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.

EASTER SPECIAL! #16 The Bible: Are There Zombies In The Bible? (Part 1)

Given the time of year, there really was no other alternative for this week’s blog. I ummed and ahhed about doing The Passion of The Christ as our movie this week- but that belongs more in the Saw/Human Centipede genre than the movies we’re interested in, so I decided to go right back to the book.

But this isn’t just about making cheap jokes about other people’s deeply held religious beliefs (although it is partly about making cheap jokes about people’s deeply held religious beliefs). I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but the zombie apocalypse genre is a genre with a long standing habit of cannibalising what went before. And through the last 2000 years (give or take a few centuries) one of the most popular sources to plagiarise has been The Holy Bible. If this was a blog about Movies Where Friendly Aliens Visit, the drinking game would probably feature the rules: Does the alien have amazing powers (Take an extra shot if those powers are healing powers)? Do they try to spread a message of peace and love? Do a frightened and warlike government kill the alien because they don’t understand it? Does the alien then come back from the dead? (Take an extra shot if the alien then ascends to the heavens in a stunning light display).

These are all Jesus

 And the zombie apocalypse genre with its, well, apocalyptic imagery and all the gore and violence and penchant for preachers who totally kick ass (for the Lord), seems like it wouldn’t have wasted any time before raiding the good book. One of the most iconic lines from any horror movie is “When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth” from Dawn of the Dead. It’s a line that sounds like it ought to be a Bible verse, although there’s no line even close to it anywhere in the good book.

So, looking at the Bible, just how many zombies, or zombie like entities can we find?

Candidate A: Lazarus

As seen here, and immortalised in a brilliant pun here. Lazarus is probably the second most famous example of someone coming back from the dead. There’s definitely some zombie-like qualities here, the wandering around in his burial clothes, the fear that after being dead for four days he’ll stink up the joint, his insatiable lust for flesh.... Okay, I made up the insatiable lust for flesh.

No, truth is, Lazarus pretty much just gets up and goes about his business as usual.

Admittedly, he really looks like a zombie

 Candidate B: Jesus Christ

You may have heard of this one. Jesus note only rose from the dead- as I just pointed out, he caused others to rise from the dead. And he was quite big on the eating of flesh and the drinking of blood, as shown here, here and here. 

Who knows, maybe the New Testament would have turned out very differently if the Romans had decided to skip crucifixion in favour of removing the head or destroying the brain.

But, although he did have some cool/gruesome scars after he rose, Jesus still seems pretty much articulate and none-flesh eating, which isn’t really in keeping with the zombie apocalypse tropes. And raising one person isn’t exactly an pandemic- for there to be an argument in favour of a zombie apocalypse, you’d need a whole bunch of people rising from the dead.

Candidate C: When Jesus Causes A Whole Bunch of People to Rise From The Dead

Taken from Matthew 27: 50-53 – right at the moment when Jesus dies on the cross. 

“And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.

At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!””

This is way, way more impressive. Tombs breaking open, a whole horde of the dead rising, this is the kind of shit they really ought to be telling kids about the Bible in school. This imagery is proper, classic Romero stuff.

I know several of you are now clicking the Bible open in a new tab and excitedly reading on to the next bit. You’ll be disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, Matthew 27 is one of the better chapters- as well as being the bit where Jesus gets crucified, this chapter also features Judas hanging himself- admittedly, the least cool of the two Judas deaths described in the Bible. (The best one can be found here) but there’s nothing more on the zombie uprising. It’s not said whether the risen saints feasted on the flesh of the living, carried on from where they left off, or simply dropped dead again, necessitating a massive clean-up operation. The Bible pretty much skips that whole thing.

And deep down, you know it’s not enough for the dead to just rise. So far, the only gore we’ve seen at all is a couple of holes through Jesus’s hands. Dead rising and just walking about, while creepy, isn’t what we came here for. We want some violence!

Candidate D: Some Really Really Nast Shit Goes Down

You wanted it. Here it is- this line is taken from Zechariah 14:12-15: 

“This is the plague with which the LORD will strike all the nations that fought against Jerusalem: Their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. On that day people will be stricken by the LORD with great panic. They will seize each other by the hand and attack one another. Judah too will fight at Jerusalem. The wealth of all the surrounding nations will be collected—great quantities of gold and silver and clothing. A similar plague will strike the horses and mules, the camels and donkeys, and all the animals in those camps.”

