Zombies: The Recent Dead Part 1

ZOMBIES:.

THE RECENT DEAD.

Edited by Paula Guran.

For Linda and Laura- who have kept me from becoming one of the living dead myself lately, and who I trust will know when to hit me in the head with a baseball bat.

Preshamble.

I've never thought of them as zombies; I never called them zombies. When I made Night of the Living Dead, I called them flesh-eaters. To me, zombies were those boys in the Caribbean doing Bela Lugosi's wet work for him [in White Zombie (1932)]. I never thought of them as zombies. It was only when people started to write about them and said these are zombies that I thought maybe they are. All I did was make them the neighbors; take the voodoo and mysterioso out of it and make them the neighbors, and I don't know what happened after that. The neighbors are scary enough when they're not dead. Maybe that's what made it click.

-George Romero.

As David J. Schow correctly points out in the following introduction, the modern zombie archetype is derived from cinematic rather than literary roots.1 But we'd be remiss if we did not note the other zombie mythos-and the roots of an earlier round of zombie popularity.

Haitian Voudou is not an easily explained belief system. For our purposes we will only mention that the idea of the "voodoo zombie" arises from a mixture of African folklore-the dodo of Ghana, for example, shambles, hides in trees, and eats unwary travelers-and the Afro-Caribbean religion of Voudou. Essentially the "traditional" zombie is a dead or living person stripped of their own will and/or soul who is under the control of a sorcerer.

American and European understanding of Haitian Voudou is steeped in racism, racial and cultural stereotyping, and a complex socio-political history. For our purposes, let us state only a few overly simplistic facts: A slave rebellion beginning in 1791 ended with the establishment of an independent Haiti in 1804, a black republic composed of former slaves.

This successful rebellion by black slaves inspired American slaves, but it terrified white slave-owning Americans. As black, white, and multi-racial Haitian refugees arrived in American port cities, slave owners fears of a black revolution spreading to the to the United States were further exacerbated.

After the American Civil War Haiti was still generally held in disdain by the U.S. In the nineteenth century, fiction (and "nonfiction" that was just as imaginative) concerning "voodoo" gained popularity. (Zombies-albeit not by that name-appeared in some of it. An 1882 novel, for example, by "Captain" Mayne Reid, The Maroon: A Tale of Voodoo and Obeah, features a voodoo pract.i.tioner who resurrects himself from the dead.) Fear that Germany might establish a military base in Haiti-dangerous close to the Panama Ca.n.a.l-and imperialist motivations led to the United States' occupation and rule of Haiti by means of a military government between 1915 and 1934.

Although the occupation had some positive aspects (such as infrastructure improvement), Haiti was still ruled by white foreigners with profound racial prejudices and contempt for its inhabitants.

Both fiction and nonfiction fed on and imbued the predominant racism and ethnocentricity concerning "voodoo" and its supposed sorcery and black magic.

The American public, which had already developed an appet.i.te for entertainment based on such fallacies and prejudices, was further misinformed by a hugely popular book: The Magic Island, a 1929 "travelogue" on Haiti by William Seabrook.

Seabrook-in dramatic style-reinforced current and earlier American and European thought about "voodoo" while introducing new innuendo and "facts" about zombiism. " . . . Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields," a twelve-page chapter in The Magic Island featured the first widely read English language account of Haiti's "walking dead" that referred to them specifically as "zombies": It seemed . . . that while the zombie came from the grave, it was neither a ghost, nor yet a person who had been raised like Lazarus from the dead. The zombie, they say, is a soulless human corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life-it is a dead body which is made to walk and act and move as if it were alive. [Seabrook, W.B. The Magic Island. New York: Harcourt, 1929.]

Kenneth Webb, inspired by Seabrook, wrote a dud of a Broadway play, Zombie. Opening on February 10, 1932 at the Biltmore Theatre in New York City, it lasted only twenty-one performances.

