Zombie Talk

Zombie Talk interviews the producer of the upcoming UK-based remake of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD.

Welcome to Zombieland...

Not the movie, which I'm seeing tonight, but the world in which we live.

The Zombie Explosion

Twenty years ago, it seemed like all we had were three Romero movies, a few Italian oddities, CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS, and that funny one that convinced the public that zombies love to eat brains. In the printed realm, there was Skipp and Spector's BOOK OF THE DEAD, and Philip Nutman's novel-length expansion of his short story, Wet Work. DEAD/ALIVE came along and moistened things up a bit, but, beyond that, there really wasn't much for a zombie fan to chow down upon...

Today, one could say that our cup hath runneth over: zombies are everywhere. In less than five years, we've gotten three new Romero movies. Over the past decade, Skipp, Spector, and Nutman have been scooted down the shelf to make room for tomes by Max Brooks, Brian Keene, Kim Paffenroth, and a shambling and varied host of other zombie novels.

Romero predicted the zombie apocalypse, and it is here: the living dead are everywhere. Slim pickings have given way to an embarrassment of Rhodes-style open-belly feasts, and one has to wonder: how much is too much? Is the grue-filled balloon about to burst?

Yes and no.

Gamers have shown no sign of zombie fatigue. After a decade, Resident Evil--the spark behind today's zombie craze--is still going strong, and its progeny (LEFT 4 DEAD, DEAD SPACE, DEAD RISING) are among the most popular games on the market.

In movie theaters, zombies have yet to take a serious chunk out of the box office. Films like [REC] and DIARY OF THE DEAD receive limited theatrical runs, and a modern classics like SHAUN OF THE DEAD produce less-than-stellar box office numbers. Zack Snyder's remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD remains the reigning zombie box office king, and it's popularity is due more to the fact that it's a balls-out action packed horror film than to the fact that the movie-going public at large were champing at the bit to see zombies on the big screen.

As far as books are concerned, the public will move on. Some new trend will pass over the cultural landscape, and a few major publishers will get burned, having dumped too much money into a zombie book simply because Pride and Prejudice and Zombies sold well, and Max Brooks may very well never outsell The Zombie Survival Guide.

There will, however, always be an audience for zombie books. Zombies have niche appeal, and I don't believe the core audience--the folks who purchased 20,000 copies of DAY BY DAY ARMAGEDDON, for example--is going anywhere. They've been around for quite some time, and while their numbers are not strong enough to put anyone on the NY Times Bestsellers List, they are more than powerful enough to keep several small presses afloat for the foreseeable future.

Outside of games, movies, and books, zombies continue to disappoint nut-jobs the world over by simply insisting upon remaining fictional.

Big Book News

We're about to find out just how strong the zombie book buying audience really is: George A. Romero, the real Big Daddy, has reportedly been paid a $300,000 advance by UK publisher Headline to pen two zombie novels. The first, aptly titled The Living Dead, will reveal "the origin of the zombie realm," and will give us "glimpses of increasing chaos from around the globe."

A decade ago, Romero dipped his toe into these waters, with a serialized e-book, the somewhat Vonnegutian The Death of Death. The plug was pulled on that project one hundred pages in, but elements of the story have shown up Romero's recent work, and I suspect the minute-by-minute, around-the-globe time-line style of Death will carry over into The Living Dead and its sequel.

Click here for more.

Zombieland

Thanks to the fine folks at Sony Pictures and Moroch, I'll be attending a press screening of ZOMBIELAND tonight. Based on the trailers alone, I have pretty much decided that this is my favorite film of all time.

Stupendous advance word isn't helping, but I should probably lower my expectations...

Do You Have the Crazy?

The remake onslaught continues with THE CRAZIES, a movie "loosely based" on George A. Romero's little-seen original.

Aside from Justin Welborn, star of THE SIGNAL*, I have no idea what to expect from this movie. Romero is listed as Executive Producer, but I don't know if he had any real input.

Here's the teaser poster. Click to make it all nice and big.

*Probably the best movie ever made about a town going nuts, as well as my choice for best horror film of the past twenty years.

