(Hi there! It's the start of another new and exciting project wherein I talk about a Japanese cartoon that made me cry for several thousands of words. Business as usual over here on the blog, I know. Before that, though, I'm going to talk about a mini zombie movie marathon I did for research into the project, and for other reasons we'll delve into in the post. This is just our introduction, though. Hopefully we'll have Part 1 of Night Of The Loving Dead all ready for you sometime in February. Until then, have 3000 words of whatever the hell this became as your appetizer and introduction to my internal landscape going into this longform criticism. Enjoy!)
Here we are again, you and I. The metaphorical coffee shop, warm atmosphere and a hot drink each, ready to hear another story. When last we met here, in May of 2021 at the end of the grand Symphogear project, I framed the end of that story in terms of a regeneration, a moving on to something new and beautiful and resonant. Such things are rarely instant, and so here and now in January 2022 it's very much in progress. Then again, perhaps that's apt. Being in transition, crossing a boundary between one thing and other, somewhere between life and death... It's all tied into why we're back here again. If you'd care to stay and share a hot drink with me, I'd love to tell you all about it.
Sandwiched between the grand Symphogear project was another experience entirely. I first laid eyes on it in October 2019 on vacation in scenic Grand Bank, Newfoundland, a spooky-themed dalliance to stave off boredom whilst off the grid. A month later I began watching Symphogear, a show which quite literally changed me and my life, but we've told that story before. In April 2021, as I was working on the closing statements of what Symphogear meant to me, a second season of that experience from October 2019 began. This experience was another Japanese cartoon, a show named Zombie Land Saga. In the wilds of its second season, I got angry. I did not get angry because of the poor quality of the show; quite the opposite. I got angry because it was dealing in themes and moods and songs that spoke to me, that spoke to the project I just finished. Zombie Land Saga reached a cold blue hand from the peat of the grave, grabbed me by the collar, and hissed in the crooning clotted voice of eternal undeath a
demand that I write about it with the lavish love and attention I gave Symphogear.
Okay, fine, a flair for the melodramatic, but still. The point is, Zombie Land Saga spoke to me innately. I'll even make a bold claim. Zombie Land Saga is, for me, my new favorite piece of zombie media. I knew this was the thesis statement of this project, this heartfelt discussion between us, as I sat there watching the second season speak to me in moving and resonant ways. I also knew fall was coming and that would bring me to a busy writing fever. So, I bided my time. I returned to scenic Grand Bank, rewatching the second season of Zombie Land Saga there and thus experiencing the whole show in its serene glow. I wrote words about spooky things on the blog in Sixteen Screams For Halloween. I talked about Doctor Who Flux and hit my breaking point with Chris Chibnall. I wrote a NaNoWriMo thing. Then, when the calendar rolled around, I knew it was time to tackle the Zombie Land Saga... but there was one other elephant in the room. One particular bugbear within my internal landscape that needed to be dealt with. Not destroyed. Befriended and understood. If I were to explain my love for Zombie Land Saga, I needed to reconcile with this part of myself.
I have held a disinterested disdain for zombie media thanks to its perceived nihilism.
It's just an assumption I picked up somewhere, via cultural osmosis, but it's lived in my head rent-free for ages. This idea that zombie media is just a series of grim gritty portraits of bullshit, wherein society collapses and humanity are the real monsters because nobody can get along with anyone. Every huddled survivor argues and bickers in the face of human extinction, lone cowboy assholes threaten people with guns now that the world is a lawless wasteland, martial law reigns supreme and nobody is a good person. That was my bugbear, my prejudice towards zombie media. The few things I liked that trended away from this were the film Shaun Of The Dead and the novel World War Z. The former was a funny movie more about responsibility and growing up that happened to have a zombie outbreak. The latter was told orally and with multiple perspectives, so one grim gritty pocket of survival with rude assholes wasn't the only view offered. That, and the fact that it was told after humanity learned to manage said outbreak, giving a ray of hope that I felt other stories lacked. Part of this is why Zombie Land Saga struck me as hard as it did, and we will be getting into that proper, but beforehand that bugbear had to be confronted. So it was, then, almost 800 words into this thing (oh, is that all? I'm actually relieved it wasn't like 2000) that we get into my attempt to reconcile with my bugbear. This is the result of my zombie movie marathon.
