Ok, so the latest trend sweeping European horror, it seems, is the revival of the indie supernatural zombie genre. With [Rec] 1 and [Rec] 2, and soon to be [Rec] 3, the Spanish horror scene is looking to relive the heyday of European unenlightened anti-Zombie filmmaking. ([Rec] 1 was remade in the US under the title ‘Quarantine’ to moderate success).

I have to ask, though, if Salon.com could have found anyone *less* qualified to write a review of these anti-quasi-Zombie films, though. Seriously, take a look at this:

Some horror fans seem to be exercised about the fact that Balagueró and Plaza aren’t playing by the normal zombie-movie rules and have something more Old World and Old Testament in mind, to which I say: A) That’s true, and it makes the movie a lot scarier and cooler; B) for Christ’s sake, you haven’t seen enough regular zombie movies? and C) there must be a proverb or saying that adequately describes horror-movie buffs who resist supernatural and/or religious elements, but I can’t come up with it right now.

I don’t even know where to begin with this. For one, these… filmmakers… ARE playing by the normal zombie-movie rules FOR EUROPE.

Honestly! Hasn’t this Andrew O’Hehir individual ever heard of Lucio Fulci, Lamberto Bava or Dario Argento? Within the Spanish tradition you even have Armando de Ossorio, famed for his Blind Dead series of quasi-zombie movies about mystically reanimated Templars. The idea that magical or demonic zombies are unprecedented in European cinema is just silly, bordering on the profoundly ignorant.

Here, I’ll break it down for Salon. In the American, or Romero, zombie tradition, Zombies are used as allegorical scapegoats for social unrest, disease, the collapse of trusted institutions and so forth. They are thus, contra this Salon piece, resolutely depicted as unromantic, empirically derived sources of terror. Not supernatural. Pre-Romero, the American zombie movie tradition focused on voodoo, black magic, and of course racial supremacist themes, with the zombies being used as a proxy for the various aspects of the ‘lesser’ cultures that needed to be put in their place by good, upstanding white America.

However, in Europe their zombies are very different, and the line between movie zombies, mummies, demons and spirits has always been very blurry indeed. For example, Ossorio had this awful and hateful position on the subject of his most famous movie’s antagonists:

Ossorio objected to the description of the living dead Templars as “zombies,” insisting that they more resembled mummies and that, unlike zombies, the Templars were not mindless corpses.

Meanwhile, Argento and Bava’s infamous ‘Demons‘ features a race of demonic/zombile creatures that spread by Romero-esque infection, a sort of cross between the mystical and the disease metaphors, with the added bonus that they originally stem from a movie-within-the-movie plot, so they are, in a sense, demons of a non-religious sort, derived from celluloid and pop culture.

Is it a demon? A zombie? A mummy? A ghost? With European filmmaking, you’re often never sure.

So [Rec] 1 and 2 may be sweeping the Continent with innovative camera work and a modern sensibility, but they’re certainly not breaking bold new ground for the depiction of Zombies from Europe. They only seem that way to Americans who grew up on Romero, Russo and their Anglo-imitator Boyle. The ZRC is appalled by bad zombie movies, but we’re also appalled by such sloppy scholarly work.

For shame, Salon. For shame Andrew O’Hehir. For shame.

Tags: Euro-zom, Fulci, Movies, Romero

This entry was posted by John Sears on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 10:53 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.