By The Landlord
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”
Elizabeth: "Your balls, Mr. Darcy?"
Darcy: "They belong to you, Miss Bennett.” – Seth Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
“You are so lucky
that I cannot remember
how to use doorknobs.” – Ryan Mecum, Zombie Haiku: Good Poetry for Your...Brains
“If I were a zombie
I'd never eat your brain
I'd just want your heart.” – Stephanie Mabey
“Culture is just a shambling zombie that repeats what it did in life; bits of it drop off, and it doesn't appear to notice.” – Alan Moore
“You shouldn’t have done that, Dave.” – Steven Ramirez, Tell Me When I'm Dead
“Bite first, ask questions later.” – John Austin, So Now You're a Zombie: A Handbook for the Newly Undead
“I always thought of the zombies as being about revolution, one generation consuming the next … I liked the monster within the idea, the zombies being us. Zombies are the blue-collar monsters.” – George A. Romero
It’s a feeling I have most mornings. Not, I hasten to add, with an urge to eat human flesh, but as groaning, half functioning still barely-human, eye-rolling twitching-corpse, shuffling and stumbling, with some semi-remembered, hardwired instinct, to go towards the kitchen. But, in a bigger sense, without realising it, in our daily behaviour, in mankind’s own marauding history on planet Earth, drawn to shopping and mass consumption, could all of us already be zombies, sleepwalking into our own apocalypse? It’s certainly worth bearing in mind, if not actually in brain.
So then, this week we turn our heads, ears, ears and hands, hopefully without any of these dropping off, to the topic of zombies and other mostly human monsters of the undead. This could in theory include horror movie mummies too, and possibly even vampires, but whether the latter actually die before they change to super-charged blood suckers, is uncertain, so let’s try to concentrate on songs about zombies and the like. Hopefully this topic will bite, and you, dear Song Bar punters, can some flesh on it, or possible strip it back to the bare bones.
There’s something endlessly fascinating about zombies. They may be slow, but just keeping coming at you, with a sole purpose in life (or death). You can’t help but admire their single-minded focus.
Coming to get you. Night of the Living Dead.
The term zombie comes from Haitian folklore, where a dead body is thought to be reanimated by magic, but later depictions in have the cause as everything from nuclear radiation to parasites, or scientific accidents, reflecting some major flaw in society.
The English word “zombie” or indeed “zombi” first appears in print in an 1819 history of Brazil by the poet Robert Southey, and the word is thought to have its origin in West Africa in one of the Bantu languages spoken by the Kongo people living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo - nzambi (god) and zumbi or nzumbi (fetish, or indeed vumbi (mvumbi) (ghost, revenant, corpse that still retains the soul), or nvumbi (body without a soul).
Later, W. B. Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929) was a sensationalised account of a narrator who encounters voodoo cults in Haiti and their resurrected thralls. But while the idea of the dead coming back to life was nothing new in many cultures from Egypt to Japan to Mexico, and arguably Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein was the first and most famous example in western culture of meddling in science to bring back the dead, the term zombie itself was slow to rise up from the ground in popular culture, but when it did, audiences were greedy for it, literally falling over themselves for more.
A strange way to conduct ourselves …
Things were never more ripe for a zombie apocalypse than in 1968 when America was in a height of social nd political turmoil. After the so-called summer of love in 1967, hell seemed to have been unleashed. With the killing of Dr Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy, the Vietnam War escalating, heightened tensions at home, violence, racial and social inequality, it felt like the ground was opening up. And out of that hole came George A. Romero’s low-budget, indie revolutionary breakthrough, Night of the The Living Dead, described by the Los Angeles Times as “An irreducible metaphor for a country swallowing itself alive”:
Within a classic American rural, farming community out off the darkness they came, flesh eating flesh, spreading from one person to another, the nuclear family literally tearing itself apart. Holed up together, the survivors argue and die. A young couple try to escape but end up burning. White turns on black; black turns on white. Romero's young lead, played by African-American actor Duane Jones, is the hero of the film, he overcomes the zombies. But of course, most poignantly, he ends up being shot dead by white vigilantes just before the credits roll. It’s an image that was powerful then, but it just as powerful and relevant now, in these same times of climate meltdown and Black Lives Matter.
There were tonnes of copycat movies in the 1970s, but Romero deliberately waited 10 years for his next, set in a modern urban environment, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead. “When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.”
This time the survivors were holed up in a shopping mall, the undead roaming on its wide, consumerist aisles.
"Why do they come here? [to the shopping mall]
"Some kind of memory, instinct - this was an important place in their lives."
George A. Romero is the undisputed the king of the zombie film. He has many amusing and insightful further thoughts on his genre, which hopefully can help inspire some song nominations.
