Marty Michaels

Ok, so I lied about the last post being my last horror movie related post, but this should be a fun one. At our weekly movie night (Wednesday nights at James’ house – bring your own Doritos) James, me and James’ brother Matt watch and play all manner of movies and video games, but one thing that we love more than anything else is a good old fashioned zombie movie. Yes sir, nothing says “fun” more than a bunch of reanimated corpses chowing down on the living. That said, there often comes a time when you long for something deeper, something based on the traditional Caribbean zombies, created by voodoo and condemed not to walk the earth in search for brains but to work as a mindless slave for a voodoo master So here goes with the top ten REAL zombie movies! Onward!

10. LIVE AND LET DIE (1973)

Yes, THAT Live and Let Die. Roger Moore’s debut as James Bond is not one of my favorite Bond movies, but it does feature a traditional voodoo zombie in the form of Baron Samedi – a seemingly unkillable villain who uses occult magic to dispose of his enemies. Shot in the head, stabbed with a machete and locked in a coffin filled with venomous snakes – but come the end of the film, the time in the film where Bond is usually on top of the world and lying in bed with his latest squeeze, Baron Samedi is seen, very much alive and cackling demonically. The only supernatural villain that Bond has ever faced and the only villain I can think of offhand to survive til the end credits.

9. THE GHOST BREAKERS (1940)

Sure it’s a Bob Hope comedy, but like the best horror comedies, the comedy is played for laughs and the horror is played straight. Unlike most horror comedies, the film manages to create a uniquely eerie atmosphere – helped by the black and white photography and the commanding presence of Noble Johnson (most famous as the native chief in King Kong) as the film’s main zombie. One of the classic Hollywood comedies, The Ghost Breakers (and the film it sequelled, The Cat and the Canary) inspired Walt Disney’s Haunted Mansion attraction at the various Disney theme parks.

8. DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)

After Night of the Living Dead hinted at a sci-fi explination for the reaminated corpses stalking the earth, the shopping mall-based sequel Dawn of the Dead hinted at a supernatural explination for the zombies. In fact, Dawn is the first time the zombies are even referred to as “zombies.” In one of the film’s most famous scenes, Peter (played by Keenan’s dad from Keenan and Kel) remembers the words of his grandfather – a voodoo priest – “when there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.”

5. DAY OF THE DEAD (1985)

What comes after the Dawn of the Dead? Why the Day of the Dead, of course, and while there’s no supernatural explination at hand in this third installment of Romero’s zombie saga, it does feature a more traditional zombie slave type character in the rehabilitated and somewhat house trained Bub. As loveable as a reanimated corpse hungry for human flesh can be, Bub is the private experiment of Dr. Logan (or “Frankenstein” as he’s dubbed by the other characters) and is much more like the zombies of the pre-Romero age than the brain munchers that have come since.

6. DEAD AND BURIED (1981)

A zombie film that needs to be more widely viewed, Dead and Buried is a slow burner, yes, but when it pays off it REALLY pays off. With Melody Flash Gordon Anderson and a young Robert “Freddy Kruger” Englund in the cast and possibly the single most creepy animatronic Stan Wilson ever built, the film plays like a zombie version of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (itself a zombie film in a way). Managing to invoke that Val Lewton-esque sense of impending doom that so few eighties horror movies had, Dead and Buried is a film that definatley deserves to be more well known.

5. ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS (1979)

Variably known as Zombie, Zombi 2, Island of the Living Dead, Zombie Island and, most bizarrley, Woodoo, Zombie Flesh Eaters started life as a sequel to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, but soon, under the direction of Lucio Fulci, became something quite different. Rather than a group of the undead and a group of survivors duking it out in somewhere uniquely American such as a cabin in the woods or a shopping mall, Fulci starts the film in the US but swiftly shifts the action to the zombie’s old stomping ground: the Caribbean. Most famous for the now infamous scene in which a zombie fights a shark (yes, you read that correctly) and a brilliant effects sequence in which a woman is impaled eye-first on a splintered peice of wood, Zombie Flesh Eaters is perhaps a victim of it’s own noteriety. Branded a video nasty in the UK, it is only recently that the film has been recognised as the genre classic it is.

