YEAR OF THE DEAD
By Simon Pegg
Zombies have been battering at the peripheries of my subconscious for a long while now. It started back in my early teens, when I heard word that Michael Groves had seen a banned film in which a man had the top of his head sliced off by a helicopter("No fuckin' way!" Yes fuckin' way, it came off like a Frisbee!" "Wicked!"). The film was, of course, George A. Romero's masterpiece Dawn of the Dead, and I wouldn't actually see it until after I had seen Day of the Dead, both versions of Night of the Living Dead, and Dan O' Bannon's Return of the Living Dead 1, 2, and 3. When I finally did see Dawn, it was everything I had hoped for. From the confusion of the opening sequence, through to the desperate ennui of the final scene, I was hooked and, unbeknownst to me, destined to one day walk among them.
Other key moments flash past on the way to the year 2004. Almost exactly ten years prior to the American release of Shaun of the Dead, on Halloween 1994, I made up Nick Frost as a zombie for a theme night at the restaurant where he worked. Two years later, I met a furry little guy who shared my love of the genre and was determined to become a filmmaker- his name was Edgar Wright. Move forward another few years, and I’m brandishing a pump-action shotgun and diving around in the darkness of a fake living room, uttering Bruce Campbell maxims and blowing the heads off Romero-style zombies for a TV show called Spaced. Eventually, 20 years after those first whispered reports of groaning, biting, and guts, work began on our own zombie opus, a film that would emerge in a year crowded with mobile corpses-from Zack Snyder’s speed demons, to Jesus Christ himself.
When Edgar and myself were initially strolling hand-in-hand through our collective subconscious looking for film ideas, we were, as far as we knew, the only people to spot the pasty little dead kid in the corner, waving his skinny arms in the air, clamouring for re-invention. It was only when we were well into the writing process that we heard about the other projects. Fortunately our ardour wasn’t dampened by the release of Resident Evil and 28 Days Later. The former was a noisy mess, with none of Romero’s wit or charm, and the latter flirted lovingly with a number of the conventions of the zombie movie but never claimed to actually be one. Relieved, we shuffled forth toward production. It was, however, the news that Hollywood would be remaking Dawn that really worried us. Initially, our somewhat lame pun of a title was a reference to an underrated classic; with the remake in the offing, we feared our movie would sound to many like an opportunistic cash-in on a big-bucks American release (as well as a lame pun of the title) and be somewhat overshadowed. In the end, things worked out rather well. Universal, the daddy of both Dawn and Shaun, stipulated that the former precede the latter by at least two weeks. This enabled us to attach our trailer to every print of the big-budget zombie flick and surf its crimson wave of undead love. Fortunately for us, Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (or as Edgar likes to call it, 28 Coffees Later), was really rather good- a fast-paced refit of the original which was half as long and twice as expensive, but nevertheless cracking entertainment.
My main problem with it wasn't so much the fast zombies (I'll come to that later), as it was the fact that it was called Dawn of the Dead. Rumour has it that James Gunn's original screenplay did not start out as a Dawn remake but was shaped as such by the mall-set mid-section, written to accommodate the brand name. The film certainly isn't a remake. Gunn has little time for the satirical subtleties of Romero's original. Instead, we get a highly effective roller-coaster actioner, with the emphasis on shocks and jumps. There are no musings on the nature of consumerism or embedded collective behaviour; no desperate little bourgeois paradises. In fact, most of the original's wonderful defining moments are absent. This does not mean that Snyder's film is bad- it just stops it from being Dawn of the Dead. 28 Days Later (another 2004 hit in the US) blissfully draws on it's source material without ever feeling the need to justify itself with a remake/reimagining/rehash tag. The last section of Alex Garland's excellent screenplay has wilful similarities to Day of the Dead. The famous sequence in Dawn 78', in which a refuel stop sees S.W.A.T. team hero Peter (the peerless Ken Foree) having to kill a couple of zombie children, is recreated almost shot-for-shot in Boyle's infected update. It's a shame that the studio risked a little of Dawn '04's credibility by not allowing it an identity of its own. It would have been perhaps a cooler, if not financially shrewd, idea to draw on one of the film's funnier moments, and adopt the word used by annoying yuppy Steve in his description of the zombies at Fort Pastor, thus giving us Zack Snyder's Deadish. This brings me neatly to the notion of fast and slow zombies. People, please! The clue is in the tagline. "When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth. WALK the Earth. Not, "When there is no more room in hell, the dead will run around shouting." The nu-skool ghoul is effective, perhaps even scarier than Romero's shambolic originals. It's fair to say that if Snyder's mutha-munchers had invaded Crouch End, Shaun and Ed would not have even made it to the record box. The point is, are they as dramatic, as affecting and shudder-down-your-back eerie as George's original doddering, patient zeroes? I say no. It is the very crapness of the Romero zombie that fundamentalises its appeal. Governed by a single biological imperative and crippled by necrosis, the Romero zombie is a tragic, almost sympathetic figure. Slow zombie rubbishness also works brilliantly on a dramatic level. Survivors can actually share screen-time with the enemy, developing relationships with individual zombies as they approach. [In Shaun] we see them as tragic figures, real people plucked from real lives, in the middle of a football match; washing the dishes; attending a fancy dress party. What other movie monster allows two guys to discuss the relative merits of Prince's career, whilst closing in for an attack?
Another key factor in their appeal is that they present a potential for us to all be a hero. In their crap, tragic, shambling desperation, they give us all a fighting chance. A few people criticized Shaun of the Dead for the scene in which the gang pretend to be zombies to avoid being eaten, protesting that the real zombies would have known. Why? They're not telepathic, they don't have heightened senses, they're not controlled by a wizard or a genius. They're dead, they're all messed up. Therein lies their beauty- they're crap, they're stupid, they're brilliant. Then again, what the hell? It's all gravy. Danny Boyle's "Infected" and Zach Snyder's Zombies 2.0 are huge fun, if not as classic or cerebral. I guess when there's no more room in hell, there's still plenty left in the film industry, no matter what your groundspeed. As for me, I'm gearing up to fly to Toronto and take it slow in George Romero's new and long overdue offering, Land of the Dead. If I'd have known that was going to happen when I was a child, excitedly speculating about mythic zombie movies, I would have simply lost my mind. Finally, I'm going to be a zombie ("No fuckin' way!" "Yes fuckin' way!" "Wicked!").