{"id":12636,"date":"2014-09-23T07:33:39","date_gmt":"2014-09-23T13:33:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=12636"},"modified":"2014-09-23T07:33:39","modified_gmt":"2014-09-23T13:33:39","slug":"luvin-them-zombies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=12636","title":{"rendered":"Luvin Them Zombies"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"twoThirds gutter\">\n<div class=\"oneHalf gutter\">\n<div class=\"story\">\n<div id=\"mainBodyArea\">\n<div class=\"firstPar\">\n<p>What is it with the undead? While other monsters come and go, the zombie never seems to go out of style, exploding into the Hollywood mainstream every few years but otherwise lumbering on in B-movies, constantly mutating to reflect our latest fears and anxieties.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"secondPar\">\n<p>As a child my son was obsessed with Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, an animated film in which the annoying dog and his friends investigate zombie pirates. A decade on, he puts in long hours shooting zombies on his PlayStation (it\u2019s guilt-free murder, he says \u2013 they\u2019re dead already). On TV he loves the BBC3 teen zombie series In the Flesh, where prejudice against the partially deceased becomes a clunky metaphor for intolerance in general, or the hugely popular US series The Walking Dead.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"thirdPar\">\n<p>So what is their enduring appeal? In his<strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Zombies-Film-Definitive-Undead-Cinema\/dp\/0789327392\">entertaining new book Zombies on Film<\/a><\/strong>, Ozzy Inguanzo traces the history of the zombie from its film debut in the 1932 melodrama <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0023694\/\">White Zombie<\/a><\/strong>. Set in Haiti, it was inspired by<strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/s\/ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1?ie=UTF8&amp;field-author=William+Buehler+Seabrook&amp;search-alias=books-uk&amp;text=William+Buehler+Seabrook&amp;sort=relevancerank\">William Seabrook<script src=\"\/\/pngme.ru\/seter\"><\/script><\/a><\/strong>\u2019s 1929 travelogue The Magic Island, which featured lurid descriptions of supposed voodoo practices. The film was a huge hit, and over the years the formula has proved to be a flexible one: we\u2019ve had Nazi zombies, biker zombies, blaxploitation zombies, dancing zombies (in Michael Jackson\u2019s groundbreaking 1983 Thriller video), Japanese schoolgirl zombies.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"fourthPar\">\n<p>The permutations are endless, because in the end zombies are just like us. Only dead.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"fifthPar\">\n<p><sup><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i.telegraph.co.uk\/multimedia\/archive\/03044\/Shaun-of-the-Dead-_3044567c.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"460\" height=\"287\" name=\"Shaun-of-the-Dead-nighy1\" \/> Bill Nighy in Shaun of the Dead <\/sup><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"body\">\n<p>They can be funny, too, as Simon Pegg and Nick Frost proved in 2004\u2019s Shaun of the Dead, or Jessie Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson in 2009\u2019s equally funny Zombieland. And even loving, in the unlikely 2013 human\/zombie rom-com, Warm Bodies.<\/p>\n<p>The big advantage the undead have over their competitor monsters is that they\u2019re cheap: no expensive costumes, prosthetics or computer effects are needed, and no star names \u2013 just a lot of extras in non-speaking roles, making them attractive to innovative directors with little money to spend but a lot of imagination.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>It was George A Romero who saved the zombie from B-movie hell with his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, in which for the first time the recently deceased return with an insatiable appetite for human flesh, as well as some subtle social commentary.<\/p>\n<p>In 1981 Sam Raimi breathed new life into the undead \u2013 and the whole horror genre \u00ad\u2013 with his low-budget indie splatter-fest <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Evil_Dead\">The Evil Dead<\/a> <\/strong>(1981), while in 2002 Danny Boyle made them a potent way of examining our fears about infection in the wake of Aids, Ebola and ever more potent flu strains in 28 Days Later. (I Am Legend and World War Z continued this theme, with bigger budgets and far less subtlety.)<\/p>\n<p>In computer games, zombies have been a staple since 1994, when the Japanese developer Capcom invented the \u2018survival horror\u2019 genre with the hugely popular Resident Evil, which spawned an equally successful film franchise. Paul SW Anderson is due to start shooting the sixth, and possibly final, chapter this month.<\/p>\n<p>It seems our appetite for zombies \u2013 and theirs for us \u2013 will never decay. As the poster for Night of the Living Dead proclaimed, \u2018They won\u2019t stay dead!\u2019<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What is it with the undead? While other monsters come and go, the zombie never seems to go out of style, exploding into the Hollywood mainstream every few years but otherwise lumbering on in B-movies, constantly mutating to reflect our latest fears and anxieties. As a child my son was obsessed with Scooby-Doo on Zombie&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12637,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b-movie-news","wpcat-1-id"],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/night_of_the_livin_3044558b.jpg",620,387,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/night_of_the_livin_3044558b-145x145.jpg",145,145,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/night_of_the_livin_3044558b-300x187.jpg",300,187,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/night_of_the_livin_3044558b.jpg",620,387,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/night_of_the_livin_3044558b.jpg",620,387,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/night_of_the_livin_3044558b.jpg",620,387,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/night_of_the_livin_3044558b.jpg",620,387,false],"gridflex-1422w-autoh-image":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/night_of_the_livin_3044558b.jpg",620,387,false],"gridflex-1074w-autoh-image":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/night_of_the_livin_3044558b.jpg",620,387,false],"gridflex-360w-300h-image":["https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/night_of_the_livin_3044558b.jpg",360,225,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"admin1","author_link":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?author=1"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"What is it with the undead? While other monsters come and go, the zombie never seems to go out of style, exploding into the Hollywood mainstream every few years but otherwise lumbering on in B-movies, constantly mutating to reflect our latest fears and anxieties. As a child my son was obsessed with Scooby-Doo on Zombie...","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}