No offense to the lovely ladies in the above photo, but zombies ain't what they used to be. Like Dracula and Frankenstein's monster before them, they've become quaint archetypes denuded of much of their shock value by media oversaturation. It has reached a point where even a fan of the zombie apocalypse subgenre such as myself has become jaded, and the shambling hordes of ravenous undead have become a shallow high concept plug-in (see also: monkeys, ninjas, and pirates) or simply locked into a predictable formula.
More so than the various slasher fiends that haunted the screen back in the day, zombies were the true archetype of horror for my generation, which came of age in the rubble of the Grand Consensus and the rise of Reagan. They were creatures born of miscalculation, failure, and/or hubris, a rotted reflection of contemporary society reduced to its basic impulses -- consume and assimilate.
They were an effective visualization of underlying anxieties -- ecological, biological, racial, economic -- reflecting the sense that society was poised to devour itself. It's a concept that can, and did, float a host of metaphorical conceits wrapped in a gut-munching package. And so it played out, with various levels of competence, across scores of low-budget domestic and European films that graced the drive-ins and video stores of my childhood and early teens.
As fringe entertainment, it was great fun, terrifying and amusing in equal measure. Once it came to the foreground of the popcult consciousness, however, things began to fall apart quickly. Blame the popularity of the Resident Evil games or the inherent decadence of the entertainment biz, but once the professional tastemakers turned their Eye of Sauron onto the zombie subgenre, it was a foregone conclusion that they wouldn't move on until it been completely strip-mined.
Sequels, remakes, spin-offs, tributes, parodies, cash-ins -- the whole arsenal of weapons of commercial destruction were employed toward this end. The dreaded "death of a thousand tweaks" tactic of making minor alterations to the established conventions was rolled out as an attempt to stress differences ("Hey, our zombies can RUN FAST!") while wallowing in sameness ("Otherwise, though it's a straight-up zombie flick!"). The gore 'n' metaphor formula, incidental or organic in the source material, became self-consciously codified to the point of absurdity. ("WE SURVIVORS ARE THE REAL LIVING DEAD!" Dude, that's, like, soooo deep. Yawn.)
Such is the way of all corpse flesh. At least we'll always have Louisville...because Return of the Living Dead, no matter how cheapjack it looks to me these days, is still the most depressing and disturbing horror film I've ever seen. Exploitation cinema has never been so unrelentingly Sophoclean.
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