time with his friends and family.

You’ll see similar scenes at the start of a bunch of zombie movies. Night of the Living Dead opens up with a brother and sister bickering on their way to drop off flowers at their father’s grave. The opening act of Shaun of the Dead introduces us to Shaun’s relationship problems and his dead end job. The 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake shows a nurse finishing her shift, going back to the suburb where she lives, chatting to her neighbour’s daughter and spending time with her husband.

The purpose of these scenes in a zombie movie is pretty straight forward. They exist to establish the main characters as people we can identify with. They have jobs and relationships and lives not that different from yours. The implication is loud and clear- these people are you. This could happen to you.

Likewise, on the commentary to Hotel Rwanda, Terry George says that he “Wanted to show they had a very Western lifestyle not unlike Europe and America".

Apart from the Problems in the Background

In Hotel Rwanda, while these scenes of domestic bliss are taking place, we can still see trouble brewing. A large part of this comes through news on the television and radio. The movie opens with radio propaganda from George Rutaganda saying why he hates to Tutsis. During the opening scenes we overhear news broadcasters talking about the Rwandan President’s involvement in peace talks.

Then in the background we see other details. While Paul is buying food and drink for the hotel, a crate tips over revealing it’s full of machetes. A neighbour is mysteriously dragged away by the army. Roads are mysteriously empty. Paul’s brother-in-law comes to him begging him to leave the country, and even while Paul is reassuring him that everything will be fine, there’s a power cut.

Again, we can see this reflected in a lot of zombie movies.

The first clue that things might be wrong in Night of the Living Dead is a news report about a crashed space probe from Venus, which the brother and sister promptly switch off without listening to. The Dawn of the Dead remake’s opening scenes have a background filled with mysteriously ill patients suffering bite wounds, news broadcasts that are almost immediately switched over to music stations, and “emergency bulletins” appearing on muted tellies.

Perhaps there’s no better example of this trope than Shaun of the Dead. The opening scenes of Shaun of the Dead are filled with half glimpsed headlines containing words like “mutilated remains” “GM crops blamed” and “Super-flu scares public”. A story about a space probe returning to Earth is heard on a passing radio, and the scenery is full of background hints such as sick people falling over in the street, ambulances and army trucks dashing about and a couple outside the pub who appear to be making out, right until one of their heads falls off.

The purpose of these scenes again, is pretty self evident. It’s that old saying about boiling a frog, gently ramping up the danger level so that our protagonists don’t notice it until it’s too late, while also firmly rooting a story that is about a small group of people in a much larger event.

Then Things Go Horribly Wrong

So, it’s at this point in the film that things start to really go bad. The president is assassinated. Tutsis from around the neighbourhood arrive at Paul’s house, begging for help. Soldiers turn up at the house, loading everybody into a van and driving them through the city. As they drive through Kigali, we see just how bad things have become. We see front gardens littered with corpses, people running around the streets with machetes, shouting and screaming and attacking other people. It really doesn’t take that much of a leap at all to see how these scenes resemble the scenes in a zombie movie. It’s a portrait of a society that’s fallen apart.

But for the sake of argument, we can see these scenes mirrored in the same zombie films we’ve been looking at already. When Ana runs out of the house to escape her zombie husband in the Dawn of the Dead remake, we see the city burning, people running and screaming through the streets, an ambulance ploughing someone down as it speeds past. In Shaun of the Dead, when they finally leave to pick up Shaun’s mum we see parks full of zombies and body bags struggling in the backs of crashed ambulances.

These scenes are crucial for setting the scene, because before long each of these films goes onto the next stage of the plot, which is the siege.

The Siege

In Hotel Rwanda the story really begins once the characters are inside the Hôtel des Mille Collines. More than anything else, Hotel Rwanda is the story of how Tutsi refugees are kept safe inside that hotel.

More than anything else, this is something Hotel Rwanda has in common with the vast majority of zombie movies. Whether it’s the pub in Shaun of the Dead, the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead, the mall in either Dawn of the Dead movie, the Big Brother House in Dead Set, the radio station in Pontypool, the stately home in the final act of 28 Days Later or the campsite in the first series of The Walking Dead, the pattern is the same.

Most zombie apocalypse movies work by first establishing a vast, world shattering catastrophe and then narrowing the action to a single group of people at a single location.

The Apocalypse will be Televised

Of course, while the characters in Hotel Rwanda spend much of the film restricted to the grounds of the hotel, we are still given a picture of the world beyond the hotel’s walls. We see footage from news crews that have been out there, depicting the slaughter. We hear stories from aid workers and refugees who come to the hotel after Paul and his family have arrived there.