I chose six films and one episode of television for this. For reasons I'll get to near the end this was cut to five. The first four, however, were absolute titans of zombie media. I was reckoning with the pioneer himself, the one and only late great George A. Romero. Over an intermittent period of almost 40 years, Romero put out the first four films I decided to view: Night Of The Living Dead, Dawn Of The Dead, Day Of The Dead, and Land Of The Dead. I wanted to give zombie media a fair shake, and be fairer than those I have criticized. Often, in Discord DM with another kinophile friend, we have both mocked the hyper-obsessed superhero movie fans who just refuse to leave Martin Scorsese alone after he dared to imply once that he didn't care for superhero movies as cinema. The type of person who will post breathless reviews of the newest MCU thing and go AHAH, IT'S BRILLIANT, SURELY MARTIN SCORSESE WILL CALL IT CINEMA NOW! with utmost sincerity. The type of fan who sees Scorsese's opinion as a dragon to be slain, something to be proven wrong such that they shall be proven to be correct for enjoying a superhero movie more than he. The type of fan who will dismiss Scorsese's ouevre by saying they're all just dumbshit mob movies that glorify the life of being a criminal. Oh. Oh dear. Wasn't that what I was doing by calling zombie media grimdark edgelord horseshit? So, I was the bigger person. I faced my prejudice head-on and watched some George A. Romero zombie movies.
"Stop shouting, love. Stop making a fuss. It's too late. All the graves of planet Earth are about to give birth. You know the key strategic weakness of the human race? The dead outnumber the living."
Well, wow. Those were four very good zombie movies I watched. I can't speak for the rest of his output, but I can make this bold claim: Each zombie film in this miniature marathon was a transcendental step above the rest. I don't think most people agree with that and will claim Dawn Of The Dead as the peak of Romero's zombie media, but I'll say it. I'll do more than that, even, I'll explain it in great detail. Before that, though, we have the original 1968 Night Of The Living Dead. It is a very good film and a real trendsetter of sorts, but it's a double-edged sword in some ways. On the one hand, it has the same totemic quality I can sense whenever I watch the original 1978 Halloween: a sacred text of genre-defining proportions being written right in front of you by an invisible hand as you watch, classic zombie media conventions and rules presented as sincere twists to the story being told. On the other, it has that unpleasantness at the heart of it, that stuff that made me wince away from the genre. A group of huddled survivors being unpleasant to each other while besieged by zombies. That unpleasantness spreads to the zombies as well: how quick everyone in the genre-defining text is to write off any latent humanity in these formerly alive humans. Just things to be shot first and asked questions about later. That extends to the tragic ending as well, of course, and that's even
before you get into all the racial subtext of how things end. A bunch of trigger-happy idiots having way too much fun shooting things that look like people but aren't people anymore, supposedly. Hmmm. Let's take that into account and look at Dawn Of The Dead.