Now-forgotten fiction written for Weird Tales and other pulp magazines by writers like Hugh Cave, Seabury Quinn, Robert E. Howard, Jane Rice, Henry S. Whitehead, and others was at least partly inspired by Seabrook's book. But such stories were relatively rare, of no great literary merit, and made little impact on popular culture as a whole.

The first feature-length zombie movie, White Zombie (1932), and later films provided a far more lasting cultural influence.

Ultimately much of what Western culture thinks it understands about Voudou is still based on Seabrooks' depiction, films like White Zombie and I Walked With a Zombie (1943), and consequent pop-culture fantasies.

Voudou/voodoo also played a role in more recent Haitian politics during the oppressive regimes of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier (1957-1971) and his son Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier (1971-1986). Papa Doc exploited Haitian belief in Voudou, reputedly practiced sorcery, and even claimed to be a loa (spirit) himself.

Canadian anthropologist and ethn.o.botanist Wade Davis theorized in his 1985 book The Serpent and the Rainbow that tetrodotoxin (TTX) is used in Haiti to place people in a pharmacologically induced trance by use of "zombie powder" containing TTX. (A horror movie directed by Wes Craven, The Serpent and the Rainbow, very loosely based on the Wade's book, was released in 1988.) Wade's ideas have been both challenged and defended. Most recently, Terrence Hines ["Zombies and Tetrodotoxin," Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 32, Issue 3: May/June 2008] refuted Wade's claims on a physiological basis writing that TTX does not produce the trance-like "zombie" state.

We still have fiction and based on the "traditional zombie"-some fine examples are contained in this volume. But the currently prevalent "Romero" archetype a.s.sumed the name "zombie," become disa.s.sociated from Voudou, and has taken on an undeath of its own.

The "new zombies" have little in common with the controlled, non- cannibalistic "old zombies." Traditional zombies were enslaved victims; contemporary zombies are uncontrollable flesh-eating monsters.

Not that the stories about either variety are really about zombies . . .

Paula Guran.

June 2010.

Introduction:.

The Meat of the Matter.

When the film opened, it was met by outraged attacks against its motives, its competence of execution, and the unabashed saturation of gore. It was dismissed by critics, flagellated by concerned commentators who viewed it as a prime example of the p.o.r.nography of violence, and cited as a contributing factor to everything from crime in the streets to the corruption of the morals of American youth.

-George A. Romero, from the Introduction to Night of the Living Dead by John Russo (1974) Once upon a time, an independent Pittsburgh filmmaker and commercial cinematographer named George A. Romero conceived of a low-budget movie about corpses that reanimate and attempt to eat everyone still alive. Supposedly activated by a s.p.a.ce virus (possibly the product of governmental experimentation gone horribly wrong), these walking dead laid siege to the living, killing and infecting them with the virus so they, in turn, became new walking, flesh-hungry zombies.

Romero originally wrote out his concept as a prose piece t.i.tled "Anubis" (after the Egyptian G.o.d of the dead) and presented it to his partners in his company, Image Ten. The topic of an independently financed movie had been tabled and hashed around by others in the company, becoming a sort of community ca.s.serole of gags, ideas, and set-pieces which one of the partners, John Russo, eventually completed as a feature screenplay.

Miles of copy have been written about the Romero "zombie trilogy" in the years since 1968, when Night of the Living Dead-originally t.i.tled Night of the Flesh Eaters-first became notorious for depicting naked corpses on the hoof, greedily devouring, on camera, "stunt guts" (animal entrails standing in for human tripe). This poverty-budgeted black-and-white quickie offended nearly everybody and established what was then an important new foothold for graphic special effects in film: no movie since Psycho and Peeping Tom had demonstrated such an ability to grab its audience by the genitals and honk. It also kicked off Romero's career as a "real" moviemaker and, in due course, between other projects, he presented the world with the second and third acts of his zombie saga, Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Day of the Dead (1985).2 Where Night laid down the rules of game play, Dawn eagerly exploited them to become the exploding head movie of the seventies. By deftly setting its action in an iconographic (and characteristically characterless) suburban shopping mall, its theme of ident.i.ty loss through the consumer ethic resonated heavily with another basic American fear: victimization by the ma.s.ses, the Wad. Thus, Dawn became not only an a.s.s-kicking zombie movie splashed out in lurid anatomical primary colors, but also an incisive observation on the burial of the individual by the herd.

