Zombies: The Recent Dead (3 page)

Or, throw caution to the winds, as Karl Edward Wagner did, when he cued the entire apocalypse this way: “It seems that the world has been overrun by flesh-eating zombies, see—and then . . . ”

Better (Dead) Homes and (Dead) Gardens

George Romero pooh-poohs the popular notion that his Living Dead films hew to a grandly incisive, sardonic, and preplanned evisceration of American cultural mores. He is not responsible for much of the import read into his work by eager fans. One critical specification overlooked by rabid
Dawn of the Dead
acolytes—whose first exposure to the Zombie Apocalypse probably came on videotape or laserdisc—is the sheer impact this material had when it was new. If you weren’t there, you don’t have any idea.

In a lot of ways, my own zombie fiction began when
Dawn of the Dead
hit the Holly Cinema on Hollywood Boulevard. Don’t look for the theatre today because you won’t find it; not even the address, 6523 Hollywood Boulevard, technically exists in the wake of retrofitting the Walk of the Stars and the ravagement brought to the real estate by the Hollywood-sized folly of MetroRail. There’s a shoe store there now, in the space.

I recently spoke to an out-of-town guest who had been warned not to go near the Boulevard after dark; to me, a ridiculous and cowardly notion, the kind upon which fearsome urban paranoia is built. Before
Dawn of the Dead
struck Hollywood, I was living in a two-bedroom apartment on Normandie Avenue, south of Santa Monica Boulevard—not a neighborhood wimps would bid you to explore, even today. It’s different when you live in the center of a “bad neighborhood,” so-called by people who never go there.

I missed
Night of the Living Dead
in its original release; nearly all of my contemporaries did, catching up with it in second-run houses, cult or grind house theatres, or the deep-South “werewolf circuit” of drive-ins (then they lied about when they’d first seen it, in a kind of endless slapjack of geek credibility).
Night
’s underground popularity far exceeded its visibility in the days before the term “independent film” had become comfortably co-opted. The first time I saw
Night
was at a midnight show in Chicago, across the street from the Biograph Theatre, site of John Dillinger’s assassination (the Biograph was then hosting weekly conclaves of
Rocky Horror Picture Show
fanatics). The print of
Night
was a grainy, abused 16-millimeter dupe, which only added to the documentary look and surreal experience.

But for
Dawn
, I was there on the first day. The Holly was then owned by a chain called SRO Theatres, which also owned the Paramount (refurbished in recent years into the Disney-centric El Capitan, its original name). In 1979, you could still find movie theatres on Hollywood Boulevard; from west to east: The Chinese, the Hollywood, the Vogue, the Egyptian, the Pussycat, the Holly, the Fox, the Pacific, the Vine, the Pix, and the World. Usually, new or premium features started on the west end, and worked their way east through second runs and bargain double bills. It was possible to work your way theatre-to-theatre and watch movies for more than twenty-four hours straight with no repeats, which our crew did on more than one occasion. It was also possible to do this even though most of us were normally dead-ass broke, because virtually everyone worked as an usher or assistant manager at one or another of the cinemas, and favors were exchanged often and eagerly.

My Los Angeles flop was with a gang of budding graphic artists who had holed up in a threadbare one-bedroom apartment on Harold Way, one door north of the house where Bela Lugosi died. (The apartment house is still there in 2010, and looks more threateningly downscale than ever; we were in #7.) All of these guys and gals held jobs at Boulevard theatres, most for SRO (even Frank Darabont worked as an usher and ticket-taker at the Paramount, and had to wear one of those poop-brown jackets)—Ramon Mahan, Grant Christian, Peggy Sniderman, Alex Kent, Michael Takamoto, Marcus Nickerson. At any given time there were no fewer than five people living at what we called the Harold Way Station, not counting sofa and floor sleepovers—on average, two extra people per night—plus girlfriend cameo appearances. I, an out-of-towner, generally slept directly beneath a long table fashioned from a door scavenged from the Paramount. There was a single rotary phone and chuddering refrigerator that got murdered one night when one of our roomies sought to hack away accumulated ice with a meat cleaver and hit the Freon line. The fridge actually screamed as it died . . . and for the next six weeks, we hiked to the 7-Eleven whenever we wanted a cold beverage. To do this entailed a sortie around the backside of a Jaguar dealership on Hollywood Boulevard that butted up on the freeway. It was a good idea to venture forth in groups, because Morlocks waited back there.

We watched every movie playing at every theatre on the Boulevard even though we were broke most of the time. Assorted under-the-table deals with the ushers at competing theatres meant perpetual free admission. This was in addition to the free flow of ticket scams and back-door discounts.

The furniture at Harold Way didn’t last long, either, the eighth-hand coffee table and sofa getting quickly destroyed by impromptu “wrestling practice” in the living room. The stereo components were kept imprisoned in a padlocked closet, and the carpeting had so much stuff spilled on it that we thought to file claims with the
Guinness Book
. One night, two guys climbed through the bedroom window to burglarize the joint. Boy, were they surprised when the light clicked on. Six of us braced them with ball bats, pipes, buck knives, and bare knucks . . . all in our underwear or in the buff. They practically shit themselves getting out the window, and we were laughing so hard we wound up not chasing them.

About now, you are probably wondering what all this seedy autobiography has to do with
Dawn of the Dead
, so I’ll spare you the story of the bottle rockets, the two fifths of scotch, the freeway off ramp, and the police cars.