It is, of course, a very good zombie movie. As I said, the cultural opinion seems to be that this is the pinnacle of Romero. Society is crumbling because of this zombie epidemic and four folks try to make their own little society in the ruins, with muddled success. Dawn Of The Dead is many things, and a lot of people like poking at its satire of 70's consumerism with its shopping mall setting and the mindless zombies shambling around in there, having some memory of Mall Being Good in life and thus wanting to get in on instinct. What struck me watching was how the movie cuts
against that typical lone wolf cowboy yeehaw bullshit. Early on we see a SWAT team guy go absolutely berserk and start cackling like a maniac while shooting everyone he sees, as if to go HAHAHAHA SOCIETY HAS COLLAPSED! FINALLY, AN EXCUSE TO SHOOT THE PEOPLE I DON'T LIKE!!! YEEHAW BANG BANG BANG! We see the same roaming bands of hunters as seen at the end of Night, and they're all just having a fucking
blast shooting things that look like people but aren't people anymore, supposedly. Even two of our protagonists succumb to this mentality, and it's interesting what happens. Roger goes all yeehaw during the mission to block their mall off with trucks to keep the zombies from getting in, and his cavalier attitude gets him bitten and he later dies from this. Later, when a roaming gang of bikers is threatening their mall, Stephen decides NO THIS IS OUR MALL GOD DAMN IT and starts shooting everyone down to protect his place. He eventually gets got by zombies as well. It's almost like a twist on slasher movie rules. You know how in a Friday the 13th or Halloween or whatever the fuck, if you have sex with someone you're marked for death and the killer will soon jam a machete into your fucking skull for transgressing a moral code? It's almost the same thing here. Lone wolf yeehaw bullshit gets you rewarded with fucking death. It's intriguing, to be sure, but not quite as intriguing as what's to come in the marathon. The real fun shit starts here.
As the opening of Day Of The Dead shows, the world is fucked. A city completely deserted except for the living dead, and one lone bunker of soldiers and scientists who again just can't seem to resist being deeply unpleasant to each other. The soldiers are gathering undead specimens for the scientists who are supposedly researching a cure for the zombie epidemic. Once again the lower ranked soldiers are a bunch of hooting and hollering jackasses reveling in insults and tauntings and extra-judicial executions of the people who just don't count as
people anymore. Just a bunch of dumbfuck zombies. They are unpleasant boorish assholes and we dislike them, but that's the point. Those scientists, on the other hand, and their experiments? Well. George A. Romero, in 1985, took the nihilistic question of "what if humanity were the real monsters?" and flipped it on its head. We already know the answer to that question. It ends in unpleasantness and people being shot and/or eaten by zombies. Day Of The Dead raises a cold blue hand and asks, calmly, "what if zombies were the real humans?". Our lead mad scientist man is trying to socialize the zombies and make them remember the customs and manners of humanity, his star pupil being Bub the zombie. The sheer idea of Bub is incredible, revolutionary, and is going to resonate back into the original point of this project. The soldiers are not impressed that all their time is being wasted on teaching a dumbfuck rotting corpse how to use a fucking Walkman instead of curing the zombie outbreak. Things get worse when they discover that the mad scientist has been feeding Bub bits of dead soldiers as reward for good behavior, and said scientist is executed on the spot for such grave inhuman
desecration of the noble dead soldiers. How utterly hypocritical. Oh, I see, you believe in the sanctity of the dead when it's your guys, but if it's any other walking corpse it's just a subhuman dumbfuck that's not a person any more and is totally okay to mock and taunt and shoot in the head! INTERESTING BIAS!!! Bub the zombie discovers this, as all hell breaks loose and zombies are swarming the complex, and everyone is being eaten in horrific ways thanks to Tom Savini going over the fucking top with the grossness. Bub the zombie picks up a gun and shambles his way to the top brass officer. Bub the zombie avenges his mentor's death by shooting the guy and letting the zombies rip him in half. The other scientists make an escape to live a new life on a tropical island, and Romero put down zombies for 20 years. Then he came back. Oh my lord, did he come back.
