Zombie CSU (59 page)

The rise of the new zombie auteurs, Zack Snyder, Edgar Wright, Danny Boyle, and others raises the question as to whether the living dead torch has officially been passed.

“Romero will always be king,” insists horror film critic Jim Dolan. “No matter how big someone else’s films get, Romero’s vision is the
official
vision of zombie cinema. Without him there wouldn’t even be a genre.”

Russell agrees. “For me, Romero is the Don of the Dead. It’s his vision of social apocalypse that I think is the crux of what makes the zombie genre so frightening, really. That claustrophobic, there’s-nowhere-to-run feeling that his films instill in the audience is one of the things I find most terrifying about zombies. It’s a stark nihilism—a secular End of Days that suggests there isn’t a God or an afterlife…We’re all just hunks of meat.”

Z
OMBIE
C
OMICS

Zombie comics have been hot for the last few years. I asked a few folks in that industry to comment on the upsurge of these illustrated zombie stories.

“Since the 1940’s, some of the best American monster stories have appeared in comic books,” says Trevor Strunk, comics expert and freelance writer. “Frankenstein was done first and best by Dick Briefer for Prize Publications in 1946; Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan defined the comic book vampire in their 1970’s series
Tomb of Dracula;
and
Werewolf by Night
, by Gerry Conway and Mike Ploog translated the werewolf myth into the universe of the flawed Marvel Comics superhero. The zombie, however, one of the most popular monsters, has had a very limited presence in comic books.”

Why so?

“The incidental nature of zombies in comics could be attributed to a couple causes,” Strunk explains. “First, the Golden Age of horror comics of the 1940’s and 50’s came long before George Romero popularized zombies with his
Night of the Living Dead
films. Secondly, the Comics Code, a watchdog organization that limited violence, gore, and profanity, could not have looked kindly on the concept of a reanimated corpse, especially one that devours still-living flesh. There were a few zombie-related series during Marvel Comics’ 1970’s horror revival—
Tales of the Zombie
, for instance, was published in magazine format and focused solely on the zombie—but the zombie comic has only recently recovered from its footnote status.”

So, who is driving the new zombie comic genre?

Strunk doesn’t hesitate: “Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s
Walking Dead
, published by Image Comics, is a serious, large-scale zombie series, and Kirkman and Sean Phillip’s
Marvel Zombies
, a tongue-in-cheek look at superheroes as zombies, has made the living dead more popular than ever in comic books. With high popular interest and more lax censorship standards, the comic book zombie’s future has never been brighter.”

I contacted Robert Kirkman and Bob Fingerman to see what they had to say about creating zombie comics. First thing I asked them was: Why zombies?

“Because, generally, they’re a universal problem,” says Fingerman. “They’re the roach of the monster world; if you’ve seen one, you know there are thousands more where it came from. Also, they’re scary because they can’t be reasoned with. They’re worse than children. But seriously, their lack of reasoning and their pure need-driven motivation are what make them frightening. That and the fact that they’ll tear you limb from limb and devour all your soft tissue. Individually they’re just gross and unsettling, but they always come in mobs and mobs are by nature terrifying.”

Kirkman agrees. “Why not zombies? They’re a mighty easy way to get things good and screwed up in a fictional world, and that leaves for some pretty interesting character development.”

I asked what kind of feedback they’ve gotten about their books.

Fingerman says, “What I got was uniformly positive.”

Kirkman, who slaughters all of Marvel’s favorite superheroes (some get zombified, some get eaten), agrees. “Overwhelmingly positive response to be honest. And the formula was pretty damn easy: It was pretty easy. Zombie bites superhero, Superhero turns into zombie, bites more superheroes. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.”

Kirkman says that the readers often form strong emotional connections to the characters in zombie comics. “Every now and then someone will get upset about something I did to a character in
The Walking Dead
—but that really just means I’m doing my job. If they care about the fake people in the book—what I’m doing works.”

And he summed it up for both of them by saying, “We’re lucky enough to be working in very zombie-friendly times.”

Z
OMBIE
M
USIC

Horror is a very popular theme in music—and has been for a long time. C’mon—you remember singing “Monster Mash” and “Purple People Eater,” don’t you?

Over the last thirty years a few subgenres of zombie-themed music have emerged from the music world, all sorts of styles like rock, pop, R&B, horror punk, death metal, dub, electro, indus, techno indus, blues, funk, industrial, gothic, and even hip hop. There’s even an emerging fusion style called zombie country. The undisputed king of all zombie music is the master himself, Rob Zombie, who always incorporated living-dead themes into his music. But before Rob there was Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Harry and the Undertakers, Goblin, and scores of others.

I asked a few people who are really
into
zombie music for their opinions on why this subgenre is so strong and getting stronger all the time.

I asked author David F. Kramer,
¹³
a long-time devotee of horror music, to explain why zombie music is so popular. He said, “I’m quick to fall back on the words of Anton S. LaVey
¹⁴
—the Devil has always written the best tunes. Whether or not one believes in the diabolic nature of the devil’s chord (tritone), the fact is—it’s representative of dissonance—and that’s really what the darkness is all about. So—“evil” music has really never gone out of style—at least not for the last few hundred years or so—and I hope it never will!”