Pics from SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD

FearNet.com has a gallery of fresh pics from the set of George A. Romero's newest project Survival of the Dead.

Bon appetit!

More SURVIVAL footage, reviews OF THE DEAD

Here's some more SURVIVAL footage. And here. I'm not sure if these are merely promo pieces or actual clips from the film (maybe the opening, pre-credits?), but I dig them. They're vintage Romero in many ways. I love the cutaways to the puddle of blood.

The first reviews of the film have gone live. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter have lots to say about Romero's latest-- the former is pretty scathing, the latter quite positive. Neither are very insightful nor are they of much use to me either way, as my ass is already in the seat.

28 Days Later to be expanded into comic series

Hitting stands today, BOOM! Studios comics is producing the continuing story of Selena, hardcase heroine from Danny Boyle's impressive 2002 foray into zombies. (That's right; I said zombies. You pedants can argue as I once did that we're talking about "infected", and that remains a notable distinction within the movie, but it's foolish to argue from some biological technicality that 28 Days Later is not, for all intents and purposes, A Zombie Movie, or that it should be removed from the company of zombie movies. We're talking about fantasy creatures: biological details are irrelevant, but the critical elements--particularly the psychological effects on the humans--are identical. It's like saying your book about unicorns is not about unicorns because their horns grow back when hacked off. For fuck's sake, even the seminal modern zombie film, Romero's Night of the Living Dead, does not feature "zombies" in the strict and original Voodoo sense--nor does any of its descendants--but I don't see many people having kittens over that misattribution. The umbrella of the definition and category expands as we see fit, and I see this inclusion as extremely fucking fit.)

Newsarama has a full preview.

Personally, I'm not wildly impressed with the art, but I'll probably pick it up just to see for sure if The Walking Dead has any competition.

Again with the Boobs

A few quickies:

My review for THE BOOBY HATCH will appear at Fear Zone within the next week or two. As far as Romero-related oddities go, this one may be the oddest: it's a post Latent Image softcore sex comedy directed by John Russo and Rudy Ricci.

It also stars Ricci, who you'll recognize as one of the bikers in DAWN OF THE DEAD, as well as Russ "Johnny" Streiner and David "Flyboy" Emge.

I haven't watched it yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if some other familiar faces pop up...

In other news:

John Harrison recently talked to Fangoria regarding his score for George's new DEAD flick:

"I don’t want to write a score for …OF THE DEAD by starting off with ominous horror movie music, atonal , even pseudo-industrial sounds that are cliché in horror films today. To do that would deliver what everybody expects…this is not that kind of movie. This is something entirely different."

Sounds promising. Follow me for the entire interview.

"I do not have a title for the movie yet,” Romero told Fango this month at the Weekend of Horrors in Chicago. “Right now it’s just called …OF THE DEAD, although I kind of wish I could just name it DIARY OF THE DEAD PART 2. What I can tell you about the story is that it is going to be focused on what is happening in the world right now. The atmosphere is a little different after the Bush years, but I still sense some uncertainty."

Some uncertainty? George Romero, ladies and gentlemen, this year's recipient of the Understatement of the Year Award.

Resident Evil: Degeneration

We owe the current zombie craze to Resident Evil.

Released in 1996, the Sony Playstation chiller created the survival horror game genre, spawned several sequels across multiple platforms, produced a string of imitators, and caught the ever-watchful eye of Hollywood.

It was obvious from the start that George Romero's Dead films inspired the video games, so it only made sense that he would be involved with the film. George's Resident Evil screenplay (the draft I read, anyhow--there were several) wasn't fantastic, but it was a damn sight better than the mess we got in March of 2002. That it featured a pack of zombie dogs devouring a character named "Russo" makes it some kind of unsung classic. But it was not to be.

The director of Dawn of the Dead was out. In his place, the director of... Mortal Kombat and Soldier? Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil was lousy, but for the first time in over a decade, there were zombies on the big screen, man. That alone was kind of cool.

Money talks, and though Resident Evil didn't set the box office ablaze, it performed well enough worldwide to triple its meager $33 million dollar budget. By the time its utterly rancid sequel hit screens in September of 2004, 28 Days Later and the Dawn of the Dead remake had already made it clear: zombie movies were back.