The techniques used here are techniques used all over the place in zombie movies. George Romero likes his gore, but some of the most horrifying things that happen in Night of the Living Dead are things that we hear about, not things we see. One of the creepiest scenes in that movie is when Ben tells the story of a flaming truck he saw barrelling down the road, with attacking ghouls all over it. The fights between the characters are often over who has control of the radio or the television, which becomes a lifeline that the survivors use to find out about the extent of the outbreak of dead cannibals. The same is true of both Dawn of the Dead films, and in Shaun of the Dead, we know the problem is widespread because by the time they get to the pub none of the TV channels are broadcasting.

Nobody’s Coming to Help You

The refugees hiding in the hotel place there hope in the international community to intervene. Paul’s hope is that all he needs to do is hold out long enough for military intervention. His hope proves to be unfounded- the white guests at the hotel are evacuated, the UN pulls out.

A reporter responds to Paul’s hope that footage of the massacre will drive people to action by telling him “I think if people see this footage, they'll say Oh, my God, that's horrible. And then they'll go on eating their dinners.” Eventually Paul tells the refugees “There will be no rescue, no intervention for us. We can only save ourselves.”

Zombie movies are quick to demonstrate that the protagonists can expect no help from anyone in authority. In Night of the Living Dead, news broadcasts feature lists of refugee camps where people will be safe. In the original Dawn of the Dead it’s pointed out that those same lists are out of date and people are going to their deaths.

In the Dawn of the Dead remake, attempts to get attention from passing military helicopters are in vain, and the constant news footage only serves to emphasise how little the government knows about what’s actually going on, and in 28 Days Later a military outpost that claims it has the “answer to infection” turns out to be run by a madman.

The Siege Breaks

Now a siege narrative can only end one way- with the siege being broken. Every zombie movie that uses the siege narrative ends with their defences being broken down, the hordes coming in, and if the characters are lucky they will make their escape by helicopter, pub trapdoor or homemade heavily armoured van.

While the siege of the hotel in Hotel Rwanda is less literal than in the movies we’ve been talking about so far- using bribes and political influence as defences rather than boarded up windows and shotguns, this film ends the same way, and during the mass exodus of the hotel the only visible difference between the attacking militia and the hordes in 28 Days Later or the Dawn of the Dead remake is that these people have machetes. They aren’t individual characters, they are a mass.

So what?

Having been through the similarities between Hotel Rwanda and films such as 28 Days Later, Dawn of the Dead, and Shaun of the Dead, the next big question is “So what?”

I’m not going to argue that Terry George deliberately copied a bunch of tropes from zombie movies to tell this story. I think this film resembles a zombie movie because it’s preying on the same fears.

A lot of people have talked about what zombies represent. They have been used as stand-ins for our fear of mortality, consumerism, our love of celebrity or couch potato culture. But before a zombie is any of those things, it is preying on a fear that is far more straight-forward and literal. They prey on the fear that ordinary people such as your friends, your local shopkeeper or your neighbours, could turn into homicidal maniacs.

On the commentary to the film, when he is asked if he realised the scale of the massacres at the beginning of the genocide, the real Paul said, "No at that time I didn't realise. I knew it was happening in Kigali but I never thought my neighbour back home in the village where I came from could kill his neighbour."

It’s no secret that George Romero had the Vietnam War on his mind when he was making Night of the Living Dead. In that war clean-cut American college kids were sent off to another country, and found themselves having to do horrendous and unspeakable things. Then Romero released a movie where the threat was that ordinary people were turning into killers.

Over the last ten years we’ve seen more zombie movies released than ever before. During that period our biggest fears haven’t been that we will be invaded- that foreign troops will walk through our streets or bombs will drop out of the sky. What we’ve been afraid of is that someone down the street from us- a doctor, or a student, or a teenager who’s been hanging with the wrong crowds or reading the wrong websites, will try and kill us on our way to work. Most of the comparisons I have made with Hotel Rwanda could also be made with 2006 film Right at Your Door, about a man holing himself up in his house after a dirty bomb is set off.

I believe that the reason the zombies have entered the popular consciousness in a way that slasher movies or alien invasions haven’t, is that the images we see in zombie movies could easily be from the news. You look at events in Katrina, or Haiti, or even our London riots and it doesn’t take a tremendous amount of imagination to picture zombies running through those streets.

The Fear and the Fantasy

But there’s another side to this, and here is where things get disturbing- because we aren’t just afraid of a zombie apocalypse. We fantasise about it. There are countless books, magazine articles and websites about how you can survive the zombie apocalypse. The Centre for Disease Control in the US even tried to cash in on this with a blog using zombie survival plans as a jumping off point to talk about disaster preparedness- and it was so popular that it crashed the site.