"When there's no more room in h.e.l.l, the dead will walk the Earth," intones Ken Foree in Dawn. The grand joke of the film is that most of the zombies he must battle were "dead" even before they died-they were dead inside, finding solace only as a consumer mob. He points out why the zombies are magnetized tropistically back to the mall: "This place was important in their lives." It is a conclusion not only simple but elemental: Now they only exist to consume, the shifted priority being now they only exist to consume you. Instead of being swallowed up by a mercantile culture, they now do the swallowing. Being dead gives them a more unified purpose; they exist to do what viruses do-perpetuate themselves (even as that pointedly nonspecific virus from Out There that started it all did).

Dawn also depicted its zombies as a nascent new cla.s.s, below peons, below derelicts (who were at least nominally human), below even the brain-dead (who at least didn't try to gobble you up). Yet it is clear that by the timeframe of the second movie, the walking dead are slowly learning basic tool use and retaining some functional memory.

Then came "Anubis," Phase Three.

Romero conceived a spectacular conclusion for his zombie trilogy, set in a terminal environment in which the living dead have actually become part of a New World Order. In Night, the phenomenon was freshly rooted; by Dawn, this dark new "race" was clearly giving humankind stiff compet.i.tion, so to speak. By the final third of this triathlon, the seesaw has definitely tipped in favor of the virus and its const.i.tuents. As Paul R. Gagne summed it up in The Zombies That Ate Pittsburgh: In the third and final stage of "Anubis," Romero's original story on which the trilogy was based, an army of the living dead chases a solitary human figure over a hill . . . [this] treatment took the zombie "revolution" to the point where the living dead have basically replaced humanity and have gained enough of a rudimentary intelligence to be able to perform a few basic tasks. At the same time, an elite, dictatorial politburo of humans has found that the zombies can be trained, and are exploiting them as slaves. (Prior to the film being made, it was often facetiously referred to as Zombies in the White House.)3 The hitch, of course, is that they have to be fed in order to be controlled (something alluded to in Dawn), and we all know what zombies like to eat.

Prior to filming, Day of the Dead hit a speed b.u.mp of surpa.s.sing mundanity-United Film Distributors, Romero's backers, refused to pony up the $6.5 million required for this biggest of the filmed trio unless an "R" rating could be guaranteed. Since Dawn had been a success arguably because of its lack of a rating rather than in spite of one, Day had to hew to a similar graphic, gory mark just for starters.

"For me, the Grand Guignol is part of these films, part of their character," Romero remarked to Fangoria Magazine in 1985. Accordingly, Day of the Dead was scaled down to accommodate a $3.5 million budget, and as a result was not quite the vast final curtain Romero had hoped for. On its own terms, however, it is quite stark, bleak, and depressing in its chronicle of a tiny band of surviving humans fighting legions of zombies (as well as each other) within the confines of an underground missile facility. The film successfully conveys the impression that these characters are perhaps the only "real" humans left in the whole world . . . and for that reason alone it remains essential viewing for the zombie enthusiast.

Originally, Romero's zombies were the product of white pancake and dark eye shadow, deriving from such cinematic precedents as the ghosts in the black-and-white cult cla.s.sic Carnival of Souls (1962) and the t.i.tular walking corpses in Hammer Films' Plague of the Zombies (1966), in which the dead are resurrected as slave workers for a tin mine via more time-honored Voudou methods, hence "zombis." Once the zombie archetype had been revitalized by Night of the Living Dead, it crashed face-first into the prosthetic innovations of Dawn of the Dead . . . and a new zombie mythology had grabbed hold of popular consciousness. Horror writers new and old were taken with this retrofit of the traditional-the first "new" monster since that nice Norman Bates proved that even the boy-next-door could kill you without preamble. Romero's zombies are both a logical extension of Norman and a trump on him, upping his ante.

