What Would the Cranberries Say?

Among the most popular horror movies are zombie flicks. The craze started with George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" in 1968 and spread across the world to countries like Italy (Zombi 2) and Japan (Versus). More than 40 years later people still love a good zombie flick as shown by the strong showing of "Zombieland" at the box office (it made back its $23 million budget in its opening weekend). But there is an overlooked question that comes with these movies. What is a zombie?

Throughout the years there have been tons of zombie movies, but the featured zombies are rarely the same. The creatures in "Dawn of the Dead" differ from those in the film's 2004 remake. The monstrosities in "Quarantine" have little in common with the ghouls in "Dead Alive." So, when considering the vast differences among the representation of zombies you have to ask what the common thread is. After talking about it with some friends, I haven't come up with any hard rules but there are some general guidelines.

To be a zombie you typically have to be undead. This means that you have to have died and then become reanimated. "Night of the Living Dead" started this trend and most films since have followed it. However, "28 Days Later" departs from this and treats the zombie-status as an infection. If the infection does kill the victim first, it is never clearly shown. When the character Frank gets infected by a drop of blood that fell into his eye, he rampages for a bit before seemingly becoming one of the Infected. So, with movies like this even the idea of zombies needing to be undead comes into question.

Zombies are also stupid. This can be proved by nearly every zombie film I've ever seen, but even this tendency is changing. Zombies started out thoughtless, only capable of capturing prey by their overwhelming numbers. But with "Land of the Dead" that stopped being true. It showed zombies develop plans and strategies and even use weapons. Now, seeing as the movie was particularly bad I doubt this characteristic of zombies will catch on, but the film is officially part of zombie history and should be kept in mind.

Lastly zombies eat people, right? "Night of the Living Dead" zombies ate people, "Shaun of the Dead" zombies did the same. But there are two problems here. First, there was a divide created in zombie films between the creatures who ate only brains versus those who ate any and every part of humans. I think the latter is more legit considering that the Romero's original movie had zombies eating things like intestines and flesh. The second problem, though, is that not all zombies eat people. Again, I go to "28 Days Later" to show how this pattern of zombies has been broken. The rage virus in the movie makes the Infected brutally kill people, but I have not witnessed one of them actually eat a person.

In the end, I guess I can't explain what a zombie is. There are too many variations to set down any hard and fast rules. Some are slow, some are fast. Some a smart, some are stupid. Some technically aren't even dead. So, much like what a supreme court justice said about what is obscene, my official statement on zombies is going to have to be "I know it when I see it."