In the movies, alongside the horror there’s a big dose of wish fulfilment. The Dawn of the Dead films, 28 Days Later and Night of the Comet all feature scenes of the survivors happily running through shops taking whatever they like. Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland both feature protagonists who have trouble dealing with the pre-apocalypse world, but who turn into action heroes when the zombies attack.

A big part of that fantasy, and a reason why zombies continue to be popular foes in videogames, is that more than terrorists, or Nazis or even invading aliens, zombies are creatures who you can murder wholesale without a shred of remorse.

I don’t think I even need to name a film where a character is told to shoot someone they knew who has become a zombie because “it’s not them anymore”. I’d be more interested in hearing if anyone knows of a zombie film where this doesn’t happen. Anybody who shows reluctance to kill zombies in a zombie apocalypse movie is portrayed as at best naive, and at worst dangerous.

Put simply, part of the fantasy of the zombie apocalypse is the ability to kill without any legal or moral consequences. I’m not saying this a bastion of moral superiority- at time of writing I have killed 45,022 zombies in Left 4 Dead- the equivalent of the population of Winchester- and it was a hoot.

Coming back to Hotel Rwanda, when the real Paul was discussing the way Tutsis were treated he said it was “dehumanising, like [they were] insects of no value". We see this all the way through the film. The Tutsis are constantly referred to as “cockroaches”. The Hutus are able to do what they do because, like the survivors in a zombie movie, they cease to see the people they are killing as in any way human.

One of the reasons I like zombie movies, and why I’ve kept following the genre for so long, is that so many zombie apocalypse stories don’t ignore these implications- they directly address them. In 28 Days Later the villain says at one point, “This is what I've seen in the four weeks since infection. People killing people. Which is much what I saw in the four weeks before infection, and the four weeks before that.”

I’ve already said that Night of the Living Dead is a movie about ordinary people becoming killers. It’s worth revisiting that and pointing out that the ghouls are not the only ordinary people who become killers in that film- the survivors do as well.

And that film was a direct take off the Vampire apocalypse novel I Am Legend, where the protagonist spends the book killing inhuman monsters only to discover at the end that they see him as the inhuman monster.

Before I finish I want to point out one major difference between Hotel Rwanda and all the other films we’ve been looking at.  That difference is gore. In Hotel Rwanda the violence is seen in the imaginations of the viewers, and in an interview Paul has said of the film that “a lot of it is less violent than real life."

The reason for this, the director says, is that “Physically close to a million people were macheted or bludgeoned death and I didn't think I could get close to the horror of this.” At one point he even looked into using actual journalistic footage of the genocide, but decided against it because it would “it would have turned the film into some sort of weird snuff movie".

Zombie movies don’t face such restrictions, because, crucially, the events of those films never happened. In the films I’ve been talking about we see eyes gauged out, decomposed skulls, heads removed, people literally torn apart and their guts spilling out as it happens. There’s the occasional discretion shot, but more often than not the camera will linger, forcing us to look directly at the consequences of stabbing, shooting or bludgeoning someone.

Sometimes maybe the gore in these movies is just splatter, but personally I think there’s more to it than that. I think these films are able to do things that films like Hotel Rwanda can’t. In the context of fiction we have an opportunity see just how terrible violent death is up close.

At their very best, zombie movies aren’t just violent films, they are films about violence.

GUEST BLOGGER: Arrest Those Zombies!: Policing The Undead

This week as well as our usual blog, we have a special guest blog from Amy Cutler of Passenger Films- one of the zombies arrested during our Royal Wedding celebrations on Friday. To find out more about the strange zombie happenings going on during the Royal Wedding, see our regular blog. Here, she shows us zombie movies have a lot to say about those events:

On Friday morning I attended a ‘Royal Zombie Wedding’ picnic, and was subsequently handcuffed and arrested in Soho Square (that’s me above), and spent the afternoon in a cell at Belgravia police station. While I was in my cell I thought a little harder about the link between zombies and the policing of cities. Here are some thoughts, followed by a call to arms for supporters of the undead!

Readers of Chris’s blog will no doubt be familiar with the importance of police in zombie films. Think of the pre-credit footage of riot police, soundtracked by Johnny Cash’s ‘The Man Comes Around’, in Dawn of the Dead. Or the use of riot police footage once again at the start of 28 Days Later, in which exposure to such television transmissions also means exposure to the transmission of ‘the rage virus’.