They are also one of the first monster archetypes to spring from cinematic rather than literary roots, along with the giant j.a.panese city-stompers and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Living dinosaurs had been a staple of literary horror since Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (and later became just as fundamental to the science fiction juveniles of the 1950s); King Kong was just another dinosaur in spirit, and anyway, Bela Lugosi in White Zombie had beat Kong into the movie houses by one year.

As Hugh Lamb pointed out: The zombie . . . embodies aspects of most of the stock horror types-the use of magic and witchcraft, the dead revived (Dracula), the lurching monster (Frankenstein), and mastery over the soul that goes even beyond death. Yet for all this, the zombie has no literary roots whatsoever . . . it lacks any basic work of fiction to draw from. Voodoo zombie tales are rare. One fairly successful story is "Ballet Negre" (1965) by Charles Birkin, in which a troupe of Haitian dancers turn out to be zombies.

Romero's science-fictional rationale for the revivification of corpses-never meant to bear intensive scrutiny, but merely provided as a neat one-liner to kick off the entire phenomenon-has its antecedent in a zombie tale written by Richard Matheson in 1955, "Dance of the Dead," in which a biowar germ takes the blame for making stiffs jump up and jitterbug. One of the most unusual zombies in all of literature is found in Gordon Honeycombe's 1969 novel Neither the Sea Nor the Sand, in which love is the motivational power that keeps the dead moving (the film version followed in 1972). To travel even further back along the timeline, there's Tiffany Thayer's Dr. Arnoldi, a 1934 novel in which death just plain stops; n.o.body dies anymore for any reason, and the world begins to choke on the living. It includes one scene where a condemned man is electrocuted numerous times before his executioners give up and shove him into a giant meat grinder . . . and when the burger plops out, it's still squirming around!4 But it was the "Romero zombies"-scoffed at by purists as more properly ghouls or ghosts or cannibals or some weird potpourri of all three-that captivated idle young minds aplenty, and the influence on writers of Romero's zombie triptych was seen in its most concentrated form in the late 1980s to early 90s. In the U.S., Bantam Books issued Book of the Dead, an anthology of original zombie stories edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector in 1989. Its sequel, Still Dead, was published in 1991. The Mammoth Book of Zombies, edited by Stephen Jones, followed in 1993. Byron Preiss and John Betancourt's The Ultimate Zombie (Byron Priess Visual Publications) was also published that year. Clearly, everyone from Stephen King to Clive Barker to Anne Rice had something to say about the walking dead, and when they said it, they influenced other writers. This zombie "virus," it was clear, could infect in more ways than one.

"Zombie fiction" had become a subgenre.

So, how does one introduce the topic of social-archetype walking cadavers in the midst of the biggest carnevale ever? Ira Beaudine's best buddy summed it up one way in Midnight Graffiti #2 (Fall 1988): According to Romero, twilight brought the virus Earthward, and afore decent folks coulds witch from wrestlin to news, dead people wa sup and walkin almost as good as their survivin relatives. Problem was, what they call "peaceful co-existance" was out from the git. Y'see, we liked shootin 'em almost as much as they liked eatin us. Ira Beaudine said it best: "Why, h.e.l.l, what you got here is your ee-volution inaction. These dead p.e.c.k.e.rwoods is like new, improved human beans. They're sposta replace us, see? 'Cos this ole world just ain't fit for old puds like you 'n me no more."

Now, personally, I think the only way Ira would ever git stiff was by liquorin up. Bu the fact was, dead folks was marchin and eatin and marchin some more, and pretty soon they began to outnumber the rest of us. So just incase we hafta wave bye-bye altogether, somebody should set down a chronicle . . . .in case some 'o them s.p.a.ce aliens land and want to find out what the f.u.c.k transpired here, pardon my Frog.

