Reason Writers Around Town: Tim Cavanaugh Chews Over Zombie Science at Slate
In today's Slate, Reason senior editor Tim Cavanaugh takes a look at two zombie series premiering in the U.S. this week—IFC's Dead Set and AMC's The Walking Dead —and how the return of the "banquet" scene, in which the living dead feast on warm flesh at a liesurely pace, marks a return to serious zombie science:
The zombie genre has always been fairly political as well, and enraptured fans are forever searching for deeper meanings that might justify our interest in watching the cannibal feast. At this point it should be clear that there are no larger sociological truths in zombie trends. Zombie holocausts are popular during booms, during busts, in peacetime and wartime, before, during, and after natural disasters, and at all other times…
Any new living dead entertainment must take account of the rapid advances in zombie science that have occurred in the last 10 years or so. Max Brooks' World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide codified zombie-fighting physics and tactics. In a recent issue of the hipster journal n+1, Mark McGurl compared the recent popularity of suave, attractive, withholding, physically robust vampires with the simultaneous rise of decaying, grotesque, needy, enfeebled zombies, and stumbled on a great hidden-in-plain-sight discovery: Vampires are stars; zombies are fans…
The banquet in all its silly grotesquerie has always been the key to the genre's seriousness, not only because it shows that the dead must win but because it is where the zombie movie really luxuriates in physical dread and frailty. In recent years, the banquet has been undermined by the rise of the fast-moving zombie. First appearing in Dan O'Bannon's execrable 1985 Return of the Living Dead, the newly invigorated undead have recently blossomed in an atmosphere of hyperkinetic editing that allows filmmakers to cheat the angles shamelessly. (Boyle and Snyder should have been jailed for the improbable-to-impossible action in 28 Days Later and the Dawn remake.) With the action going by so fast, you never get to settle in and dine. As Romero, who explored the handheld-camera universe in 2006's Diary of the Dead, puts it in a commentary track, "If you're shooting a film objective camera … when the zombies are feasting, you can go in and feast yourself. You can stretch it out for five minutes, go in for close-ups, all that."