Forbes the Latest Website to Push Column About Zombies Written By Someone Who Knows Next to Nothing About Zombies
Uggh.
Sometimes I get to have a spirited debate with a talented, witty and informed, if still hatefully bigoted, Anti-Zombie writer/creator.
Other times I read a column about Zombies that is so rife with factual errors and stupefyingly bad logic that I want to break open the tequila. Again.
That was the case today with Forbes blog by one Larry Olmsted, a man who would be hard-pressed to know less about Zombies and yet took it upon himself to critique all Zombie film and criticism of said film. After a lengthy introduction that practically screams ‘Get to the point already!’ and shows why some bloggers really do need editors, Mr. Olmsted starts his rant:
So why are the new crop of zombie films keeping me up at night?
Because they don’t have any zombies.
In the most recent issue of the Atlantic, James Parker wrote a less than inspired ode to the phenomenon in the entertainment section (Our Zombies, Ourselves) in which he perpetuated the biggest lie of the current zombie renaissance when he wrote, “Recent years have given us both the sprinting or Galloping zombie of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.”
He is not the alone, and joins a laundry list of otherwise respected critics attributing “zombie” status to Boyle’s thoroughly entertaining film and its equally likable sequel 28 Weeks Later (28 Months Later, the third in what may be a long list of nearly identical titles culminating with centuries, eons, or millennia, is scheduled for a 2013 release), despite the fact that neither movie includes a single non-living, non-breathing, zombie.
In reality (or at least celluloid reality) Boyle’s human characters face death at the hands of other human characters, humans who have been infected by the rage virus and are not undead brain eaters at all.
Splitting hairs?
Maybe, but I don’t think so. When you buy chocolate ice cream, you expect chocolate, not fudge ripple. It’s close but not as advertised. And in that sense it is not just the critics’ feedback: posters advertising 28 Days Later loudly proclaimed it the scariest zombie movie ever.
You know you’re in a special place when the critic takes it upon himself to actively refute the movie’s own advertising and correct the studio as to what it’s about. That’s a special kind of ego. Next up: Larry Olmsted tells off ‘Star Trek’ for not depicting a voyage of any great length.
Moving on, however, the staggering ignorance begins to peek around the ego:
I Googled “Best Zombie Films,” and got a lot of lists. Every single one I looked at, from the picks of (terrible) horror film director Rob Zombie himself to the site Zombierama had 28 Days Later on it. Interestingly few included another similar non-zombie zombie film, the Will Smith vehicle I Am Legend, a remake of the classic Charleston Heston film Omega Man. The absence of zombies (instead, more chemically infected – and ultimately curable – humans) did not stop numerous prominent reviewers from describing it with the “Z” word. NPR’s Bob Mondello (“as movie zombies always do…”), NY Observer’s Rex Reed (“carnivorous blood sucking zombies”), WSJ’s Joe Morgenstern (those damn zombies everywhere). While critic Steve Whitty of the Newark Star Ledger broke new ground by describing the infected humans as “vampires,” an even more appalling mischaracterization, it was the Globe & Mail’s Liam Lacy who took the cake (“generic zombie slaughter fest highly reminiscent of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and its sequel 28 Weeks Later) slurring three non-zombie films with the same misconception in just one sentence!
Ok. Back the trolly up. Although Mr. Olmsted seems shockingly unaware of this, ‘I Am Legend’ was written as a novel by Richard Matheson and published in 1954. It does, in fact, contain a number of vampire characters. A screenplay is floating around the net, also by Matheson, and it too involves a lot of vampires. That screenplay is available in book form
from major retailers like Amazon.com.
The infected individuals in ‘I Am Legend’ always WERE vampires. I haven’t seen the Will Smith movie because I value my time, but if Mr. Olmsted had read the book, the screenplay or even just seen the Vincent Price adaptation ‘The Last Man on Earth’ he would in fact know that the creatures in ‘I Am Legend’ are SUPPOSED TO BE VAMPIRES.
So he criticized a critic who may actually have been aware of the provenance of the film, unlike himself, for correctly identifying the antagonists as vampires. Wonderful; ignorance wins out.
Can he get worse? Oh my, yes:
Slow or fast, thinking or not, I don’t care. I can live with innovation and creativity, but some rules need to be followed. Like these:
Zombies should be dead. This most basic rule goes back to the very origin of the zombie myth in Haiti’s voodoo culture. (Or not myth if you buy into The Serpent and the Rainbow school of zombies-are-real academia, interesting book, terrible film.) This rules out living people overtaken by rage viruses, secret government nerve gas, or ill-advised anti-cancer vaccination.
Zombies need to want to bite/eat people.
Zombie condition needs to be highly contagious. The zombie itself is not scary, the outbreak and end of humanity that results is.
Being dead and then brought back to life does not make one a zombie. Scary (Pet Semetary), clever (Re-Animator), or classic (Frankenstein), maybe, but not zombie.
He’s willing to live with innovation, so long as ‘Zombie’ films slavishly follow the Romero-Russo formula. The problem with that is, as we’ve noted again and again here on the ZRC blog, Romero doesn’t do that himself; his conception, misguided as it is, of the Differently Animated has changed both over the course of his films and during the course of the internal continuity of his film universe. In ‘Night of the Living Dead’ they’re malicious, tool-using figures who form whenever anyone dies and are bent on murder first, not eating people. In ‘Dawn’ and ‘Day’ they’re decomposing Undead creatures hungry for flesh. In ‘Land of the Dead’ the Zombies are intelligent and capable of considerable planning, outwitting the Living humans and staging an amphibious invasion of a defended island. Etc. There’s not a lot of internal consistency and even Romero violates the rules that Olmsted clings to.
What really gets me is that he seems to think that ‘Re-Animator’ innovated off of Romero because ‘Re-Animator’ was made in 1985 (the same year as ‘Day of the Dead’ and ‘Return of the Living Dead’, btw). There’s a slight issue with that ‘innovation’ theory….
‘Re-Animator’ is an adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story from 1921-22. The tone was greatly altered, from horror to severely black comedy, but the nature of the ‘Re-Animated’ individuals was largely the same.
The only way that qualifies as innovating on Romero is if H.P. Lovecraft had access to a time machine, and if he did, as the art director pithily queried, ‘Why didn’t he come to our time and see an oncologist?’
I can already see a defense that might be levied against this; ‘Oh, but he references Voodoo too, so it’s not entirely Romero.’
Well, no, but Voodoo zombies don’t spread by infection, bring about the apocalypse or eat the living. That’s pure grade-A Romero there.
Let’s recap: Larry Olmsted wrote a blog entry complaining that other people and especially Hollywood don’t take Zombies seriously enough for failing to conform to the standard concocted out of whole cloth by George Romero and John Russo in the 60s, which has changed significantly over subsequent decades anyway. He lambastes a critic for describing ‘I Am Legend’ as being about vampires (which it originally was and was always meant to be), then describes a willingness to let Zombie movies innovate so long as they slavishly follow Romero, capping it off by stating that ‘Re-Animator’, whose source text predates ‘Night of the Living Dead’ by over forty years, is somehow illegitimate for not following Night’s rules.
Which it would have required the violation of space and time to achieve at any rate.
I say again: uggh.
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