Or, throw caution to the winds, as Karl Edward Wagner did, when he cued the entire apocalypse this way: "It seems that the world has been overrun by flesh-eating zombies, see-and then . . . "

Better (Dead) Homes and (Dead) Gardens George Romero pooh-poohs the popular notion that his Living Dead films hew to a grandly incisive, sardonic, and preplanned evisceration of American cultural mores. He is not responsible for much of the import read into his work by eager fans. One critical specification overlooked by rabid Dawn of the Dead acolytes-whose first exposure to the Zombie Apocalypse probably came on videotape or laserdisc-is the sheer impact this material had when it was new. If you weren't there, you don't have any idea.

In a lot of ways, my own zombie fiction began when Dawn of the Dead hit the Holly Cinema on Hollywood Boulevard. Don't look for the theatre today because you won't find it; not even the address, 6523 Hollywood Boulevard, technically exists in the wake of retrofitting the Walk of the Stars and the ravagement brought to the real estate by the Hollywood-sized folly of MetroRail. There's a shoe store there now, in the s.p.a.ce.

I recently spoke to an out-of-town guest who had been warned not to go near the Boulevard after dark; to me, a ridiculous and cowardly notion, the kind upon which fearsome urban paranoia is built. Before Dawn of the Dead struck Hollywood, I was living in a two-bedroom apartment on Normandie Avenue, south of Santa Monica Boulevard-not a neighborhood wimps would bid you to explore, even today. It's different when you live in the center of a "bad neighborhood," so-called by people who never go there.

I missed Night of the Living Dead in its original release; nearly all of my contemporaries did, catching up with it in second-run houses, cult or grind house theatres, or the deep-South "werewolf circuit" of drive-ins (then they lied about when they'd first seen it, in a kind of endless slapjack of geek credibility). Night's underground popularity far exceeded its visibility in the days before the term "independent film" had become comfortably co-opted. The first time I saw Night was at a midnight show in Chicago, across the street from the Biograph Theatre, site of John Dillinger's a.s.sa.s.sination (the Biograph was then hosting weekly conclaves of Rocky Horror Picture Show fanatics). The print of Night was a grainy, abused 16-millimeter dupe, which only added to the doc.u.mentary look and surreal experience.

But for Dawn, I was there on the first day. The Holly was then owned by a chain called SRO Theatres, which also owned the Paramount (refurbished in recent years into the Disney-centric El Capitan, its original name). In 1979, you could still find movie theatres on Hollywood Boulevard; from west to east: The Chinese, the Hollywood, the Vogue, the Egyptian, the p.u.s.s.ycat, the Holly, the Fox, the Pacific, the Vine, the Pix, and the World. Usually, new or premium features started on the west end, and worked their way east through second runs and bargain double bills. It was possible to work your way theatre-to-theatre and watch movies for more than twenty-four hours straight with no repeats, which our crew did on more than one occasion. It was also possible to do this even though most of us were normally dead-a.s.s broke, because virtually everyone worked as an usher or a.s.sistant manager at one or another of the cinemas, and favors were exchanged often and eagerly.

My Los Angeles flop was with a gang of budding graphic artists who had holed up in a threadbare one-bedroom apartment on Harold Way, one door north of the house where Bela Lugosi died. (The apartment house is still there in 2010, and looks more threateningly downscale than ever; we were in #7.) All of these guys and gals held jobs at Boulevard theatres, most for SRO (even Frank Darabont worked as an usher and ticket-taker at the Paramount, and had to wear one of those p.o.o.p-brown jackets)-Ramon Mahan, Grant Christian, Peggy Sniderman, Alex Kent, Michael Takamoto, Marcus Nickerson. At any given time there were no fewer than five people living at what we called the Harold Way Station, not counting sofa and floor sleepovers-on average, two extra people per night-plus girlfriend cameo appearances. I, an out-of-towner, generally slept directly beneath a long table fashioned from a door scavenged from the Paramount. There was a single rotary phone and chuddering refrigerator that got murdered one night when one of our roomies sought to hack away acc.u.mulated ice with a meat cleaver and hit the Freon line. The fridge actually screamed as it died . . . and for the next six weeks, we hiked to the 7-Eleven whenever we wanted a cold beverage. To do this entailed a sortie around the backside of a Jaguar dealership on Hollywood Boulevard that b.u.t.ted up on the freeway. It was a good idea to venture forth in groups, because Morlocks waited back there.