“Flesh will rot why they are still standing” “eyes will rot in their sockets”- finally, we’re getting to the really gruesome stuff. Admittedly, there’s nothing here to suggest that they are actually dead, but as we’ve established before, and outbreak of the Rage virus still counts! According to the book of Zechariah, attacking Jerusalem will result in an outbreak of zombie madness.

Pictured: Rational justification for a pro-Israel foreign policy

Candidate E: The Book of Revelation

Of course, “attacking Jerusalem will result in an outbreak of the rage virus” is one of the lesser known Biblical prophesies, and considering that all those saints rising from their graves sounded like quite a big deal, it’s been pretty much underplayed by churches and R.E. lessons alike. No, it’s generally acknowledged that when the end times finally roll around, the book to look to is the book of Revelation, which Biblical scholars tell us predicts that before the end of the world, we will see the dead rise.

Pictured: Biblical scholars

Well, unfortunately Winston Zeddemore doesn’t have great Biblical recall. There is a resurrection in Revelation, only it’s just all the really nice people being brought back from the dead. Then, later, they bring the rest of the dead back only to quickly chuck them into Hell. 

And quite frankly, in the Book of Revelation, that’s some of the tamest stuff that happens. And this is something we should go into right now, because it turns out this book might be about to become extremely...

Then the screen flickers, and the image of the witty but informative zombie blog is replaced by the pale visage of Locutus of Borg.

This Blog is to be continued...

In the mean time- time for the drinking game!

Well, there’s not much of people under siege, or incompetent/dangerous rescuers (Unless you count Judas). There’s not even much of mankind being the real monster. However, there are walking dead (One shot) who do rise without being “infected” (Two shots) and nobody calls them zombies (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.

#10 Contact: Plus An Interview With The Director!

So, something a little different for the blog this week (I know, twice in two weeks! But you hate change! Don’t worry, next week I promise to stick entirely to formula). This week we’re going to take a look at the short horror film Contact from director Jeremiah Kipp. No zombies, and only the merest whiff of a post-apocalyptic landscape, but you’ll see soon enough how it fits right in with the rest of our catalogue here.

I believe you’ll find that Contact is the perfect date movie, and ideal for watching with a partner of your gender of choice to get them in the mood. Watch it here:



Yes, I’m sorry, that was a cruel, cruel lie.

Contact is about as disturbing and head-fucky as a film can get. It’s the sort of film that is best watched alone in a darkened room, immediately before going into a bright space full of people.

However, here at Chris Writes About The End Of The World we know better than to judge art based on the first, visceral gut reaction. So once you’ve got over the “What would it be like if Agent Smith had done that mouth sealing thing to Neo while he was getting off with someone” image, we can look at the film from a slightly more rational perspective.

I’ve talked before about the way horror tends to be an inherently conservative genre- regardless of the sympathies of the artist. Usually horror works by showing us something horrifying to define what isn’t horrifying- most explicitly in all those drunken promiscuous girls that get knifed to death while their chaste, sober friend is able to defeat the baddy before going off with the hunky but boring dude who only wants to hold hands.

At first glance Contact seems to be the epitome of this. In fact, its roots seem to go further back, past horror movies to their grizzly, considerably more child-murder friendly ancestor, the fairy tale. It’s the story of a girl who leaves her family, goes off the path in search of romance and adventure, finds something horrible there and runs back to her family wiser and more chastened.

The nice, civilised looking dining room is contrasted with a world of ruined buildings and sinister drug dealers with police batons and eyeliner. The sexual contact that ends in a gross, fleshy Chinese finger trap is contrasted with a wholesome paternal hug.

The worst part? He's still using too much tongue

On the surface that’s pretty much exactly what this film looks like, and I’ve got to admit on my first couple of viewings that’s exactly what I thought it was. But even then there were certain things that didn’t sit right with me. The wholesome, safe family home that our heroine runs from and returns to doesn’t seem all that appealing. There’s nothing all that homey or comforting about the neatly set table and wordless parents. The protagonist looks uncomfortable in the buttoned down outfit she’s wearing. The scary sting at the end of the movie shows us she’s still traumatised by her bad trip, but there’s an argument to be made that the real fear is that this has scared her into never leaving the comfort zone she was brought up in.

Or maybe it’s just a film about how drugs are bad. Either way, it scared the crap out of me.

