Danny Boyle & eating brains: 10 zombie movies worth resurrecting

The Herald Scotland

3 days ago

There was a time there when you couldn't turn around without stumbling over zombies. Maybe they'd be fighting cockneys or Jane Austen heroines (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; it's possible I am the only person in the world who quite liked it) or Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Pegg and Frost aside, the result wasn't always appetising. It's fair to say that most zombie movies are hardly worth consuming.
But what are the ones worth making a feast of? Here are 10 worth revisiting.
The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live with Danai Gurira and Andrew Lincoln (Image: AMC) I Walked With a Zombie
Jacques Tourneur, 1943
Producer Val Lewton's 1940s low-budget films - often made in conjunction with the director Jacques Tourneur - are a high point in horror cinema - literate, beautifully crafted nightmare movies that both shock and seduce. Despite the come-on of the title this one is a seduction; a dreamy, eerie reinvention of Jane Eyre that weaves voodoo lore into the story. It may be the most beautiful zombie movie; admittedly there isn't a lot of competition.
Night of the Living Dead
George Romero, 1968
The first zombie movie is generally regarded to be White Zombie, Victor Halperin's 1932 horror film starring Bela Lugosi as a zombie master and often read as an allegory for slavery. But it was George Romero's black and white shocker that really kickstarted the zombie genre as we know it today. Stark, brutal and shockingly nihilistic, it's a take on racial politics in 1960s America - with a black hero at its heart - that opened up the idea of the nightmare movie as a form of social commentary, as subsequently pursued by David Cronenberg, Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper. Romero's movie - and its two increasingly bleak sequels - is the foundation for all that followed.
Shaun of the Dead (Image: free)
Shaun of the Dead
Edgar Wright, 2004
So dangerously overfamiliar now, it might be hard to recall just how fresh and funny this felt at the time. It posits the notion that we wouldn't notice the arrival of a zombie apocalypse because no one watches the news anymore. Presumably it would be all over Twitter now. And we'd assume it was fake news.
Zombie Flesh Eaters
Lucio Fulci, 1979
Inspired by George Romero, Italian exploitation cinema became rather taken with zombies during the 1970s and 1990s, usually with much, much more blood and gore (our cover star Rupert Everett even appeared in one, Cemetery Man). The apotheosis - or maybe its opposite - came with this gruesome film which was banned as a video nasty in the UK. It is often deeply unpleasant and yet there are moments of surrealist grandeur, most notably when Fulci has one of his zombies fight a shark. The result is one of the stupidest yet most memorable moments in the history of scary movies.
Return of the Living Dead from 1984 (Image: free) Return of the Living Dead
Dan O'Bannon, 1984
A kind of sequel to Romero's Night of the Living Dead, but played for gory laughs to a punk soundtrack. Combine a cemetery, a zombie-inducing gas, the brain-hungry undead and cartoon punks and the result is the apocalypse replayed as a cartoon. According to my TIme Out Film Guide (fifth edition, 1997), 'matters conclude, anti-dramatically, with the death of civilised life as we know it.' Snicker, snicker.
One Cut of the Dead
Shin'ichiro Ueda, 2019
This is a low-budget, high-idea Japanese zombie comedy. And the less you know about it going in the better. Let's just say it contains a 37-minute continuous shot and it's all very meta in the very best way. Who said zombie movies can't be smart?
Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later (Image: unknown)
28 Days Later
Danny Boyle, 2002
The first in the trilogy that continues with the release of 28 Years Later this month, 28 Days Later popularised the idea of the fast-moving zombie (they had already been seen in 1980 in Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City, although there might be some dispute as to whether the affected hordes were actually zombies in that movie).
But, really, what lingers in the memory is not the zombie sequences which are effective but not overwhelming. No, it's the early sequences in which CIllian Murphy, newly awakened from a coma, wanders around a deserted, demolished London; a vision straight out of a John Wyndham sci-fi novel.
28 Years Later is in cinemas on Thursday
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The Girl With All the Gifts
Colm McCarthy, 2016
Why did this not launch its Scottish director Colm McCarthy into the world of big budget movies? This fantastically staged film captures the gruesomeness and the world-building imagination to be found in M R Carey's original novel. (Like 28 Days Later, its reimagination of a post-apocalyptic London is rich and strange). Is there anything, the film asks, still human about its central character, the zombie child Melanie? It is a question zombie movies have seemed to grow bored of over the years (it's easier to just treat them as targets in video game-style films such as The Rezort). But it's the only one that matters.
Train to Busan (Image: unknown)
Train to Busan
Yeon Sang-Ho, 2016
Easy pitch, this. Zombies on a train. This South Korean thriller is a Big Dipper of a movie, one that eschews the portentiousness of World War Z but isn't afraid of some cutting social satire on Korean society. But it works because it never forgets to scare and to thrill. Probably the most edge-of-the-seat movie in this list.
Anna and the Apocalypse
John McPhail, 2017
I can't be the only person who likes this, can I? Yes, it's a weird Scottish-set movie in which hardly any of the cast is Scottish. Yes, there's a big role for Paul (Dennis Pennis) Kaye. And he even gets to sing in it.
(Oh, did I not mention it's a Christmas zombie comedy musical? No? Well, I have now.)
But, even so, it's a lot of fun. The performances are always enthusiastic, even when they're not subtle, the choreography is neatly done and the songs - by Tommy Reilly and Roddy Hart - are well up to the mark. The result is High School Musical meets Zombieland. But, you know, filmed in Port Glasgow.