We watched every movie playing at every theatre on the Boulevard even though we were broke most of the time. a.s.sorted under-the-table deals with the ushers at competing theatres meant perpetual free admission. This was in addition to the free flow of ticket scams and back-door discounts.

The furniture at Harold Way didn't last long, either, the eighth-hand coffee table and sofa getting quickly destroyed by impromptu "wrestling practice" in the living room. The stereo components were kept imprisoned in a padlocked closet, and the carpeting had so much stuff spilled on it that we thought to file claims with the Guinness Book. One night, two guys climbed through the bedroom window to burglarize the joint. Boy, were they surprised when the light clicked on. Six of us braced them with ball bats, pipes, buck knives, and bare knucks . . . all in our underwear or in the buff. They practically s.h.i.t themselves getting out the window, and we were laughing so hard we wound up not chasing them.

About now, you are probably wondering what all this seedy autobiography has to do with Dawn of the Dead, so I'll spare you the story of the bottle rockets, the two fifths of scotch, the freeway off ramp, and the police cars.

Dawn of the Dead, bearing all the stigma of an unrated movie, landed at the Holly Cinema and played there for weeks. Our practice, once we had exhausted all auxiliary movie-going activities on the Boulevard, was to safe-house it at the Holly, since one of our own, Ramon Mahan, was then the manager. Hence, when there were no more movies to watch, we watched Dawn of the Dead again and again and again. And we witnessed the singular phenomenon of audiences literally staggering out of the theatre, gla.s.sy-eyed, disoriented, stunned, not much different from zombies on the lurch, looking like they'd been whacked in the head with one of those rubber things you use to separate your groceries on the supermarket conveyor.

We also noticed the audiences got bigger the longer the movie played. Word of mouth was getting out. Now, for us, seeing Dawn of the Dead twenty or thirty times on the Holly screen would seem to be a saturation point, yes? We had no idea. There was more submersion yet to come.

During Dawn's run at the Holly, our Harold Way crew began to break up, courtesy of Michael Takamoto scoring an entry-level job in animation at Hanna-Barbera (Mike's dad, Iwo Takamoto, was VP of the studio at the time). Mike vetted several others into newbie positions, but remember that nearly all of these guys were artists, and they rose quickly through the company ranks. They weren't washing cels for long. Suddenly, unexpectedly, and for the first time ever, they were making real money.

Inevitably, people started getting their own apartments, with bedrooms all to themselves, an unprecedented notion for us at the time, and it came to pa.s.s that the Harold Way contingent dwindled to a skeleton crew. Further new digs were procured and Harold Way had to be vacated. Due to the exigencies of leases, firsts-and-lasts, and delays, there was a period during which several of us would be technically homeless for a few days.

Unless we stayed in the bas.e.m.e.nt at the Holly Cinema. With the rats and the substantial roach population.

Moreover, available monies were sunk in apartment deposits, rendering our already-Spartan food budget nil. For three days, we subsisted on all-you-can eat popcorn from the snack bar, leftover hot dogs, and all the fountain c.o.ke we could stomach. Candy bars were off-limits, as these were inventoried, same as the soft drink cups and popcorn containers. So, providing our own cups, scarfing surplus popcorn, we eagerly awaited the close of business each evening to divide up the unpurchased snack bar hot dogs, if any. In keeping with the zombie theme that had overrun our lives, these refugee wieners-if any -had been doing the "rotisserie roll" for hours, and by the end of the day they had decomposed into a sort of greenish hue, a color that doesn't exist in nature and one which you can only see today if you watch an extremely faded trailer for the drive-in snackbar goodies of yesteryear. They also had next to no structural integrity whatsoever; if you picked one up by the end, it would fall apart. Thus we had to procure a loaf of 35 Wonder Bread to hold the dogs together long enough for consumption, since, yes, the buns were inventoried too, and off-limits.

