According to Wikipedia.org, the modern conception of the zombie owes itself almost entirely to George A. Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. In his films, Romero “bred the zombie with the vampire, and what he got was the hybrid vigor of a ghoulish plague monster”. This entailed an apocalyptic vision of monsters that have come to be known as Romero zombies.
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times chided theater owners and parents who allowed children access to the film. “I don’t think the younger kids really knew what hit them,” complained Ebert. “They were used to going to movies, sure, and they’d seen some horror movies before, sure, but this was something else.” According to Ebert, the film affected the audience immediately:
“The kids in the audience were stunned. There was almost complete silence. The movie had stopped being delightfully scary about halfway through, and had become unexpectedly terrifying. There was a little girl across the aisle from me, maybe nine years old, who was sitting very still in her seat and crying.”
Movie poster for Night of the Living Dead
Romero’s reinvention of zombies is notable in terms of its thematics; he used zombies not just for their own sake, but as a vehicle “to criticize real-world social ills—such as government ineptitude, bioengineering, slavery, greed and exploitation—while indulging our post-apocalyptic fantasies”. Night was the first of five films in the Living Dead series.
Innately tied with the conception of the modern zombie is the “zombie apocalypse”, the breakdown of society as a result of zombie infestation, portrayed in countless zombie-related media post-Night. Scholar Kim Paffrenroth notes that “more than any other monster, zombies are fully and literally apocalyptic … they signal the end of the world as we have known it.”
Night made no reference to the creatures as “zombies”. In the film, they are referred as “ghouls” on the TV news reports. However, the word zombie is used continually by Romero in his 1978 script for Dawn of the Dead, including once in dialog. This “retroactively fits (the creatures) with an invisible Haitian/African prehistory, formally introducing the zombie as a new archetype”.
Dawn of the Dead was released under this title just months before the release of Lucio Fulci’s Zombi II (1979). Fulci’s gory epic was filmed at the same time as Romero’s Dawn, despite the popular belief that it was made in order to cash in on the success of Dawn. The only reference to Dawn was the title change to Zombi II (Dawn generally went by Zombi or Zombie in other countries.)
The early 1980s was notable for the introduction of zombies into Chinese and other Asian films, often martial arts/horror crossover films, that featured zombies as thralls animated by magic for purposes of battle.Though the idea never had large enough appeal to become a sub-genre, zombies are still used as martial-arts villains in some films today.
1981’s Hell of the Living Dead was the first film to reference a mutagenic gas as a source of zombie contagion, later echoed by Trioxin in Dan O’Bannon’s 1985 film, Return of the Living Dead. RotLD took a more comedic approach than Romero’s films; Return was the first film to feature zombies which hungered specifically for brains instead of all human flesh (this included the vocalization of “Brains!” as a part of zombie vocabulary), and is the source of the now-familiar cliche of brain-devouring zombies seen elsewhere.
The mid-1980s produced few zombie films of note (the Evil Dead series, while highly influential and notable on their own, are not technically zombie films but films about demonic possession). 1985’s Re-Animator, loosely based on the Lovecraft story, stood out in the genre, achieving nearly unanimous critical acclaim, and becoming a modest success, nearly outstripping 1985’s Day of the Dead for box office returns. Lovecraft’s prescient depiction is notable here; the zombies in the film are consistent with other zombie films of the period, and it may escape the viewer that they are nearly unchanged from the 1921 story.
The 1988 Wes Craven film The Serpent and the Rainbow, based on the non-fiction book by Wade Davis, attempted to re-connect the zombie genre with the Haitian vodou (“voodoo”) roots that inspired it. The film poses both supernatural and scientific possibilities for “zombification” and other aspects of vodou, though the scientific explanations for them, which involve use of the poison tetrodotoxin, have been dismissed by the scientific community. The film was relatively well-reviewed and enjoyed modest financial success, and is notable as perhaps the only vodou-themed zombie film of recent times.
Also in 1988, the Romero zombies were featured in Waxwork, where the protagonists are drawn to the world of Night of the Living Dead.
After the mid-1980s, the subgenre was mostly relegated to the underground. Notable entries include director Peter Jackson’s ultra-gory film Braindead (1992) (released as Dead Alive in the U.S.), Bob Balaban’s comic 1993 film My Boyfriend’s Back where a self-aware high school boy returns to profess his love for a girl and his love for human flesh, and Michele Soavi’s Dellamorte Dellamore (1994) (released as Cemetery Man in the U.S.). Several years later, zombies experienced a renaissance in low-budget Asian cinema, with a sudden spate of dissimilar entries including Bio Zombie (1998), Wild Zero (1999), Junk (1999), Versus (2000) and Stacy (2001).
In Disney’s 1993 film Hocus Pocus, a “good zombie”, Billy Butcherson played by Doug Jones, was introduced, giving yet a new kind of zombie in an intelligent, gentle, kind, and heroic being.
The turn of the millennium coincided with a decade of box office successes in which the zombie sub-genre experienced a resurgence: the Resident Evil movies (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010); the Dawn of the Dead remake (2004), the British films 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later (2002, 2007)[35][36] and the comedy/homage Shaun of the Dead (2004). The new interest allowed Romero to create the fourth entry in his zombie series: Land of the Dead, released in the summer of 2005. Romero has recently returned to the beginning of the series with the films Diary of the Dead (2008) and Survival of the Dead (2010).
The depiction of zombies as biologically infected people has become increasingly popular, likely due to the 28 Days Later and Resident Evil series. 2006’s Slither featured zombies infected with alien parasites, and 2007’s Planet Terror featured a zombie outbreak caused by a biological weapon. The comedy films Zombie Strippers, Zombieland and Fido have also taken this approach.
Zombies in recent popular culture have considerably increased their locomotion, as exampled in recent movies like 28 Days Later (and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later), the Dawn of the Dead remake, House of the Dead, Zombieland and the video game Left 4 Dead. In contrast, zombies have historically been portrayed as slow.
As part of this resurgence, there have been numerous direct-to-video (or DVD) zombie movies made by low-budget filmmakers using digital video. A proliferation of ‘documentary-style’ zombie films has resulted, including The Zombie Diaries, American Zombie and Colin, each taking distinct approaches to the undead phenomenon.