I’ve always been interested in zombie politics, which has an early model in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), concerned with the 1665 bubonic plague in London and the effect of the ‘walking putrified carcasses’ which were the infected, and also the attempts by the mayor and the aldermen to police the situation. New legislation came out at the time to ‘prevent idle assemblies’ and therefore contagion, but there were plenty of instances of people ‘breaking out in Rabbles and Tumults’, just as the body breaks out in tokens of the plague. The behaviour of the sick and infected in the book poses a form of geographical insurrection, for ‘they were with great difficulty kept from running out into the Fields and Towns, and tearing all in pieces wherever they came’. Defoe is himself awed by the idea of a mob of people, as seen in his 1702 publication, ‘The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England’ (1702). He thought mobs to be the very antithesis of government. An example is when he called upon the House of Commons to pay attention to the Kentish petitioners, and signed his name ‘Legion’; he is clearly therefore very aware of the idea of people acting as a political force. It is also telling that it is the poor and labouring classes who are of the greatest importance in Plague Year, for they cannot afford to withdraw into isolation, but must continue to work and be mobile – and are thus most likely to be spreading the infection.

Zombie films learn from Defoe a fascination with the various meanings of the term break-out – the break out of disease, the break out of riots, and the break out of contained spaces such as shut up houses and jails. The administration that went on in trying to control the spaces of the city included the mayor’s orders forbidding the ‘multitude’ of rogues and ‘wandring Beggars’ from ‘swarming in every place about the city’, and the large scale incarceration of people within infected houses. Defoe quotes verbatim these rules for the regulation of the citizens. But he is also fascinated with the areas in which these policies fail or are ineffective. ‘There was just so many Prisons in the town as there were Houses shut up’, the narrator observes: yet over and over he tells stories of the people who broke out by force and stratagem, whether they found ways to unscrew locks, escape into one of the back streets, go over the rooftops, or break or throw themselves out of the windows.

It’s important to remember that Plague Year was written during a moment of crucial revision in men’s exercise of final authority over one another. Defoe constantly draws attention to the internal governance and state institutions that provide the matrix within which the spectacles and anecdotes of the plague take place. He adopts the conceit that fully deployed legal authority in the city turns its houses into prisons and its citizens into criminals. (When we talk about crime it’s important to note that Defoe has first-hand knowledge of the development of the penitentiary system at this time, as he’s actually been imprisoned on seven or eight occasions, both for debts and for libel in his work as a journalist.) This criminalisation of the infected is partly because, as Michelle Brandwein notes,

plague effectively turns crime and disease into identical things. A plague, as a contagious illness, breaks down the distinction between ordinary, non-contagious illness (understood as harmful only to the self) and crime (understood as harmful to others); because a plague is harmful to both the sick person and others it forms a bridge between illness and crime, and all who suffer from it are both victims and criminals at the same time.

In the modern zombie film, we see a similar concern with the political constructs behind the suppression of the zombie threat. In the sequence in the underpass in 28 Days Later, the running zombies are portrayed very much as an anonymous mob. None of them are discriminated from each other – instead, they herd as shadows towards the human agents in the scene; we hear the footsteps of a mob as one threatening sound. In 28 Weeks Later we again see the threat of the mob as something which has an uncontrollable and unmanageable element, and the efforts of the military or governmental agents to control the movement of people (as in some scenes they appear as little more than glorified traffic controllers). Concepts of border control, quarantining and containment are all subject to investigation in today’s political zombie film.

The perceived social wrongs which zombie films address have ranged from the colonial connotations of the early voodoo zombie films, the consumerism of mall society in Romero’s early films, and the various social divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ which are exhibited in the class and race tensions in Land of the Dead. We can witness that film’s interest in the policing of the divisions of the city space immediately in the poster, showing a disembodied zombie hand clinging to what we must surely guess is the wrong side of the fence.

Recent zombie films explicitly refer to particular governmental decisions. In Joe Dante’s Homecoming, the American Republican policy makers are flummoxed by the return of the Iraqi war dead, who begin to contradict patriotic narratives of the war (one declares on TV ‘I was killed for a lie’). These are speaking, thinking, harmless zombies, threatening only in the sense of the affect of their return on the government’s political agenda. Mark Peranson points out the overt links to the Bush administration:

Homecoming’s most stunning scene is the first appearance of the zombies at Dover Air Force base, as the undead soldiers emerge from beneath the American flags covering their coffins — the very scenes that the Pentagon has forbidden the media to cover. More than soldiers, though, the zombies represent all the disenfranchised, including those whose votes weren’t counted in both recent elections: as the undead eventually are allowed to go to the polls, and the results start swinging to the left, the Republicans make the call. Dante pulls no punches in declaring the fix was and still is in (after name-checking Florida, he even shows the classic “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline).