And Dawn played on. Five-to-seven shows per day; extra screenings on weekends. And somewhere in mid-process, that movie ingrained itself indelibly on our malleable widdle brains. Holed up in the Holly, rarely seeing daylight, we absorbed each beat of the Goblin score and every line of dialogue until we felt we were actually there, stranded inside the drama along with Peter and Roger and Steven and Fran. Hearing that music or seeing any footage from Dawn has a visceral effect to this day, and I'm thankful it's not the reaction caused by the living dead hotdogs.

In 1990, Night of the Living Dead was subjected to a revisionist remake directed by Romero protege Tom Savini, the makeup artist responsible for the ground-breaking splatter effects of Dawn of the Dead. The re-make did not spark a zombie renaissance, but it did prove that some things can rise from the grave no matter how many times they are p.r.o.nounced dead. In 1998, John Russo's thirty-years-after spin on Romero's original footage (with "added scenes" shot contemporaneously) revisionist version was released to VHS and DVD as an "anniversary" edition that cheesed off a lot of true believers. In 2001, Beacon Films announced a remake, of all things, of Dawn of the Dead.

And George Romero himself has been endlessly pressured to return to the realm of his own Living Dead, despite dozens of rip-offs and retrofits of his ground breaking work. The world, it seems, can't get enough of zombies-the Romero kind-and the durability of this new icon was further demonstrated when doc.u.mentarians Jason Bareford, William Schiff, and Christian Stavrakis focused their efforts on Dawn2K, a reminiscence of Dawn of the Dead by all its princ.i.p.als and many interested observers.

The plain fact is that the aptly-christened "Romero zombies" have infiltrated the culture to the extent that even people who have never experienced the movies "know" what zombies are in short form: They're dead, they walk, they want to eat you, and they usually outnumber you. The codicil, courtesy of Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead (1985), is that they want to eat your brains, in particular, and this specification has percolated down through subsequent zombie movies from all cultures in all parts of the world. In sum, people know zombies, now, the way everybody knew what a vampire was, thirty years ago.

Zombie fiction, like it or not, for better or worse, has arrived . . . and this probably isn't the last you'll see of it.

BONE appet.i.t!

Addendum 2010: Not only was Dawn of the Dead subjected to a revisionist reboot (in 2004), but Day of the Dead was, too (in 2008) and 28 Days Later begat 28 Weeks Later. George Romero self-resurrected and begat a second zombie trilogy: Land of the Dead (2005), Diary of the Dead (2007), and Survival of the Dead (2009).

-David J. Schow.

New Year's, 2003/Revised May 2010.

[Originally from the Introduction and Afterword of Zombie Jam, Subterranean Press, 2003].

Deaditorial Note:.

The World Has Been Overrun By Flesh-Eating Zombies, See-And Then . . ..

Mr. Schow was, in fact, not only correct about not seeing the last of zombie fiction, 2003 turned out to be the dawn of yet another era in the popularity of the walking dead.

Despite the early 1990s boomlet in short zombie fiction, the icon's popularity was confined primarily to diehard horror fans. By the mid-1990s horror itself, as a commercially viable marketing category, dwindled. New York publishers produced less horror while specialized presses published for what was evidently a niche market.

From 1993 through 2003, zombies still lurked in horror literature-popping up in the occasional short story or novella here and there. Zombies also shambled into a few novels. Outside of Eric Powell's droll The Goon series (2003) and The Walking Dead written by Robert Kirkman with art by (originally) Tony Moore (series began in 2003) zombies weren't notably present in comics. James Lowder teamed up with Eden Studios and their zombie-related role-playing game to produce three anthologies: The Book of All Flesh (2001), The Book of More Flesh (2002), and The Book of Final Flesh (2003).

