#17: The Royal Wedding Zombie Flash Mob: Breach of the Peace (of the Dead)

This is part of a special two part blog. For the story on what happened at the Royal Wedding Zombie Flash Mob, keep reading. For an exclusive blog from Amy Cutler, something of a zombie expert and one of the zombies arrested at the event, and her views on just how the zombie genre is able to critique these events, click here. UPDATE: For a recent interview with Hannah, on how life's been for her after the arrest, and what she and others are planning to do about it, click here.

This was going to be a very silly blog. A combination of geeks, hippies and protesters had decided to mark the Royal Wedding of Will and Kate by having a picnic dressed up as zombies- some thought it was a political protest, some just thought it would be funny. We’ve done movies, books, TV, videogames, the Bible and Live Action Role Play on this site, so reviewing a zombie wedding party seemed like it would fill up our personal bingo card and maybe even rank high in google. To this end, unable to get to London myself, I asked Hannah Eiseman-Renyard and Amy Cutler to go and get photos and quotes for what I thought would be a bit of fun.

Then Hannah phoned me from the police station.

But let’s back track. A few days before the Royal Wedding of Will and Kate, of which we were all so pleased, I came across the hashtag #RoyalZombieFlashMob, which led me to this:

As you can see the invite listed various causes they wanted to raise awareness of, and had a tone that was irreverent but barely even counts as disrespectful. Seeing how this could make a silly piece for the blog, I recruited Hannah Eiseman Renyard, boss editor king of Whippersnapper Press, and Amy Cutler, who regular readers might remember as the zombie expert in our blog a few weeks back, and asked if they’d be up for popping along, taking some photos and giving me a bit of write up.

On the morning of the event Hannah headed out dressed like so:

In her defence, she's looked worse

While she was off having fun, I was stuck following events through twitter (Yes, Chris Writes About the End of the World finally has its own twitter feed @Chriszombieblog, we are at the cutting edge of 2006):

@Hannah_Chutzpah
Goddamnit I can't find my tiara! Flower girl zombie it is....#RoyalZombieFlashMob

@Hannah_Chutzpah
@ChrisZombieBlog so, I'm getting both grins & glares in my zombie bridesmaid outfit... Did a Queenly wave to one car & they looked v happy

@Hannah_Chutzpah
@ChrisZombieBlog oh fuckit! Bus stop is outside a funeral directors. Goddamn I live in a badly-written sitcom#RoyalZombieFlashMob

Around this time I saw other, slightly more menacing tweets about arrests and police vans, and heard some of the organisers had been arrested for having a mock guillotine. I retweeted, and whaggishly posted:

@chriszombieblog
Nobody tell @Hannah_Chutzpah - I'll never hear the end of it if she gets arrested. #RoyalZombieFlashMob

Then to be on the safe side texted Hannah and Amy to let them know arrests had happened, because I’m not a total bastard. Amy texted back “Should I abstain from putting blood on the flag? Is there a law against it do you think?”

Oh how we laughed.

Note: The flag is unbismirched

In her account of the day, Hannah described the “Mob” itself as:

Within Soho Square there were maybe twelve people there for the demo – one dressed as a crusader with a colander on his head, a couple of people with crowns made out of gold paper and everyone else dressed in pretty normal, boring clothes. Three film crews were milling about, bored, more photographers and journalists milling about, and a pretty obvious police presence. I decided to hang well back and stayed on the other side of the square to where anyone else was.

I heard a few chants of “one solution: revolution!”

Journalists kept approaching trying to interview me about my aims and objectives as I was pretty much the only one who looked like a zombie. I was a bit embarrassed, given that I’d come to report on it too and had no idea about aims or anything else – I just happened to have dressed up. I explained I was mainly there to report on it too. Lots of people took my picture. I couldn’t really find anyone to speak to myself. Apparently I was the story. Whoops.

It was a damp squib. It’s possibly, but not conclusively, because three of the main organisers had been arrested the previous day.

Left to their own devices, this would be a blog where my main joke would have been contrasting the gathering with this googlemaps simulation of a royal wedding zombie outbreak.

Every simulation I've run ends with Prince William running away and leaving Kate to die

Amy Cutler explains:

"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 is perhaps the most ridiculous part of this whole day. Sixteen police officers to arrest five zombies, when everybody knows that zombies can’t run.

And they could totally bite from there if they wanted

The zombies were arrested for “A potential breach of the peace” and were kept in a police cell up to pretty much the exact moment Will and Kate drove out of Buckingham palace past a huge baying horde that looked like a far more evocative image of a zombie apocalypse than anything some fake blood could muster.

The Royal Zombie Flash Mob was a very, very silly event. Some people there might have thought they were overthrowing the government, some people were trying to raise awareness about important issues, some simply thought dressing up as a zombie equals funny. It doesn’t matter a huge amount if you agree with their politics, or how effective you think dressing up as a zombie is as an agent of political change.

Because the silly stuff is important, it’s where we have to draw the line. The difference between the right to put on some gory make up and make a pratt of yourself in public, and the right to criticise the government and stand up for the rights we’re supposed to hold sacred, is haggling.

This is Amy's real arrest paper- not hilarious satire

There’s plenty more to this story. You can hear the zombie’s accounts of the arrests from their interviews with Mary Hamilton- one of the brains behind the Zombie LARP, who knows a thing or two about pretending to be a zombie. Here’s an interview with Hannah as well as Amy and the other zombies. You can see a zombie nun chatting to a police officer and you can watch the police evicting the remaining zombies from the park.

Read about it on the Guardian, with a photo of Amy Cutler getting escorted away in handcuffs and seven and a half minutes into this video, you can see the arrest itself.

And now, I know our regular readers will be gasping for our drinking game.

Do the characters spend most of the story under siege in some manner of building? Well, I don’t know, does Soho Park count? I’ll leave that one to your discretion.

Are the people coming to rescue you incompetent or more dangerous than the zombies? The police are technically there to protect the people they were arresting, so take two shots.

Is mankind the real monster? And another one for this.

Has anybody said “They’re coming to get you Barbra!” Probably, I reckon. If the protesters didn’t, they should have!

Are the zombies walking dead who move slowly and can only be killed by destroying the brain? Well, the zombies were going to Starbucks- they were clearly pretty sedantry. One shot.

Kiddy zombies? And they’re adorable! Two shots!

Do the dead rise regardless of whether they were “infected”?  Well, zombies have been spotted in Brighton and London today, and with Amy looking into arranging a protest lurch- email Amy here if you're interested in taking part- I think it’s fair to say they’ll rise.

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).

#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.