Zombies Go Mainstream… and it Doesn’t Bite
Lately, television and film have been flooded with sexy charactertures of Hollywood monsters. Vampires have become the glittering fantasies in teenage girl’s dreams and werewolves are now shirtless sex icons with rippling abs and wicked tats.
All in all, this isn’t that surprising because vampires and werewolves are inherently sexy. They are young and beautiful forever with an unbearable urge to ravage you, and in the case of vampires, literally suck the life out of you. These monsters have now softened up, but the basis remains… they are ageless, sexy and overwhelmingly attractive to young audiences. Zombies are not.
So, how have zombies become the next new/old big thing in Hollywood? In the past, the living undead were relegated to low-budget horror flicks whose main goal was to see how much red-colored corn syrup they could splash on the screen… and it was awesome. With the release of Marc Forster’s World War Z starring Brad Pitt last week zombies have officially gone mainstream.
The genre was created by George A. Romero when he released the ground-breaking late-night horror film Night of the Living Dead in 1968. In the years following, Romero became the end-all-be-all in zombie lore and culture, releasing smash zombie hits every few years including Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead.
In more recent years, zombies have taken on all new facets. Oscar-winner Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later… made zombies terrifyingly fast and bloodthirsty. The Simon Pegg horror comedy Shaun of the Dead made zombies a hilarious parody and the subsequent Hollywood take on the zombie horror comedy Zombieland finally gave the genre a budget.
AMC’s The Walking Dead has made zombies a weekly thing for horror fans and an actual zombie culture featuring books, conventions and massive amounts of makeup have all sprung from the small black and white movie made by Romero for a measly $114,000.
Despite the genres hugely successful history, World War Z is the first major mainstream project to take zombies seriously. Like Boyle, Forster’s monsters are fast and unrelenting, but the twist is in the funding the film received.
With a star like Pitt ready to face the undead and a budget that is more than 100 times what Romero was working with in ’68, Forster is able to show us how the rest of the world would handle the zombie apocalypse. In most cases, our heroes are relegated to a single location, a house, a mall or if they’re lucky an entire dead city, but Pitt has more pull than that.
As former UN Investigator Gerry Lane, he is recruited to fly around the world to discover the origins of this new and fast growing disease. With America faltering, he heads to Korea, Israel and Europe in response to the chaos.
It’s probably important to point out World War Z is PG-13 and all of the gore that is typically associated with the genre is cut and replaced by high-tension moments and off-screen screams, but the spirit still remains.
The interest lies in seeing how far the stumbling monsters Romero created so long ago who were hungry for brains and other yummy innards have come. Officially, zombies have become mainstream and there is no coming back from that distinction, but maybe it isn’t totally a bad thing. Maybe even next time we’ll get to see an A-list actor get his brains chomped on.
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