Here are the returned patriots posing before the flag:

Equally harmless zombies are the subjects of the recent French film Les Revenants (English title They Came Back). The use of zombies to show the return of the repressed, and entry into a Marcusian non-repressive civilization, is a familiar trope. In Revenants, the mayor of the town and the governmental and military representatives decide they cannot deal with the unsolicited returnees: the returned loved ones and family members are therefore, in a horrifying final sequence (spoiler alert!), gassed and returned to their graves (below). What better image for the suppression that society enacts, in order to ensure it continues to function? Or Kristeva’s image of the zombie as the ‘abject’ of society – that matter, such as dead bodies, or faeces, which must be ejected from society in an organised fashion. (I have to say I felt like a very abject zombie indeed in Cell no. 12 at Belgravia police station.)

If we’ve outgrown Romero’s consumerist zombies, then perhaps one of the still growing zombie themes is that of surveillance and its association with the policing of space. The use of CCTV in Diary of the Dead and 28 Weeks Later are cases in point; in the latter, we are even given the military’s gun-point of view, in a scene in which all discrimination between ‘friendlies’ and the infected is given up, and the soldiers are instructed to enforce the quarantine by shooting ‘anything that moves’.

This ‘anything that moves’ bring us to what I think is the most interesting form of policing – that is, policing movement. The threat of the mobile crowd, the threat of the mobile infection, and the threat of the mobile dead – nicknamed in recent TV series The Walking Dead simply as ‘walkers’ – invites, but also defies, arrest by the authorities. The zombies are defined not simply by being dead, but by being the moving dead, and to ‘arrest’ them would also to be, literally, to cease their motion. The idea of zombie arrest is very similar to the idea of the arrested, controlled society – most strikingly so when we consider the threat of the ‘mob’, and the link between ‘mob’ and ‘mobility’. From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

Mob, 1680s, "disorderly part of the population, rabble," slang shortening of mobile, mobility "common people, populace, rabble" (1670s), from L. mobile vulgus "fickle common people" (c.1600 in English), from mobile, neut. of mobilis "fickle, movable, mobile," from movere "to move" (see move).

I’ve begun to discuss this idea with some of my students. (I teach a couple of classes on film studies to third year geographers on the Mobilities course at Royal Holloway, where I’m doing my PhD.) Perhaps I’m even keener given that I’ve now been an arrested zombie myself. The full story of the day is given by Hannah, my fellow zombie convict, here.

What remains fascinating to me is the revival of some of the ideas I have been previously interested in, such as the portrayal in Homecoming of zombies versus the controlling political agendas hidden behind patriotism. In our case, on the day of the wedding the scene on street level was subject to severe editing by the police. We were fairly inoffensive members of the undead, who ate some homemade ‘brainnnsss’ cake earlier in the day, and travelled on to Starbucks where we sat down with some tea. At this point, four police vans (with sirens!) came round the corner and did a raid on Starbucks. We were stopped and searched under a special Section 60 for the wedding day – by sixteen police men, although there were only five zombies – and finally arrested and transported to the police station. This constituted a successful removal of what was seen as an ‘unseemly’ element of the day’s celebrations. Apparently, our fancy dress was too alternative to be tolerated. Even though, look, I was being patriotic – I even had a flag!

Footage of our arrest is on this video – you can watch us actually being handcuffed at seven minutes thirty seconds in.

I also found out afterwards that one of the camera men who filmed us being arrested was subsequently arrested himself! His account here.

Meanwhile, the good news of the day is that the zombie family I met (complete with two little zombies in prams, one holding a ‘princesses are pigs’ sign) apparently got away and danced the night away in Red Lion Square. And they’re reported here in the Guardian, saying that ‘anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian Britain (is) the land of the living dead’.

I made good friends with the other undead convicts, Ludi, Hannah, Deborah and Erich, all charming and creative people – Erich has coincidentally just run a zombie all-nighter at the London Indie Film Festival. We also managed to get the word zombies into the Guardian the following morning, in a quote in which I sound particularly harmless and simple-minded:

So, what next? We’re thinking of arranging a protest lurch. Please get in touch if you want to be involved (amycutler1985@gmail.com), and come and be a manacled zombie shuffling round Soho, in a walk in support of our right to be zombies whenever we goddamn like.

The perfect model, of course, is Bub from Day of the Dead, who I’ve saved for the end, as probably the most famous zombie prisoner. Don’t forget he ate through his manacles in the end though.

#15 Fido: I Don't Want You Thinking That What We Did is Normal or Okay

A film opens on two men robbing a darkened house. As they grab as many valuables as they can and stuff them into their swag bags, the window behind them is illuminated. The camera cuts to show a car pulling into the driveway. And the audience’s first thought is- get out of the house!