Five years after the first Resident Evil film resurrected the living dead on the silver screen, George A. Romero had returned twice to the genre he created--this after twenty years had passed since Day of the Dead.

The success of Resident Evil also brought new life to the world of zombie fiction, dormant since Philip Nutman's excellent novel Wet Work, itself an expansion of his short story of the same name, found in Skipp and Spector's groundbreaking Book of the Dead. By 1998, zombie short stories (many of them very poorly written) were multiplying online, found chiefly at the Homepage of the Dead, a site frequented by longtime Romero fans who loved to play Resident Evil and Resident Evil fans whose love of the game prompted them to seek out Romero's films.

By 2000, the demand for zombie novels was growing, a demand initially answered by self-published writer Darrin Brent Patterson. Project Phoenix: Dead Rising, a nightmare abomination of bad writing, borrowed elements from both Romero and Resident Evil. Appropriately enough, the genre was eating itself.

Eight years down the road, thanks mostly to the small press, there are more zombie novels than any fan frowning in confusion over Project Phoenix could have hoped for, many of them far better than the shoddy fan fictions that announced their coming, and some not much different. Like the walking corpses within their pages, they just keep on coming, with no end in sight.

Zombies are everywhere now: on the big screen, the small screen, in video games and comic books, on toy shelves and book shelves. And George Romero is up at bat again for the third time in five years.

Thank you, Resident Evil.*

Oh, before I forget: Here are the first eight minutes for the fourth Resident Evil film, the all CG Degeneration. I'm not going to say it looks good, but it certainly looks... interesting, if a little lifeless and uninspired. The motion-capture work is convincing, the fluidity of which goes a long way toward making the textures and the facial animation all the more unnatural. Unless you're a hardcore fan, you'll probably just want to skip the eight minute clip and go straight to the Age Restricted Red Band clip. That's where the fun stuff is, anyhow.

While not real, Claire Redfield no doubt has a glowing future as a Japanese pop sensation.

*If you had anything to do the 30th Anniversary Special Edition of Night of the Living Dead, well, then... someone should kick you in the nuts.

FearZone ...of the Dead

The Dead Don't Die isn't just a zombie blog. Starting in December, it's also a monthly column for Greg Lamberson's FearZone. First up will be an interview with Don May, Jr. of Synapse Films. We'll discuss his involvement with Night of the Living Dead, from Elite's 25th Anniversary laser-disc to the recent 40th Anniversary DVD, as well the upcoming Definitive Document of the Dead.

Also on the horizon, extensive coverage of George A. Romero's latest living dead opus, known simply as ...of the Dead. Early reports suggest that the title is a placeholder. Others have referred to the film as Island of the Dead, an unlikely title, with the remake of RKO's Karloff chiller, Isle of the Dead, on the horizon. I hope ...of the Dead sticks. It has a nice Steinbeckian ring.

After a few months of confusion and erroneous reports (It's a sequel to Diary of the Dead/It's not a sequel to Diary of the Dead/It's about an island of intelligent "zombie overlords" who cull the living), we're finally getting some solid and reliable news on the film's storyline.

Direct from Voltage Pictures:

On a small island off North America's coast, the dead rise to menace the living. Yet the islanders can´t bring themselves to exterminate their loved ones, despite the growing danger from those they once held dear.

A rebel among them hunts down all the zombies he can find, only to be banished from the island for assassinating his neightbors and friends.

On the mainland, bent on revenge, he encounters a small band of survivors in search of an oasis on which to build a new life. Barely surviving an attack of ravenous flesh eaters, they commandeer a zombie infested ferry and sail to the island.

There, to their horror, they discover that the locals have chained the dead inside their homes, pretending to live "normal" lives with bloody consequences. What ensues is a desperate struggle for survival and the answer of a question never posed in Romero's Dead films:

Can the living ever live in peace with the dead?

Somehow, I don't think things will turn out like the end of Shaun of the Dead.

Neither as ambitious and compromised as Land of the Dead nor as experimental as Diary of the Dead, Romero's latest is the most promising entry in the series since Day of the Dead.