“With 'Dawn,' I wanted the slick look; I wanted to bring out the nature of the shopping center, the retail displays, the mannequins. There are times when maybe you reflect that the mannequins are more attractive but less real - less sympathetic, even - than the zombies. Put those kinds of images side by side, and you raise all sorts of questions.”
“Zombies to me don't represent anything in particular. They are a global disaster that people don't know how to deal with.”
“I sympathise with the zombies and am not even sure they are villains. To me they are this earth-changing thing. God or the devil changed the rules, and dead people are not staying dead.
“I can't really make fun of zombies. They're not liars. They're not cheats.”
“A zombie film is not fun without a bunch of stupid people running around and observing how they fail to handle the situation.”
“I’ll never get sick of zombies. I just get sick of producers.”
Romero made several more zombie films, with Day of the Dead his favourite, but the genre went into decline in the 1980s and 90s, though of course there were some exceptions, including Peter Jackson’s incredible 1992 New Zealand comedy horror Braindead also titled Dead Alive, a parody of traditional family life:
But by the turn of the millennium, it made a comeback in both film and fiction. Perhaps that’s something to do with the end-is-nigh association of that epoch turn. As Max Brooks puts it: “Zombies are apocalyptic. I think that's why people love them because we're living in, not apocalyptic times, but I think we're living in fear of the apocalyptic times.”
Danny Boyle’s 2002 film 28 Days Later was a shockingly brilliant return to the genre, but while many people think of it as a zombie film, Romero points out that it isn’t. “Zombies can’t run!” He says. And “people called '28 Days' and '28 Weeks' zombie movies, and they're not! It's some sort of virus; they're not dead.” Fair point, but don’t those shots of empty London streets remind you of more recent times?
While is most certainly a tribute to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s 2004 Shaun of the Dead for me still stands up as a brilliant horror comedy, packed with great jokes and scenarios, with Pegg as the hapless shop assistant who is so hungover one morning he doesn’t notice the situation on a trip to the shops, and that fabulous scene where he and his best friend Ed, played by Nick Frost, resort to throwing vinyl at the slow-moving assailants, but still find themselves frantically arguing about what to keep from Shaun’s collection:
There’s been an avalanche of zombie films, books and TV this century, pastiches and parodies, from the clever Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, to the endless streaming behemoth The Walking Dead, but one of the more interesting is In The Flesh, the BBC series in where after the so-callee Rising of the dead, zombies are re-introduced into society after treatment but, while still themselves, are seen as outcasts, and the plot centres around the sensitive teenager Kieren Walker who lives in a Lancashire village trying to deal with others’ prejudice about his condition.
Another more screwball TV comedy worth checking out is the more recent Santa Clarita Diet, in which Drew Barrymore plays an estate agent who is both alive and dead, very high functioning, with a flesh-eating drive that causes her family some very unusual problems. It’s another attempt to humanise the zombie as a sympathetic character within the modern, consumerist world.
There’s a marauding crowd of hungry guests staggering into the Bar with more to say on this subject. I’m already running out of tomato juice as they scream for yet more bloody marys. Here are a few adding more liquid to the subject.
“There is a universal fascination with the living dead. There is more to a zombie story that a bunch of corpses attacking the living. The real power of such a story lies with the undercurrent of hopelessness compounded by a very real instinct to survive,” reckons Julie Ann Dawson.
“Zombies are not just fictional creatures that devour the flesh of the living. They also include those who follow the words of others without thinking for themselves. This world is falling apart. I don’t think anyone can disagree with that. People live in their twenty-mile-radius realities and don’t notice the world happening around them, until it finally breaks down their front door,” adds Joseph McGinnis, reading from his book, The Weathering, Dawn of the Apocalypse.
“If there had been zombies on the iceberg when the Titanic hit it, that would have made a much better movie, chips in Chuck Palahniuk with no shortage of mischief.
“I have an idea for a movie called 'The Walken Dead' which is about a town where, instead of zombies, everyone becomes Christopher Walken,” says Robin Williams. That’s one film I’d like to see made.
But with all of this zombie action in other genres, can we now translate that into songs? The more I dig in the dirt the more I can find rising from it. So to finish, first let’s enjoy not a song about zombies but one by The Zombies, with a title you could interpret in a zombie brain context:
And finally, what better way to finish than, with the great Kenneth Williams as mad Frankenstein-type scientist from Carry On Screaming, in which he accidentally re-animates his Egyptian mummy, Rubbatiti, ending in that immortal line: “Frying tonight”
So then, who will be our hero, with pickaxe or other implement in hand, battling through all these zombie and undead songs. We are led, no doubt heroically, by our very own master of the Marconium, the marvellous Marco den Ouden! Place your songs in comments below in time for deadline (deadline indeed) on Monday night (probably UK time 11pm) for playlists published next week. Time to flesh things out. It’s going to be horribly good.
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