Bonus Blog- The Dead Island Trailer: Why Killing Children Is Awesome

So, the trailer for the new game Dead Island has been released. Personally, I love it, it’s a great little three minute zombie movie that is both terrifying and sad.

Watch it here:

It’s already started to kick off some controversy, even from those who are normally the first to defend against moral guardians. The writer of this blog found it uncomfortable viewing, saying that “personally I just can't get away from the fact that I'm uncomfortable watching a graphic depiction of the horrific final moments of the life of a young girl.”

Well, good. Watching a little girl dying a horrible and violent death isn’t supposed to be punch-the-air “Fuck yes!” entertainment. The writer concedes: “Yes, perhaps that's because I'm a dad and have a beautiful daughter.” I don’t have a kid, so I can only take a poorly educated guess at how that affects your perception of the world. Similar motives have been given for Steven Spielberg’s decision to replace the guns with walkie-talkies in E.T.

Walkie-Talkies THAT SHOOT LASERS. I assume.

It’s easy to dismiss this sort of thing as being prudish Mary Whitehouse style stuff. But I think to answer this needs a more robust defence than that. Zombie apocalypse fiction is steeped in violence, and if we get our entertainment from watching bloody death on a mass scale, it’s worth, on occasion, asking what it’s actually for.

Firstly, as anyone who’s been playing the Chris Writes About The End of The World Drinking Game knows, kiddy zombies are not exactly a rarity in the genre. The premise of the zombie apocalypse is that your friends and loved ones are turned into the threat, and seeing some cute adorable little kid running (because even in Romero movies, kid actors never seem to get the hang of lurching) towards you with murder in its eyes is a great shorthand to get that point across.

However, context is everything. It’s one thing to see a zombie kid get killed as part of a longer narrative, with consequences for the characters. It’s another to see it as the entire subject of a film, particularly one as short as this. So the question is, does the trailer manage to justify its child murder?

Well, as you may have noticed, the trailer is played in backwards. I’m not trying to play the Happy Titanic argument here (Where if you rewind James Cameron’s Titanic it has a happy ending), but the order in which you tell a story is every bit as important as the story itself.

The classic example for this is Memento, where most of the scenes are played out in reverse chronological order, intercut with flashbacks that play out in chronological order, until at the end of the film the two storylines meet in the middle where it turns out that $£*()$£*()”$*()£$*£)$(*. In the trailer, the same thing happens. We get the reversed storyline of the corpse magically leaping up through the magically mending window and latching onto her father’s neck, intercut with flashbacks to the frightened little girl running down a hotel corridor.

In Memento, when the backward and forward moving narratives meet, it brings us to the most important part of the film. In the Dead Island trailer, when the backward and forward moving narratives meet, it is on the image of a father reaching out to his child. When we see that image, we know it won’t end well. But that’s not the point, the point is, the video takes a scene of bloody, terrifying violence, then gives the scene context, showing that the survivors are actually fighting for something.

You can see the trailer in chronological order here.

In this version, the story is a straight forward tale of a little girl running away from zombies, then dying horribly. It’s pretty bleak, but it doesn’t carry the same punch as the trailer seen the way it was originally intended.

In the blog link at the beginning of this post, Ben Parfitt argues that the trailer “uses an image of a dead girl and images of her dying to create an emotional bond with a product.”

Well, yes. It does. Although I have to say I find it far less distasteful and manipulative than Paul Whitehouse remaking The Sixth Sense for Aviva.

What this advert does is tell a story, to advertise a game that will also tell a story. Personally I find it refreshing to see a videogame advert that presents violence as anything other than totally awesome. If the videogame that it’s advertising manages to resemble the tone of this trailer at all, it’s going to be a very special game indeed.

We’ll return to our regular posting schedule on Monday, when I’ll be writing about a romantic comedy. No prizes for guessing which one.

#2 28 Days Later: Measure of a Zombie

This blog will contain spoilers for the movie 28 Days Later. Also, Romeo and Juliet die at the end.

Is 28 Days Later a zombie movie? This has been a subject of much debate among people who care about this sort of thing. So I’ve decided that now I’ve got a blog, I can end this argument once and for all, because nothing puts an end to a controversy like somebody writing a blog.

Well, let’s start by going right to the source- Danny Boyle, who directed the movie. He’s gone on record to say: “I keep saying, ‘It's not a zombie movie, everyone. It's not a zombie movie!'… They're infected. They're not zombies."

Other masters of the genre agree. Simon Pegg, writer and start of Shaun of the Dead and that zombie-themed episode of Spaced has chimed in describing 28 Days Later as “an excellent film misconstrued by the media as a zombie flick” but which actually features “rabid propagators of a virus known as "rage".”