Land Of The Dead ramps up the theme of zombies being more than just shambling rotting corpses to 11. Then it adds a heaping dose of anticapitalism. This movie, this fucking movie heard the phrase "eat the rich" and took it literally. Rich people have holed themselves up in a fancy tower called Fiddler's Green and are living a life of luxury, gleefully pretending there isn't a fucking apocalypse happening right outside their ivory tower. Noted movie critic Youtube show Red Letter Media poked at this plot point a bit in a video, calling it unrealistic that the rich would just pretend the end of the world isn't happening. NEWS FLASH, BOYS! LOOK OUTSIDE THE WINDOW! THEY'RE DOING IT
RIGHT FUCKING NOW AS WE SPEAK!!! OVER A PANDEMIC AND THE WORLD BECOMING AN OVEN! THIS IS TOTALLY WHAT THE UNHINGED RICH WOULD DO!!! Ahem. Accepting this is plausible, let's look at the next evolution of Bub; a black mechanic zombie who's dubbed "Big Daddy" for... some reason by the credits. This zombie man sees the same bullshit we've been dealing with for the last three movies. Hooting and hollering jackasses with guns going WHOOHOO YEEHAW YAHOO LOOK OUT FUCKING STENCHES ALL AROUND, SHOOT 'EM IN THE HEAD!!!. Big Daddy does not like seeing his fellow zombies getting shot in the head. Big Daddy, over the course of the movie, leads an army of zombies towards Fiddler's Green to get his revenge. They do, and they get in and quite literally eat the rich. At the end of the film our human protagonists see Big Daddy and friends shambling off into the sunrise, and let them go as they drive off into the sunset in the opposite direction. So ends the George A. Romero part of my zombie movie marathon, and what a movie to go out on. An anticapitalist manifesto of sorts that literally eats the rich and
really advances the theme of zombies being the real humans. It would have been wonderful to end here, but I had to go to darker places. That led me to two final pieces of media, and they don't come out looking good in comparison.
Originally I was going to watch the 2004 remake of Dawn Of The Dead, the directorial debut of one Zac Snyder. My streaming service of choice would only let me watch it with a paid upgrade, however, and I really didn't want to pay Youtube a whole 5 dollars to watch it. So I skipped it. Instead, as I had access to Netflix, I watched the Zac Snyder zombie film Army Of The Dead. I'll give him that the premise is an interesting idea on paper; it's a genre fusion of a heist movie and a zombie movie. Las Vegas has been cordoned off thanks to a zombie outbreak, it's about to be nuked to deal with said zombies, and a team is sent in to steal a bunch of money from a casino vault and get out before boom. Functionally, it's like... fine? Coming off of Land Of The Dead of all things, though, it's a stark contrast. Whereas the last movie ate the rich, Army here has a world where a zombie outbreak has destroyed Las Vegas...
and the world is functionally no different. It's still a capitalist classist society like the current hellworld we're in. It gets worse, somehow, though. Even among the zombies there appears to be a class system, as there are alpha zombies who are more intelligent and cunning. This is Snyder's twist on Bub and Big Daddy, that there's an entire zombie society in the ruins of Las Vegas. It still gets nuked in the end, but think on how bleak that is. Not even a zombie outbreak, nor even
death and undeath itself can allow us to imagine an escape from capitalism and classism. How utterly unimaginative.
And so, I closed my zombie movie marathon with Episode 5 of the Marvel Studios show What If, a show whose sole answer to "what if this happened" seems to be "an MCU movie from 7 years ago would play out in miniature over 30 minutes with minute differences". To that end, this What If episode asks what would happen if a zombie outbreak happened due to quantum realm bullshit from the end of Ant-Man And The Wasp. What would happen is superheroes who are zombies but also still smart enough to use their superpowers. That sure does happen for like 20 minutes! The show then flirts around with a mashup of Day Of The Dead and Wandavision, as Vision is keeping a zombified Wanda in a base out of love for his dead zombie wife while feeding people to her to keep her at bay. It's an inferior copy of Day Of The Dead, and it's even an inferior copy of Wandavision, which itself is an inferior copy of Madoka Magica Rebellion. It is a silly show with no substance, but it ends the marathon on my own line of questioning.
What if there were a piece of media which advanced the theme of zombies being the real humans from Day and Land Of The Dead?
What if these zombies didn't rise up to destroy society, but instead to save it?
What if the zombies didn't give people an excuse to be unpleasant to each other, but instead fostered positivity and co-operation?
What if... there were a piece of zombie media with the same harmonies and hope as Symphogear's finest hours?
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