We’re talking about burglars stealing someone else’s stuff, and the audience is rooting for them to get away. Whenever it comes to storytelling, we’re willing to forgive all kinds of crap if the person doing it is the protagonist. That’s why Macbeth, a play about a good man who defeats the power-mad serial killer who murdered his wife and children, is known as a tragedy.

You can see this right across the zombie genre. It’s obvious nowhere more so than I Am Legend, but numerous times, in Dawn of the Dead, The Walking Dead, 28 Days Later and Braindead, we see our survivors doing completely bastard-like things which we’re happy to forgive, because we’re rooting for them.

Which brings us to our blog on the film that I believe is Billy Connolly’s greatest acting achievement, Fido. There will be spoilers (Also I spoiled Macbeth back there... sorry about that!)

Yeah, this shits all over Mrs Brown

Fido is, in short, Lassie, but with a flesh eating zombie instead of a dog. It’s set in an idyllic, 1950s style society, fenced off from the barren, zombie-filled Wild Zone. The 1950s are a strangely popular setting for zombie stories, given the first proper zombie movie didn’t turn up until 1968. You’ll find 50s like settings everywhere from this information film to the videogame Stubbs the Zombie- Rebel Without A Pulse, not to mention the apocalyptic 50s settings of Bioshock and the Fallout games. You could argue it’s down to the contrast between the wholesome, sanitised imagery of the fifties and the looming nuclear threat, or just because they had better music back then.

In Fido everything has this sanitised veneer, full of wholesome, suburban, all-white neighbourhoods with vintage cars and worrying what the neighbours will think. The movie is, if anything, post-post-apocalyptic. The standard of living is good, and the zombies are being used as a slave race controlled by ZomCon radio collars, not much unlike the zombies at the end of Shaun of the Dead. Some zombie fundamentalists will be enraged by the idea of friendly, subservient zombies, but I point them to Bub in Day of the Dead. Actually, the zombies in this movie stick incredibly close to the Romero Rules.

"You're welcome!"

Beneath the whole exterior, it’s no surprise to find the world of Fido is all kinds of wrong. There’s the sinister weirdo over the road who is very probably fucking his zombie. There’s the family next door who were shipped out to the Wild Zone so that ZomCon’s head of security could get the house cheap, there’s the zombie-phobic father who’s biggest aim in life is to save up for funerals for him and all his family.

The dialogue is littered with tiny clues that this is seriously dark, off-kilter society, and none of the characters realise it. Then opening scene shows the ZomCon head of security asking a class of children “How many of you have ever had to kill a zombie?” followed by three or four reluctant hands. The closest Timmy gets to a father-son moment with his dad is when his dad says: “Now, I know you're not supposed to have a hand gun until you're twelve... but it can come in real handy.”

Pictured: Wholesome

Now a worse film than Fido would have made its protagonists the likeable anachronisms of this society, the one family who, despite severe up-fuckedness of everything around them, somehow developed a set of morals and principals that are perfectly in line with those of 21^st century viewers who haven’t had to face a zombie apocalypse.

What’s great though, is that Fido allows its protagonists to do incredibly wrong things throughout the film, without ever pulling punches or calling them on it. When Fido, Timmy’s pet zombie (Billy Connolly) kills an old lady (a mean old lady, but still) Timmy doesn’t hesitate to cover it up. When a scheme by two bullies ends with them both being killed, Timmy’s mother drags their corpses into a shed and sets it on fire. When this leads to Timmy’s zombie being taken away, the inevitable plan to rescue him involves damaging a zombie’s collar in the front lobby of ZomCon headquarters, resulting in many, many deaths. And the film’s climax ends with Timmy switching off Fido’s collar to sick him on the ZomCon head of security. All these acts are treated with the exact same level of seriousness and sincerity that you would see from the characters in Lassie or Skipper the Bush Kangaroo. Except neither of those shows had much in the way of brutal, gory murder.

Despite the fact that that is all they ever think about.

A wussier film would have found a way to make none of these deaths Timmy’s fault, or would have included some miraculous escapes to keep Timmy’s conscience clean. Fido doesn’t bother with any of this because the film makers realise that we don’t care. The people who die horribly are people who are either anonymous, or who, while not actually evil, are people we don’t really like all that much.

Okay, this week’s drinking game:

The first shot is controversial. The characters are not under siege in some manner of building, but they are in a fenced off community, and the film’s climax involves that fence being breached.  One of the ZomCon head of security’s  key lines is towards the end, when he says: “Take a look- out there is chaos, and in here, is safety.” So, for that reasons, we’re going to have a shot.