A lot of zombie purists will agree. The argument is that the Infected sprint about like Olympic Athletes desperate to get to the loo and they aren’t dead. If we go by the definition of zombie listed in our zombie drinking game rules, your throat will go dry.

I’m Right- Everyone Else is Wrong

The reason I’m calling on such high authorities as the director of the film, and famed zombie nut Simon Pegg, is that I want to make it absolutely clear what calibre of people I am more right than.

28 Days Later is a zombie movie, and the infected are zombies. Deal with it.

Don’t get me wrong, like many geeks one of the few things that brings me more pleasure than sci-fi and fantasy, is getting really anal about sci-fi and fantasy. If you ever want to see what I look like when I’m really irritated, describe the Daleks as “The robots that fight Doctor Who” (The Daleks are the mutated aliens in armoured travel machines who fight the Doctor). Distinctions like that are important because they change the story. It matters whether the baddies are creatures who used to be like us, or machines made by someone like us.

But in 28 Days Later, while the infected are clearly different from George Romero’s creations, the story DNA is right there. Let’s start with the drinking game shall we?

Our merry band of survivors spend the last third of the film with some soldiers who are under siege in an old country home(One shot) where it turns out, that the people they have gone to for rescue are more dangerous than the... ahem, “infected” (One shot) because it turns out mankind is the real monster (One shot). On their way to find rescue, our hero, Jim, has to kill a kiddy... ahem, “infected” (Two shots).

In fact, it’s worth pointing out that the scene with the kiddy infected is almost beat-for-beat identical to a scene in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. The survivors stop to refuel; one of them stupidly wanders off on his own into the building, and is forced to kill a murderous child (or two). (To be fair to Danny Boyle, he has admitted that “There are certain things in that we did that I didn't even realize were complete steals from Romero.”)

Still, the novel I Am Legend will lead you to drink quite a few shots under the drinking game rules as well, possibly more, since the monsters Robert Neville is fighting off are technically dead, but they are explicitly vampires. One of the texts Alex Garland and Danny Boyle openly admit to nicking from for this movie was Day of the Triffids, which will also see you downing a few shots, but even I’m not going to make the case for walking plants as zombies.

"Fools! Don't you realise? If we combined out powers, this wretched planet could be ours!"

So I’m going to have a make a better case if I’m going to crush all Internet debate on this subject forever (and I will settle for nothing less).

Spread the Love

Under the movie’s own terms, there are certain things that don’t really make sense for people who are just supposed to be really, really angry and bleeding a lot. If I was that pissed off I’d probably by laying into anything that moved, but several times during the film, the Infected don’t seem to have the much interest in attacking one another. When an enraged horde of Infected chase the survivors’ taxi until it’s out of reach, the hyper-violent, super-testosteroned nut boxes don’t immediately start kicking the shit out of each other. Instead, they give up running, and just watch the taxi slide out of view.

They were bitten by a chimpanzee infected with the half-arsed virus

When the infected soldiers are charging round the mansion at the end, looking to spread the love, two of them meet and instead of biting each other’s faces off, they stand around, sniffing the air and looking for someone less gore-splattered to attack.

This doesn’t make sense under the movie’s premise that these people are all just really pissed off, but it does make sense in the framework of the zombie movie, where the zombies’ behaviour is all geared towards making other people into zombies.

I would argue that this, more than anything else, is the most useful definition of a zombie: Something that used to be human, that as had all traces of intelligence and humanity permanently wiped away, and is now driven to spread this condition to others.

Simon Pegg’s argument for the Romero zombie as the only “real” zombie is that zombies “personify our deepest fear: death”. Except they also personify consumerism, or in Shaun of the Dead, couch potato culture, or the mob mentality. Over the years vampires have come to represent our fear of sex, the corrupt aristocracy, drug addiction, and being creepy glitter-saturated stalkers with promise-keeper rings. But regardless of whether they turn into bats or have a fetish for leather, whether they’re soulless demons or the victims of some sort of bloodsucking-based STD, we all know a vampire when we see one.

Zombies can be just as flexible, and it’s worth remembering that the original definition of a zombie has nothing to do with Romero’s creeping hordes. Traditionally, a proper zombie is an individual raised from the dead by Vodou witch doctors using a special type of cucumber, and is interested less in eating human flesh than serving his master.

Meanwhile, in Night of the Living Dead, you won’t once hear the word “Zombie”. In fact, that’s it. I’m adding it to the list.

Does anyone actually call the psychopathic, bloodthirsty hordes “zombies”? If no, take two shots.