It’s likely you’re going to be hearing more from Contact’s director, Jeremiah Kipp. He’s got another short film coming out soon, Crestfallen (which I’ve already seen, because I’m just that cool). Crestfallen is equally atmospheric in a very different way, doing away with the ambiguity of Contact to make the point that killing yourself is a bad idea. Not long after that, he also has a feature length horror movie coming out starring legendary zombie murderer Tom Savini.

Oh, and look, he’s here now to answer some of my questions. Isn’t that handy?

Okay, so the first question I want to ask, and I'm sure you get this a lot, is: What is wrong with you?! Why can't you just make a charming romantic comedy, or something where Tom Hanks triumphs over adversity?

You don't think CONTACT is life-affirming? I am interested in people, and hope for the best when it comes to interpersonal relationships. CONTACT may seem like a dark movie, but when we made it, much of the time we were filled with enthusiasm and had a wonderful time. As little children, we aren't interested in fairy tales about two children picking flowers in a field -- unless those children get lost in the woods, find a witch in a gingerbread house, and find themselves nearly broiled in a steaming pot for lunch. Kids intuitively understand these grim little stories, because in some way they live them. The adult world is a strange and complex place. While we can triumph, the road is not an easy one, and that is the lie most movies tell us. A lot of times, I feel like the so-called feel good movies are insidious and cruel, and some video nasties are surprisingly more humane because they show life as precious, fragile and worth fighting for.

The film contains a pretty strong anti-drugs message. Did you set out to make a movie that demonstrated the more traumatising side of substance abuse, or was this just the most effective way you could think of to make people poo their pants?

People say that this is an anti-drug film, but that's not what I set out to make. Drugs can press someone to reveal their true character, their deepest fears, their paranoia and dread, and this particular couple rides the gauntlet and can't break through the barrier. For this reason, a lot of folks including good friends of mine think I was making a horror variation of a public service announcement. It's fair enough, though, because once you complete the movie it no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the audience, and they can interpret it however they like. I will say our latest short film, CRESTFALLEN, is very specifically intended as an anti-suicide film. The screenwriter, Russ Penning, wrote a very personal, very daring and sincere piece about a young woman (Deneen Melody) who feels like she has no other recourse but killing herself, and the movie takes a journey with her where we want the audience to see the value of life. I do like the idea of the audience being scared by trauma, though -- drugs and suicide are real life transgressions and have vast consequences for you and for your near and dear.

On a similar note, how important do you think gore is in these films? Aside from being an excellent way of making people watch a movie through the cracks between their fingers, what uses do you think gore has?

I wish there were more gore and nudity in films. Special effects allow you to make a metaphor into a reality -- if you feel like you and your lover are being torn apart, then gore effects can make that quite literal. The gory effects in VIDEODROME and THE THING and in much of Clive Barker's writing is a triumph of the imagination, and yes, it's really nightmarish and grotesque, but so are the things we're afraid to see. We're also afraid of pain, or of cancer and death, but it's easier to see someone transform into a giant fly than watch someone perish at their death bed. The gore in CONTACT (by Daniel J. Mazikowski) was all about making a connection to another person, but that can be incredibly frightening. Isn't it scary during the first month of dating someone? You know so little about them, you're in many ways quite vulnerable and see their vulnerability. The actors who braved the special effects and nudity in CONTACT and CRESTFALLEN were incredibly courageous, and I'm grateful they trusted me, since this sort of material can easily be prurient, offensive and gratuitous. It's important to me that the cast and crew understand what we're trying to achieve, because we're asking them for the difficult. I hope not to let them down with the finished movies. It has our names on it; it has to have value for us as creative people.

Now on this blog I've written a lot about how, particularly in genres like horror and sci-fi, everyone is constantly ripping off everybody else. So this is a great chance for you to 'fess up. Which artists and works do you make a habit of ripping off, what is it about them that you most want to steal?

Oh, I steal all the time. But so did George Romero (he robbed from I AM LEGEND), Wes Craven (from Ingmar Bergman's LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT), John Carpenter (from Howard Hawks) and Sam Raimi (from Bugs Bunny!). For CONTACT, I am sure David Lynch and David Cronenberg were on the brain. You can't make experimental body horror movies without in some way acknowledging them. I also drew from the painter Edvard Munch, whose "The Kiss" has haunted me for a long time, and photographer Gregory Crewdson for the scene involving the parents. Crewdson steals from Steven Spielberg, though, so I don't feel bad robbing from him.

