ZRC Reviews: “My Zombie Lover”
This is an oldie but a fascinating case study in how an attempt at Zombie Friendliness can go off the rails and become… well, something very different. It’s also necessarily pretty heavy on spoilers, so if you wish to avoid that, just skip to the last paragraph for our rating.
Some background: “My Zombie Lover” is a first season episode of the “Monsters” television series, which ran from 1988-1991, first on NBC and then on the Sci-Fi Channel, and currently runs sporadically in re-runs on an NBC horror-themed network called Chillers. “Monsters” was a sort of spiritual successor to “Tales from the Darkside”, which would have set off a warning bell for me had I known before watching the show (so perhaps it’s best I didn’t know); Tales was of course produced by George Romero, and we know how, despite moments of Zombie Friendliness (like Creepshow), Mr. Romero has managed to make himself the greatest public foe of the Zombie Rights movement to date.
So “My Zombie Lover” showed on a major broadcast network, and had the opportunity to reach a large audience that might otherwise eschew media about Zombies, whether positive or negative in its depiction of the Differently Animated.
The premise of the episode is a bit odd; it concerns an African-American nuclear family living in some undisclosed American town with an unusual character. As the episode starts, the father is boarding up the house’s windows in preparation for Zombies (as opposed to, say, getting some cookies and punch ready). Discussions with the rest of the family reveal that, one night of the year and for reasons nobody understands, the recently dead rise from their graves in this town and, supposedly, try to eat people. The family patriarch revels in the opportunity to do his ‘civic’ duty and shoot said Zombies with his trusty rifle, while his wife dotes on him and his eldest child apathetically decides to stay behind on the couch.
Intriguingly, the youngest child, a boy named Bradley, is a Zombie Rights Activist and opposes the annual massacre:
Bradley may be the first prominent, mainstream media acknowledgement of the existence of a Zombie Rights movement, so this could be very historically significant.
At any rate, once the parents and Bradley have gone off to the annual Massacre, the father to shoot, Bradley to picket, and the mother presumably to keep them away from one another, their eldest daughter hears a knock on the door and finds a friend and former classmate on the threshold, seeking, in essence, a date. The problem being? He’s a Zombie, and she’s been taught to hate and fear all Zombies.
*dramatic music*
Things move on from there in a fairly promising direction, as Zombie and Living person come to an understanding, but toward the end of the episode things take several sudden and bizarre turns for the worse. For some reason our Zombie protagonist remembers that he has a desperate hunger for human flesh (which had gone unmentioned previously) and bites his would-be-girlfriend. They reconcile, mostly, after arguing about this (understandable; it was poor manners on a first date especially), and she goes upstairs to conveniently allow a Comedic Mishap where the rest of the family returns home, sees her gone and a Zombie in her place, and assumes she has been devoured.
This leads to a Dramatic Mishap; the daughter is shot, dies, and then, because it’s still The Night of the Dead, revives as a Zombie. There are a couple of clunky but uplifting speeches about being Tolerant of Others, and the ZRC would have been happy to endorse the admittedly uneven result, except for a final, ‘humorous’ denouement, where it is heavily implied that the two Zombies are going to devour young Bradley alive, because young children are annoying.
Or something.
Bradley is by far the most interesting character in the episode, which is odd since there are actual Zombies. He’s a motivated Zombie Rights activist, but taking a somewhat unusual tack, and quite different from our own. Bradley feels that the rights of the Undead are being violated, that they are being punished without due process and persecuted. He makes it abundantly clear after his sister has become a Zombie herself that he personally dislikes Zombies and doesn’t want anything to do with them; his objection is more procedural than empathy-derived.
This is actually a fascinating parallel to the history of Civil Rights based upon race here in the United States; within the Abolitionist movement there were groups and individuals who simultaneously opposed slavery and opposed integration, or at least thought it was completely impractical to implement integration. Instead these abolitionists favored emigration or colonization, and this led to the disastrous project that was the founding of Liberia on the west coast of Africa as a place to ‘drain off’ America’s population of emancipated slaves.
So Bradley, ironically an African-American himself, is a Zombie Colonialist. He doesn’t want them shot, he just wants them to go somewhere else; despite being an advocate for Zombie Rights, he is intolerant of Zombies themselves.
As I said, a fascinating historical parallel.
Unfortunately taken as whole the episode of Monsters was not, and perhaps could not be the Zombie Friendly television masterpiece that we’d have desired. Who knows what is to blame. According to Wikipedia the series tried to distinguish itself from its Romero produced predecessor by focusing on horror-comedy, and so the ‘wacky’ ending which completely undermines the premise may have been tacked on to complete the formula.
Thus the ZRC reluctantly awards this promising failure a Zombie Neutral rating, for at least attempting to grapple with, if not vanquish, the forces of Anti-Zombie prejudice, even as it falls prey to some prejudices itself.
Better luck.. well, not next time, the show’s been cancelled for twenty years. Better luck to any future successors.
My Zombie Lover is embedded below in two portions from Youtube.
(Part 1)
(Part 2)
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