#1 Night of the Living Dead: And the drinking game rules

Okay, first things first: SPOILER ALERT. I’m going to spoil the heck out of this film. The plot, how it ends, who dies and when, everything. Then, just to show I’m not fucking around, I’m going to spoil the endings of Citizen Kane, and the classic Real Ghostbusters cartoon “Ghostbuster of the Year”.

Read on at your own risk.

It’s pretty hard to say anything about Night of the Living Dead that hasn’t already been said. That’s what happens when a film kicks off a whole genre. But just take a second to realise how different the world would be without this movie.

Without this movie, Plants Vs Zombies would be a garden simulator, Rob Zombie would probably be called Rob Vampire or something, and the modern classic, Zombieland, would look like this:

It's a dark and terrifying world

 There were zombie films before Night of the Living Dead, sure, but without that one movie, the zombie would be at best a C-list monster, maybe on a par with Egyptian mummies in our nightmares. That’s right: The only zombie films of the last fifteen years would have featured only one zombie, fighting Brendon Fraser.

But let’s forget for a moment this film's many, many imitators and to focus on what made this film so spectacular. Firstly, it’s a very small film. It’s a film about a zombie apocalypse (admittedly, a rather small one that only covers the “eastern third” of the United States) and it’s implied through TV and Radio broadcasts that somewhere President Bill Pullman is arguing with a gruff army chief and Professor Jeff Goldblum over the best way to combat the uprising, but we don’t get to see that.

Instead, we see the disaster from perspective of a few ordinary people trying to get by. If this was a movie about the Battle of Britain the characters wouldn’t be pilots, they’d be on the ground, hiding in shelters and listening to the noise outside, without really a clue what was happening. We don’t see the Venus space probe crash, spreading zombie radiation all over the place. The first we hear that something’s wrong is a report on the radio- that is promptly turned off because Barbra and Johnny have things to do.

This is a film about ordinary people becoming killers. The make-up on the zombies occasionally gives them flaky looking skin, or the occasional injury, but on the whole a mob of the zombies in this film looks like a mob of pretty much anyone else. They’re scary because they look like us.

Not like this

But the zombies (Should I call them ghouls? Nah, screw it. They’re zombies) aren’t the only people who turn into killers. At the start of the film, it’s safe to say none of the characters seem to come from a military background, or have any kind of violent past. Yet soon they’re shooting, lobbing Molotov cocktails and bludgeoning the zombies (and occasionally one another) to death.

If you’ve come to zombie films through ploughing through the hordes in Left 4 Dead, or watching the slapstick violence of Zombieland, the violence in this film might actually shock you. The first time we see Ben kill a zombie, it’s not a swift blow to the head to destroy the brain. Instead he sits atop the zombie going at it repeatedly with a tire iron, and it looks like hard work. The next zombie he kills, we see him actually struggling to pull the tire iron out his victim’s skull when the job is done. There are no quick videogame deaths in the movie. When Helen is attacked by her zombie daughter, stabbed to death with a cement trowel, George Romero thinks “Why not linger here a while?” and the stabbing goes on for an age, with Helen’s screams heard throughout.

And at the end of the day, the zombies are not the biggest threat in this movie. They’re an excuse plot, a reason to lock up these people together. Most of the deaths in this film are entirely avoidable (particularly Tom and Judy who, let’s face it, die in what looks like a freak gasoline fight accident) but are brought about because Ben and Harry can’t decide who gets to play alpha male.

Of this films many, many rip-offs and imitators, the most successful clue into that element of the film. The most successful zombie films are all variations on the “characters stuck in a lift” formula, with the lift replaced with any building surrounded by zombies. The reason the dead rise is something you only have to give lip service to. The hope of humanity against the rising horde is irrelevant (although it has to be said, out of all the zombie films, Night of the Living Dead probably gives humanity the best odds by the time the credits roll). It’s all about putting people who hate each other in a situation where they have to work together.

Now, I promised you some drinking game rules yesterday, so here they are. For future blogs, please following the drinking instructions every time one of these is the case, because nothing says “Good Times!” like drinking alone while you read something on the Internet. For the record, for Night of the Living Dead you have to drink for each and every one of these:
Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? (One shot)
Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent (One shot) or more dangerous than the zombies? (One shot)
Is mankind the real monster? (One shot)
Has anybody said “They’re coming to get you Barbra!” (Two shots)
Are the zombies walking dead (One Shot) who move slowly (One shot) and can only be killed by destroying the brain? (Head shot)
Kiddy zombies? (Two shots)
Do the dead rise regardless of whether they were “infected”? (Two shots)

Finally, in both Citizen Kane and the Real Ghostbusters cartoon “Ghostbuster of the Year” it turned out at the end that Rosebud was the name of his sledge.