ZomCon is shown as not exactly competent, and is pretty much the villain of the piece, so we’re going to have two shots for that, with a chaser for “Mankind is the real monster”.

The zombies are proper Romero zombies, who are walking dead (One Shot) who move slowly (One shot) and can only be killed by destroying the brain (Head shot). No less than three kiddy zombies are seen in this film, so have yourself two shots for that. And the public information films warning people against trusting the elderly show that the dead rise regardless of whether they were “infected” (Two shots).

#14 Everything You Wanted To Know About Zombies (But Were Afraid To Ask Daniel Defoe): Everything New is Old Again

Welcome to our most belated, longest titled blog entry yet. Now it takes a great man to admit when he’s been wrong. From the very beginning of the blog, I have emphasised that the zombie apocalypse genre is one that is, for want of a better pun, cannibalistic. I have argued that everything in the genre today can be traced back to Night of the Living Dead, which itself is traced back to I Am Legend.

So it is with all due humility that I say- it turns out I was more right than even I suspected.

Everything You Wanted To Know About Zombies (But Were Afraid To Ask Daniel Defoe) was a lovely event held in London last week, hosted by the Birkbeck Literature Club where various academics and zombie geeks met up to listen to a series of talks and readings about the zombie apocalypse genre- and how it related to 18^th century literature- specifically, the historical recordings of the events surrounding the spread of the plague in that period.

From the very start the venue for the event gave off mixed signals. On the one hand, the walls were littered with red crosses and pleas for God’s mercy- on the other hand, there was free wine and nibbles. I poured myself a glass and found myself a seat.

The opening talk came from a man named Peter Jones, who told us about the “Anointers” from Alessandrro Manzoni’s  Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed).

Not this Peter Jones. He knows nothing about 18th century literature or the zombie apocalypse

Faced with the horrific death and destruction, medieval peasants (Here we are defining the word “Peasant” to mean- “Anyone who doesn’t own a TV”) reacted the way they always have in the face of horrific circumstances- a great big group prayer meeting. Modern scientists have responded to the idea of fighting a contagious disease by getting everyone in your community together in a poorly ventilated building, or having them march through the streets from one end of the city to the other en masse as “Oh for the love of God no! What are you doing! And Jesus Ever-Loving Christ do none of you wash your hands?” but community leaders at the time hung up a big “Mission Accomplished” banner and told everyone to go back to their daily business.

Known today as the Mayor Larry Vaughn Technique

Those of you who have just finished googling that pop culture reference (Come on! There was picture of a fin on the poster behind them! Surely that was a give away?) will probably be able to guess what happened next. If you guessed lots and lots more people dying, you can have a gold star.

As this highly crumpled hand-out I still have left over from the event says (In an extract from The Betrothed):

“The men who had fought so long and so resolutely against the view that a seed of a disease had from the beginning been near at hand, or in their very midst, which could multiply and spread by natural means to cause a disaster – those men were no longer able to deny that the disease was in fact spreading through the city. But they could not admit that it was due to natural causes without also admitting that they had completely misled the public and done great harm thereby. That disposed them to find some other reason, and to accept any explanation of the sort that might offer itself.”

This sounds not just like Mayor Larry Vaughn (For Christ’s sake people, he was the mayor in Jaws! The one who kept insisting that there was no shark because it would damage tourism? Jaws is only one of the most successful films ever made! For once, watch something that came out before Kung Fu Panda!) but also rings a bell pretty close to the news reports we hear at the beginning of every zombie movie. It’s taken as read that when the zombie apocalypse starts, our government will leap right into action to fuck it up. And while we’d like to believe that we’re better than medieval peasants (those of us with televisions anyway) deep down we kind of know we aren’t.

So, if prayer meetings don’t work, what do medieval peasants do next?

If you answered "Horror" have a gold star

Yes, it turns out, face with unimaginable tragedy and worrying uncertainty, people’s first reaction was to find people who “didn’t fit in” and weren’t from round these parts” and then torture them. Fortunately people are much more civilised now.

Specifically, in this book the plague was blamed on “Anointers”- suspicious, shady types who would sneak around, “anointing” people with plague. Now apparently there don’t exist that many visual representations of these Anointers, and other academics (for the purposes this article: Wussydemics) would have been stopped by that. Peter Jones however showed he was a good ten times more awesome than his Dragon’s Den counterpart by giving his talk dressed like this:

Peter Jones dressed as an Anointer. Photos courtesy of Hannah Eiseman-Renyard, the Jimmy Olsen to my Lois Lane.

