I
don’t think it’s unfair to call zombies the new vampires. I mean, can you
honestly fathom the cultural alchemy that would make a show like The Walking
Dead one of the most popular, most watched shows in the history of television?
I find the phenomenon around the “pop culturalization” of zombies more
interesting than zombies themselves. Before George Romero got ahold of them in
1968, the zombie was a second stringer—a minion of the villainous zombie master
or witch doctor or other magic-savvy boogem. They were little more than a plot
device until Night of the Living Dead, but we’ll get to that in a second.
I
like that the zombies are a cultural stand-in for us—the empty, rabid consumer,
and this characterization can be shaded by religion or science, sped up or
slowed down, to further delineate what the filmmaker is trying to comment on.
Of course, some would argue that the zombie movie is more of a post-apocalyptic
exploration of humanity, rather than a simple horror film. I say there’s room
for both, and the best zombie movies split the difference handily.
Since
this is a movie list, you won’t see The
Walking Dead below. The show owes so much to the Romero zombie movies, and
everyone knows it anyway, so I’ll just assume if you’re reading this list, you
know it already, too. If you show these five zombie movies to a person who’s
never seen a zombie movie before, these five movies would encompass the full
range of all that is cool about the modern zombie movie.
