Doc of the Dead

I don't need to tell you, Mr. Speaker,

that zombies don't recognize borders and that

a zombie invasion in the United States could easily turn into

a continent-wide pandemic so on behalf of

concerned Canadians everywhere, Mr. Speaker, I want to ask

the Minister of Foreign Affairs is he working with

his American counterparts to develop

an international zombie strategy so that a zombie invasion

does not turn into a zombie apocalypse?

Coming up next on Action News 7, a dog was found...

excuse me just one moment...

I see.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm receiving a special broadcast

about something that's happening.

Van Dorn Street is blocked right now by overturned cars.

We are receiving news that the bodies of the recently deceased

are returning to life and attacking the living.

Officers are on their way right now to take you to safety.

...A live reporter out there on the scene.

There are millions, millions of zombies

roaming the earth chewing people up.

Is that crazy or what?

I suggest you find the tallest building

in your town and jump off.

The zombie outbreak is no longer an outbreak,

but a full-on pandemic.

Warning you to stay indoors, to lock your doors,

to arm yourself with any weapons that are available

and this is America so you should have plenty.

Grab something heavy, something that you could hit

very hard with, and let's party!

I'm Jonathan Leonard from Geekscape and we're going to

find out what the average person knows about zombies.

A zombie is someone who's dead and came out of the ground

and is bleeding and is gross looking and they'll kill you.

What do zombies want?

Brains.

What are the zombie rules?

Zombie rules is that you die, but you don't die.

If you want to be more like angsty and metaphorical,

a zombie could be someone trapped in a workday

who lives in a box and doesn't have fun.

In Chinese tradition a zombie just jumps.

It doesn't talk, it doesn't walk, it just jumps.

What?

Arms out and then it just hops like that.

The zombie is a relentlessly aggressive, reanimated

human corpse driven by a biological infection,

so there's kind of three aspects to that.

You don't negotiate with a zombie, right?

You can't talk a zombie out of wanting to eat you.

You can't say, "Hey, go around the corner,

there's a family of five getting in a Winnebago.

You can eat all five of them and leave me alone."

Secondly, it's a reanimated human corpse, limited in

its ability so it's actually a rotting corpse.

Thirdly, a biological infection which is,

I think, what makes zombies really, really scary.

They're us and they're us having succumbed to

our worst fear which is our own death.

You can't outstrip them even though they're slower than you.

Eventually you have to go to sleep.

They don't, so even if you're a mile ahead of them,

when you're snoring they'll catch up and meet you.

And that's like death itself.

You do everything you can to stave it off.

You do the steps at Santa Monica, you don't eat red meat.

They'll get you in the end.

Most famous monsters, the big-screen monsters

have some kind of long-standing tradition

where their stories have been developed previously --

the vampire, the werewolf, even the slasher,

the serial killer comes out of a crime novel tradition.

The zombie comes kind of directly out of folklore

and there really wasn't a literary narrative tradition.

When you take a look at zombies in cinema specifically,

you can technically go back into the silent era.

There are, of course, classics like "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,"

where you have the sleepwalking character in there who is

very much zombie-like, and yet for all intents and purposes,

we all have kind of collectively agreed,

it all starts in 1932 with "White Zombie."

Zombies!

The filmmakers in the '30s and '40s were kind of

making up these stories out of nothing.

They weren't taking existing material and adapting it.

If anything, they were drawing on misconceptions

and misunderstandings of race relations in the colonies,

sensational ideas of what voodoo and folklore

really meant in Haiti.

They took that idea and they kind of merged it with

the visual style of Todd Browning

and the gothic tradition.

I thought that beauty alone would satisfy,

but the soul is gone.

I can't bear those empty, staring eyes.

So in "White Zombie," you get a narrative that takes place

in Haiti and it involves Haitian voodoo, but then there's

a gothic castle on the coast of Haiti for some reason.

So it's this weird fusion of a misunderstood,

sensationalized folklore with an established and successful

cinematic tradition for monsters.

The early films are always about

black people menacing white women.

It's really the enslavement by the former slaves

that makes that monster initially so terrifying.

The next major step in sort of the evolution of the zombies

of pop culture icon comes when science fiction briefly

takes the lead over horror in the 1950s

and then you get movies like "Invisible Invaders..."

People of Earth, this is your last warning.

...in which aliens resurrect human corpses and use them

like puppets to try to take over which is virtually the same plot

as "Plan 9 from Outer Space," one of the most infamous movies

of all time, and what's interesting about those movies

is there we have it, we have dead people coming back.

They're not demonically possessed.

They're not impelled by some desire to eat flesh

or something we don't know.

They're being puppeteered by aliens, but they're zombies

and they're more like the zombies we know today

than the ones that preceded them.

But then what happened was George Romero...

The dead who live on living flesh.

The dead whose haunted souls hunt the living.

The living whose bodies are the only food for these

ungodly creatures.

"Night of the Living Dead."

We were trying to create a new creature,

somebody that was dead but came back.

We didn't have a name for that creature.

We called them ghouls.

I said, "George, who are these characters chasing this girl?"

He said, "I don't know."

And I said, "Well, when I was reading it,

it seemed to me they could be dead people."

He said, "That's good."

I said, "But what do they do? You don't say that either."

He said, "I don't know."

I said, "Why don't we use my flesh-eating idea?"

There was an article in "Cahiers du Cinema"

that called them zombies for the first time.

I was clinging to the idea that we had created something new

and when I read that article, I said, this ain't new at all,

so that's when I started to accept them as zombies.

"Night of the Living Dead" did not create zombies

but it rewrote zombie lore.

I like to say that there were zombie movies

before George Romero, the same way there were

space movies before George Lucas.

It changed everything.

It scrapped the old voodoo zombie and gave us

the plague-driven flesh eater.

The idea of the end of the world and zombies are around

and the world's been overtaken by them

and it's people against zombies and our population is dwindling

was introduced in that movie and no one had ever really

taken zombies in that direction before.

It's almost as if the zombie as we know it was some sort of

like biblical figure that's been around forever

and we can all pick up and use it.

It's not, it was George's idea, the whole biting thing,

the passing on the disease, the waking up -- all George.

What's monumental to me about that film was the fact that

in 1968, this film was released with a black man

and a white woman, and throughout the entire movie,

nobody made a big deal out of the fact that

we had two different colors.

It was pure survival.

We thought we were pushing the envelope a little.

We thought that some of the scenes with the guts

and when the kids get roasted in the truck...

we had actually one shot of a naked zombie from behind.

Bold -- that's about as bold as we went.

There were extreme audience and media reactions.

Reviewers who thought that we were satanically inspired,

that we were scourges, that our film should be banned.

Horror movies were not raw like that back then.

George's was almost like a real thing, a documentary.

The reaction to that movie is what really got me going

because it said people were fainting in theatres

and I thought, I don't think I want to see this movie.

It made me not want to see it and then when I saw it,

I was like, yeah, that's why I didn't want to see it.

I remember the first time I saw it was at a midnight screening

and the audience was absolutely terrified.

The sequence that blew people away was the little girl

down in the basement who we discover

is chewing on her parents' intestines.

The entire audience flipped out.

People got up and left the theatre during that scene.

Midway through the movie I hear this "boom, boom, boom,"

and I'm wondering what's going on?