Peter Jones’s talk was followed by a break, where we all got more wine and sat down to be suddenly interrupted by a man bursting in and angrily reading from  'God's Terrible Voice in the City' by Thomas Vincent, who stayed in London and was giving sermons during the plague. It was while he described the gruesome, terrifying sights of the plague to us in an underground room a little way out from King’s Cross, that I decided that I wouldn’t be going to any more apocalyptic pandemic based events in London. Thinking about this stuff is the best fun in a small, out of the way city that even the Romans had trouble clinging onto- thinking about it near the centre of a huge mass of humanity that has historically dealt with plagues by burning itself down is a little more disquieting.

I've no idea what I did to him but I am so very, very sorry!

The final talk of the evening, before the Q&A and the retreat to the pub, was Amy Cutler, who delivered a great paper on how Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is echoed by modern zombie movies.

Amy Cutler immediately admitted that her readings of the texts she was talking about were Marxist, which wasn’t a huge surprise. We’ve already mentioned Romero’s parodies of consumerism and capitalism in Dawn and Land of the Dead, as well as his take on I Am Legend as a story about revolution.

Although you could read it as the ultimate example of letting the free market decide...

She started out by drawing on some the more obvious parallels between zombies and plague victims- mainly that people walked around looking really gross, in the process infecting other people who then went on to look really gross. She pointed us to a quote from Defoe’s Journal that went “many People had the plague in their very blood, and preying upon their spirits, and were in themselves but walking putrified carcasses, whose breath was infectious, and their sweat poison”. She goes on to describe how: “The behaviour of the sick and infected also poses a form of geographical insurrection, for ‘they were with great difficulty kept from running out into the Fields and Towns, and tearing all in pieces wherever they came’”

Amy moved on from here to talk about more structural similarities however, such as “the ways in which the city space is performed and changed bodily by the actions of groups of people, of the bodies of the sick and the healthy.”

This is a key part of the zombie apocalypse genre- in the least few weeks I’ve furnished you with plenty of examples of pubs, shops and radio stations being reinterpreted as fortresses and streets and office blocks becoming battlefields. I think this is not only a key trope in the genre, but also part of its appeal. Unlike the Western, Space Opera or Historical Romance, you can easily re-imagine your own street as it is hit by the zombie apocalypse, a sort of instant Augmented Reality game.

Amy also talks about the mechanics of groups of survivors. She talks about plague survivors in Defoe’s book who “develop their own social, economic, and moral laws: they pool their money on the condition that any further money any one of them gains will be added to the public stock. In Epping Forest they build their own shelter, kill their own food, and almost totally avoid interaction with anyone outside their group.” She compares this to zombie movies where “The zombie film heralds the return of the ultimate democratised travel. There are typical scenes such as a hijacking on the road and the fall into what is basically land piracy. And there are no more zones of exclusion or privilege as each is broken into.”

I’m not sure how much I agreed with Amy’s idea that there is anything Marxist about your typical zombie movie survivors. If anything films like I Am Legend, Dawn of the Dead and Land of the Dead show the survivors as practicing the ultimate in Laissez-Faire capitalism, hording as much as they possibly can behind barricaded windows and locked doors, struggling to keep out or kill the baying hordes outside.

She did go on to point out some interesting trends that immediately seemed obvious after she said them, but hadn’t occurred to me before. Such as the prevalence and importance of petrol stations in pretty much any zombie movie you care to mention- which is odd considering that these same films are often built around static siege narratives.

So what do these talks teach us about the zombie apocalypse? Well, they teach us we keep retelling the same old stories, and that horrible things that happened centuries ago still haunt our nightmares today. They tell us about how we view cities- places of safety and civilisation that could be transformed into a jungle at a moment’s notice. But I think most of all these talks show that there is no threat so great, no common cause so important, no unifying action so crucial to our survival, that we will not act like a complete shower of dicks to one another.

Our zombie experts: Jennifer Cooke, Amy Cutler and Peter Jones, destroying your hope in humanity

I emailed Amy before writing this blog, asking for a copy of her talk and also inviting her to adjudicate the drinking game rules for this week’s blog (since some people still seem to think I’m being overly lenient). Her rulings were as follows:

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? (One shot) NO

Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent (One shot) or more dangerous than the zombies? (One shot) YES

Does nobody ever actually use the word zombie? (Two shots) YES

Is mankind the real monster? (One shot) YES

Has anybody said “They’re coming to get you Barbra!” (Two shots) NO (didn't actually mention that film or play a clip from it!)

Are the zombies walking dead (One Shot) YES who move slowly (One shot) NO (seemed to deal more with running zombies) and can only be killed by destroying the brain? (Head shot) NO 

Kiddy zombies? (Two shots) YES

Do the dead rise regardless of whether they were “infected”? (Two shots) NO it's all about infection.