Dawn of the Dead
, bearing all the stigma of an unrated movie, landed at the Holly Cinema and played there for weeks. Our practice, once we had exhausted all auxiliary movie-going activities on the Boulevard, was to safe-house it at the Holly, since one of our own, Ramon Mahan, was then the manager. Hence, when there were no more movies to watch, we watched
Dawn of the Dead
again and again and again. And we witnessed the singular phenomenon of audiences literally staggering out of the theatre, glassy-eyed, disoriented, stunned, not much different from zombies on the lurch, looking like they’d been whacked in the head with one of those rubber things you use to separate your groceries on the supermarket conveyor.

We also noticed the audiences got
bigger
the longer the movie played. Word of mouth was getting out. Now, for us, seeing
Dawn of the Dead
twenty or thirty times on the Holly screen would seem to be a saturation point, yes? We had no idea. There was more submersion yet to come.

During
Dawn
’s run at the Holly, our Harold Way crew began to break up, courtesy of Michael Takamoto scoring an entry-level job in animation at Hanna-Barbera (Mike’s dad, Iwo Takamoto, was VP of the studio at the time). Mike vetted several others into newbie positions, but remember that nearly all of these guys were artists, and they rose quickly through the company ranks. They weren’t washing cels for long. Suddenly, unexpectedly, and for the first time ever, they were making real money.

Inevitably, people started getting their own apartments, with bedrooms all to themselves, an unprecedented notion for us at the time, and it came to pass that the Harold Way contingent dwindled to a skeleton crew. Further new digs were procured and Harold Way had to be vacated. Due to the exigencies of leases, firsts-and-lasts, and delays, there was a period during which several of us would be technically homeless for a few days.

Unless we stayed in the basement at the Holly Cinema. With the rats and the substantial roach population.

Moreover, available monies were sunk in apartment deposits, rendering our already-Spartan food budget nil. For three days, we subsisted on all-you-can eat popcorn from the snack bar, leftover hot dogs, and all the fountain Coke we could stomach. Candy bars were off-limits, as these were inventoried, same as the soft drink cups and popcorn containers. So, providing our own cups, scarfing surplus popcorn, we eagerly awaited the close of business each evening to divide up the unpurchased snack bar hot dogs, if any. In keeping with the zombie theme that had overrun our lives, these refugee wieners—if any —had been doing the “rotisserie roll” for hours, and by the end of the day they had decomposed into a sort of greenish hue, a color that doesn’t exist in nature and one which you can only see today if you watch an extremely faded trailer for the drive-in snackbar goodies of yesteryear. They also had next to no structural integrity whatsoever; if you picked one up by the end, it would fall apart. Thus we had to procure a loaf of 35¢ Wonder Bread to hold the dogs together long enough for consumption, since, yes, the buns were inventoried too, and off-limits.

And
Dawn
played on. Five-to-seven shows per day; extra screenings on weekends. And somewhere in mid-process, that movie ingrained itself indelibly on our malleable widdle brains. Holed up in the Holly, rarely seeing daylight, we absorbed each beat of the Goblin score and every line of dialogue until we felt we were actually there, stranded inside the drama along with Peter and Roger and Steven and Fran. Hearing that music or seeing any footage from
Dawn
has a visceral effect to this day, and I’m thankful it’s not the reaction caused by the living dead hotdogs.

In 1990,
Night of the Living Dead
was subjected to a revisionist remake directed by Romero protégé Tom Savini, the makeup artist responsible for the ground-breaking splatter effects of
Dawn of the Dead
. The re-make did not spark a zombie renaissance, but it did prove that some things can rise from the grave no matter how many times they are pronounced dead. In 1998, John Russo’s thirty-years-after spin on Romero’s original footage (with “added scenes” shot contemporaneously) revisionist version was released to VHS and DVD as an “anniversary” edition that cheesed off a lot of true believers. In 2001, Beacon Films announced a remake, of all things, of
Dawn of the Dead
.

And George Romero himself has been endlessly pressured to return to the realm of his own
Living Dead
, despite dozens of rip-offs and retrofits of his ground breaking work. The world, it seems, can’t get enough of zombies—the Romero kind—and the durability of this new icon was further demonstrated when documentarians Jason Bareford, William Schiff, and Christian Stavrakis focused their efforts on
Dawn2K
, a reminiscence of
Dawn of the Dead
by all its principals and many interested observers.

The plain fact is that the aptly-christened “Romero zombies” have infiltrated the culture to the extent that even people who have never experienced the movies “know” what zombies are in short form:
They’re dead, they walk, they want to eat you, and they usually outnumber you.
The codicil, courtesy of Dan O’Bannon’s
Return of the Living Dead
(1985), is that they want to eat your brains, in particular, and this specification has percolated down through subsequent zombie movies from all cultures in all parts of the world. In sum, people know zombies, now, the way everybody knew what a vampire was, thirty years ago.

Zombie fiction, like it or not, for better or worse, has arrived . . . and this probably isn’t the last you’ll see of it.

BONE appetit!

Addendum 2010:
Not only was
Dawn of the Dead
subjected to a revisionist reboot (in 2004), but
Day of the Dead
was, too (in 2008) and
28 Days Later
begat
28 Weeks Later
. George Romero self-resurrected and begat a second zombie trilogy:
Land of the Dead
(2005),
Diary of the Dead
(2007), and
Survival of the Dead
(2009).

—David J. Schow

New Year’s, 2003/Revised May 2010

[Originally from the
Introduction
and
Afterword
of
Zombie Jam
, Subterranean Press, 2003]