4. I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943)

1943 and Val Lewton has a problem: he’s been told his latest project is to be called I Walked With A Zombie. He’s been in tight spots before – when the studio gave him the title Cat People they were expecting Lon Chaney not Simone Simon, but how can he turn I Walked With A Zombie from a lurid Universal knock-off into something more in line with his own brand of pyschological horror? Simple – don’t make it a zombie picture at all? Instead of shambling corpses or melodramatic zombie masters, Val Lewton gave us a classic depiction of Caribbean mysticism and voodoo. The iconic figure of Carre-Four, the towering zombie guard, (one of the most instantly recongisable images in classic horror) and the brilliantly ambigous ending make I Walked With A Zombie well worth checking out.

3. WHITE ZOMBIE (1932)

Perhaps the first zombie movie ever made, the title White Zombie tells you all you need to know about the public image of the zombie pre-Night of the Living Dead. A zombie was one thing, but a WHITE zombie?! Well, that’s something quite different. An early example of indie horror filmmaking, White Zombie was shot on the Universal lot using borrowed costumes and props with Bela Lugosi in the lead as the voodoo master Murder Legendre. Bela Lugosi as a Haitian might be a bit hard to swallow, but Bela sinks his teeth into the role with his usual abandon. The film may seem a little hokey to today’s audiences, but it does generate a palpable atmosphere of dread and, credit where it is due, the Universal sets are used a lot better than in a lot of the Universals. Remembered today mostly as the film that gave Rob Zombie (a man who should never be allowed to so much as hold a movie camera again in his life, but that’s another matter entirely) the name of his band, White Zombie is a bit of a forgotten classic, but its role in the evolution of the zombie genre (and as a precursor to modern independent cinema) cannot be overstated.

2. THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW (1988)

You know, I’ve got a theory as to why zombies are so scary. Once you get a a certain age and you realise that Santa, the Easter Bunny, and Jesus are all just fictional characters, Dracula and the Wolf Man just aren’t that scary anymore – after all, why be scared of something that’s not real, right? Problem is, zombies fucking exist. There’s even pictures of them:

That guy? He’s Clairvius Narcisse and he was (or perhaps is) an honest-to-god 100% geniune zombie. May 2, 1963 was the date of Clarvius’ funeral and he was buried under six feet of Hatian earth. Problem is a couple days later he wandered back to his village and began working in the fields with no memory of his past life. Turns out our man Clarvius was under the spell of a local witch doctor who had brought about all the symptoms of death by poisoning his victim with a cheimical concotion only to dig him up and put his undead ass to work. What does this undeniably creepy story have to do with The Serpent and the Rainbow? Well, the man who brought Clarvius’ story to the West was a guy named Wade Keller and his book, “The Serpent and the Rainbow” provided the inspiration for the film; one of the creepiest and most offbeat zombie movies ever.

1. PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES (1966)

Hammer only made one zombie movie and I suspect it’s because they knew they’d never top this one. Plague of the Zombies is the “missing link” between the South Seas zombie movie and the zombie invasion/infestation movie – an eeeevil country squire with brilliant sideburns returns from Haiti and uses his newly learned voodoo knowledge to enslave newly dead villagers to work in his tin mine and make him rich. Taking the zombie away from his home turf and into the English home counties, characterisation takes precedent over buckets of gore, but the film is not without its scares – in particular a four minute dream sequence that all but invented the classic zombie movie “rising from the grave” sequence. Filled, like most Hammer movies, with solid character actors who could act rings around most of today’s “stars” and full of tension and atmosphere – witness the scene where the voodoo master steals through the village at dawn – Plague of the Zombies is one of the lesser known Hammers (no Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee) and yet is one of the best. In fact, not only is it one of the best Hammer movies, it’s one of the best horror movies and certainly the best voodoo zombie movie ever made.

From 007 to Hammer horror via Bob Hope, George Romero and Bela Lugosi, the traditional zombie movie is a criminally underlooked genre – and one which sorely needs to make a comeback. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m getting a bit bored of flesh eating zombies. It’s about time – especially in light of recent events – that the traditional zombie reasserts himself; or rather, his voodoo master orders him to do it. Agree? Disagree? