The Zombie Next Door May Be the Scariest of All

By BRENT STAPLES

Published: May 11, 2013

The term “zombie” has traditionally referred to a corpse that has been reanimated through supernatural means and rendered into an automaton that does its master’s will. Look it up in a dictionary and you will find the traditional definition firmly in place. But pop culture, of course, has its own definition.

The cannibalistic, free-agent zombies that come pouring out of comics, video games, novels, movies and television have little in common with their languid, sleepwalking predecessors. They come into being not through magic, but through a pernicious, fast-acting pathogen. Ceaselessly devouring the living, surging over the landscape like a plague, these hopped-up creatures have become pop culture’s designated agents of the apocalypse.

The zombie as we know it owes its life to the filmmaker George Romero, whose 1968 black-and-white classic, “Night of the Living Dead,” is listed in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, reserved for culturally and historically important works. Filmed on a bare-bones budget, the film depicts a party of ghouls laying siege to a generally detestable group of human beings trapped in the now famous Pennsylvania farmhouse.

As the film critic Tony Williams points out in his fascinating book “The Cinema of George A. Romero,” this landmark movie represented the start of something new, and not just because its zombies were flesh eaters.

Before the late 1960s, Mr. Williams writes, zombies in American movies were usually black and often associated with voodoo. After this period, the monsters generally looked more like the townspeople — they were male and female, young and old, ethnically diverse. By making the monsters appear more like the folks next door, the director broadened their appeal.

Mr. Romero thumbed his nose at Hollywood conventions. The filmmaker cast an erudite, well-traveled African-American actor named Duane Jones as the hero, at a time when it was still rare for black actors to play substantial roles in films that were not explicitly about race. Beyond that, none of the living who find refuge in the farmhouse survive to the film’s final frame. Even the young lovers, who would customarily serve as symbols of hope by living to see another day, are incinerated in a truck fire. Their charred corpses are devoured by zombies who behave in the manner of people stuffing themselves at a barbecue. Here, as elsewhere in Mr. Romero’s work, the walking dead are used to mock human excess.

When the zombies in “Night of the Living Dead” finally overrun the farmhouse, a hysterical young woman is seized and hauled into the horde by the living-dead version of her brother, who had been killed earlier in the film. This scene, played out in many ways in many movies, crystallizes what the novelist Colson Whitehead has described as the elementally terrifying moment when the familiar turns suddenly murderous and “your relatives and your friends, your neighbors and the friendly folks who run the dry cleaners reveal themselves as the monsters they’ve always been, beneath the lie of civilization, of affection.”

Stories about people who either adjust to the new reality — or struggle mightily to deny it — are the stock-in-trade of “The Walking Dead,” a hugely popular cable television show on AMC that depicts a band of survivors struggling to stay alive in a postapocalyptic world of bloodthirsty zombies. Based on a comic of the same name, the show is essentially a soap opera. It has performed so well in the 18-to-49 demographic that it has spawned a companion talk show — “The Talking Dead” — where the main show is the topic of discussion.

With zombies more popular than ever, Hollywood is, of course, looking for ways to cash in. The genre works well as comedy — as in the British film “Shaun of the Dead.” But there are limits to how far this material can be stretched and to the forms in which it can be successfully packaged. Until now, zombie flicks have been mostly low-budget affairs, partly because the material was seen in Hollywood as having marginal appeal, but also because the formula that drives the most successful zombie narratives generally requires small-scale intimacy rather than epic scope.

A cast of thousands fleeing through the streets of Tokyo is axiomatic while Godzilla is razing the city to the ground. But even when the zombie apocalypse rages around the globe and threatens to wipe out the human species, its effects are best shown with a Chekhovian closeness — say, around a specific breakfast table or in the back seat of a specific family station wagon, where a doting and affable Aunt Betty turns suddenly bad and chomps a huge glob of flesh out of the nearest relative’s face.

Can the zombie trope flourish on the blockbuster scale? The question will be answered next month when Paramount releases the very expensive and long awaited zombie epic “World War Z,” starring and produced by Brad Pitt. It is based on the much-loved 2006 novel of the same name by Max Brooks, which describes in retrospect a zombie apocalypse that threatens all humanity.

The film’s cost is estimated to be about $200 million, writes Laura Holson in the June issue of Vanity Fair — or more than 200 times the budget for “Night of the Living Dead.” It would need to bring in $400 million worldwide just to break even.

“World War Z” might bring a fresh vantage point to a vintage subject. But for those of us raised in the Romero tradition, the optimal setting for the zombie story will always be the isolated farmhouse where the living hunker down as the night and the dead come closing in.

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