Gaming, in fact, provided the prime conduit for zombies to continue eating our brains during those earliest years of the twenty-first century. The immensely popular video game Resident Evil debuted in 1996 and, by 2003, had been followed by three sequels, a remake of the original and a prequel. S.D. Perry wrote novelizations of the games and the first of the Resident Evil movies was released in 2002.

Further film success came in 2002 with Danny Boyle's Romero-inspired film 28 Days Later (2002).

But the true resurgence of zombie literature began in September 2003 when The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead, auth.o.r.ed by Max Brooks, was released by Crown. With his parody of a survival guide, Brooks defined, detailed, doc.u.mented "historical" encounters, and supplied handy tips and tactics for humans to survive-evidently inevitable-attacks by hordes of the walking dead. Zombies had escaped the confines of the horror genre and invaded the mainstream.

As Stefan Dziemianowicz summed it up in a Publishers Weekly article of July 13, 2009: Three years and hundreds of thousands of units [of The Zombie Survival Guide] sold later, Brooks's publisher . . . released World War Z, a no-bones-about-it serious horror novel chronicling a global zombie pandemic enabled by contemporary social and political intrigues . . . The success of Brooks's books awakened the mainstream reading audience to the relevance of zombies. The same year that World War Z hit the bestseller list, David Wellington saw Monster Island, a zombie holocaust tale, published under the Thunder's Mouth imprint. The book had begun as a novel serialized for free at the author's blog site, and its instant notoriety netted him a print contract for the trilogy that ultimately came to comprise Monster Nation (2006) and Monster Planet (2007). By the time Scribner published Stephen King's Cell (2006), which tells of all but a fraction of the world's populace being turned into rampaging zombies by a sinisterly manipulated cellphone pulse, the zombie was well established in publishing culture . . .

Then came Quirk Books' Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a tongue-in-(festering)-cheek splice of Jane Austen gentility with zombie cannibal shenanigans coauth.o.r.ed by Seth Grahame-Smith. With his outrageous riffing on Jane Austen's painfully proper prose . . . [which] cut the velvet ropes keeping zombie genre fiction away from the literary cla.s.sics . . . With more than 600,000 copies in print, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a bestseller that has already inspired its share of genre splices and revisionist zombie literature.

Between The Zombie Survival Guide and the Austin/zombie mash-up (released in March 2009) the zombie icon has again risen from its (shallow) grave, infected the world, and attained unparalleled popularity.

The Dead Walk Among Us . . . Again!

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, zombie fiction became a force to contend with in both novel form and short stories. In the short form the walking dead started filling anthologies. The two most notable: John Joseph Adams selected some of the best zom-themed short fiction published 1975-2008 with The Living Dead (Night Shade Books, 2008). Stephen Jones complemented his 1993 The Mammoth Book of Zombies (Carroll & Graf) with The Dead that Walk (Ulysses Press, 2009).

The hefty and stylish Zombies: Encounters With the Hungry Dead, edited by John Skipp (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2009) was another notable compilation. Skipp had earlier found specialty press publication for Mondo Zombie (Cemetery Dance, 2006), an anthology that had originally been planned as a third Book of the Dead in 1991.

Minuscule press zombie anthologies were numerous and the quality of most was, at best, mediocre. Three exceptions were Kim Paffenroth's The World is Dead and History Is Dead, as well as The Best of All Flesh, a compilation of stories from the three earlier Books of Flesh by editor James Lowder. All three were somewhat uneven, but still stood above their compet.i.tion.

Bentley Little published an "old school zombie" horror novel featuring mindless, walking dead zombies: The Walking (2002). Tim Waggoner and Brain Keene overcame a primary problem of developing novels based on zombies-mindless, empty husks, with no personality make for poor protagonists or antagonists-and introduced intelligent zombies in their novels.