Until just now you thought this painting was really romantic

And for CRESTFALLEN, my conversations with the director of photography/editor Dominick Sivilli revolved around BEOWULF, Chris Cunningham and commercial and music video director Chris Milk, but that movie was also us trying to reach for the epic and the mythic because it was based on a naturalistic true story, and we wanted to make the picture feel as large and grand as our emotions. When we feel love or pain, it is as large as castles and kingdoms. That said, we only had $300 to make that movie, so it's a chamber piece that yearns to be an opera.

Your next film, The Sadist looks sort of like First Blood, if Rambo hadn't been such a peaceloving hippy. How did it come about, and what more horrible, horrible things will you expose us to next?

THE SADIST is a bad-ass killer in the woods movie. The producers (Frank Wihbey and Joe Pisani) saw CONTACT and hired me as a work-for-hire director based on that. We approached the material with high aggression, with tremendous empathy for the characters who meet this strange enemy in the forest. Most of the crew from CONTACT was on board, including Dominick Sivili (DP/Editor), Daniel J. Mazikowski (Special FX), Alan Rowe Kelly (Production Manager) and Bart Mastronardi (Associate Producer). We're still in post, but hope to be finished soon. As for what's next, I'm starting principal photography on another feature in May (this time a non-genre film) and am in early talks for another horror feature later this year. Executive Producer Marv Blauvelt is finishing up the horror anthology PSYCHO STREET, and I associate produced the segment "No Rest For The Wicked" directed by Raine Brown. I'm looking forward to that. But when it comes to projects, it's best to let the future reveal itself. We rarely know what's around the corner. I'd love to work on a larger project with Zoe Daelman Chlanda, the star of CONTACT, and Jerry Murdock, a wonderful actor who is the Bruce Willis of indie horror.

The Sadist stars Tom Savini, who when he isn't appearing in virtually every horror film ever, is doing the make up, special effects and stunts for every other horror film ever, and still manages to find time to fit in some directing as well. It's fair to say he's something of a legend in the genre, so how was it working with him? Were you daunted at all?

Tom Savini signed up because it gave him the opportunity to play a non-speaking predatory villain, not unlike some of the roles played by his hero Lon Chaney. Tom was fantastic to work with, full of enthusiasm and high energy. When I called around to other directors asking what he was like to work with, to a man they said he was a true collaborator. Let it be known he does not suffer fools gladly, and if he doesn't trust you, he will walk all over you. But my time with him was wonderful; one of the best experiences of my professional career.

Finally, given this is a blog primarily about the zombie apocalypse, we have to know: What is your zombie apocalypse survival plan?

I subscribe to the George Romero technique, which is still the best way to go: (a) Steal a helicopter, (b) bring a film crew and some guns, (c) take over a shopping mall, and (d) let loose the dogs of war.

CONTACT from Dominick Sivilli on Vimeo.

#7 Shaun of the Dead: Why You Think You're Badass

So, let’s talk about Shaun of the Dead, the film that started off the whole zombie renaissance that so many people are getting sick of by now.

Oh, you thought it was 28 Days Later?

Or the general atmosphere of apocalyptic doom and despair that’s been prevalent since 9/11 and the Iraq War.

Well, they might have helped, but the reason that for the last decade nerds have been crafting intricate strategies for the hording of food and the decapitation of their neighbours (especially Neil, because fuck that guy) can be traced back to this film. This is the film that convinced you all that no matter how big a loser you are, the day the dead rise you will metamorphose into a cricket-bat wielding badass.

Some of you have completely lost touch with reality

Shaun of the Dead is different from the other movies we’ve looked at so far. Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later and I Am Legend aren’t just violent stories, but they’re also stories about violence. In one way or another these are stories about how violent people are, and the human cost violence has for the perpetrator as well as the victim. Even Pontypool is littered with references to the war in Afghanistan, and makes a major plot point of the guilt that comes from killing the obligatory kiddy zombie.

Shaun of the Dead gives a couple of nods to these themes, in the creepy look on Ed’s face after he’s smashed someone’s skull in with an ash tray, in that most of the improvised weapons and projectiles the characters use- records, swing-balls, and boxes of assorted throwing objects, turn out to be a bit shit and in that someone who spends hours of his life shooting down people in Timesplitters 2 will actually turn out to be a bit crap when he gets his hands on a rifle. But that isn’t Shaun of the Dead’s primary concern. Shaun of the Dead is a story about an aimless twenty-something struggling to grow up and get over his hangover. I can’t imagine why I like it so much.

Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s script is littered with foreshadowing and throwbacks, and one of these is that the entire plot of the movie is summed up with the drunken Shaun’s to-do list scrawled across the fridge:

Not long before, Ed also describes the plot of the whole movie in the form of a plan for a pub crawl:

“A Bloody Mary first thing, (the zombie they kill in the garden is called Mary) a bite at the King's Head, (Shaun’s stepdad getting bitten), couple at The Little Princess, (fetching Liz), stagger back here (the Winchester) and bang... back at the bar for shots. (Getting the rifle).”

The characters see the whole outbreak in terms of their everyday lives, relationships and trips to the pub, never even thinking about the larger political, philosophical and theological aspects of the zombie (not quite) apocalypse. When they flick through the TV channels and get nothing but blank, the response is a rather glib “There’s never anything on is there?” rather than wondering if we’ll see the lights turn on again in our lifetime.

I’ve already talked about the way zombie apocalypses have of narrowing the action down to an extremely small stage, then giving us hints and tips about the larger story through radio broadcasts and background action. The first part of Shaun of the Dead is littered with this. We see military trucks moving around in the background, people passing out at the bus stop, half-glimpsed headlines, a man eating a pigeon, a guy face down on his own steering wheel, and none of it is referred to by the characters directly. Shaun even manages to walk right to the corner shop and back through smashed up cars and scattered zombies without noticing that anything is wrong (incidentally, I’ve been to that corner shop, and they do a great strawberry Cornetto).

Edgar Wright has already gone on record as saying that this was partly inspired by his own discovery of the foot and mouth outbreak in the UK.

He’d missed the news for a couple of days, then turned the telly on to see mountains of burning cows. But it could just as easily be anything in the news. The movie came out while I was in uni and the Iraq War was getting into full swing, and my memories of that time are made up of sitting in the Union Bar, chatting about the usual bollocks students talk about, but with this constant background hum on the TV screens of tanks moving through deserts, reports of car bombs going off, and over-excited reporters in blurry, pixellated footage. Shaun of the Dead slots neatly into the Romero canon because like his films, these are characters at the periphery of the world-changing events. But unlike Romero’s characters, even as the world is falling apart these characters are still driven by the same pre-apocalyptic concerns- Shaun’s rivalry with his step-dad, his toxic friendship with Ed, and his attempts to win Liz back.

The real question at the end of the film isn’t about the aftermath of this huge, world changing cataclysm. Globally, the worst consequence of the apocalypse seems to be the return of It’s A Knockout.

Although in all fairness, I would totally watch this

The more dramatically important question at the end of the film is whether or not Shaun has moved on at all. In Simon Pegg’s memoir (which I’ve been reading to better to learn his ways so that I may eventually kill him and steal his life) he mentions that it’s left deliberately ambiguous whether Liz knows that Ed is being kept chained up in the garden shed (something else foreshadowed at the start of the film). If she doesn’t know, then Shaun hasn’t really changed and the idyllic post-zombie existence they’re enjoying may not last all that long. If she does, then she’s complicit in allowing him to carry on as he did before. Either way, Shaun remains the same person even in face of the zombie invasion, the petty tendencies and the bravery in the face of danger were equally a part of him all along. I believe that the fact that he remains the same ineffectual schlub even when he’s kicking zombie arse is a big part of the reason why this film is so popular, and why more geeks have a plan for the zombie apocalypse than a plan to escape their home in the event of a house fire.*

Right, let’s get to Winchester and line up some shots. The characters spend most of the story under siege in a pub (take a shot). We could argue over whether mankind is the real monster, but from the opening credits onwards the parallels between your average Londoner and your average zombie are made abundantly clear, and the characters spend plenty of time pointing guns, broken glass and bottle-openers at one another, so take a shot. Ed cries out “We’re coming to get you Barbara!” so take another two shots. These are proper old school zombies, who are dead, move slowly and can only be killed by a shot to the brain, so take four shots for that. We don’t know if the naturally dead rise, but given Pegg and Wright’s reverence for the Romero rules, I feel safe ordering a couple of shots for that as well. There is a kiddy zombie, so two shots for that. And while the word zombie is mentioned numerous times, character’s are explicitly told not to, so you can have one shot for that.

However, the two surviving characters are rescued by the army, who turn out not to be either insane or evil, so that is the one shot you’re not allowed to take this week.

How’s that for a slice of fried gold?

*Not an actual statistic. Someone should do the research on this.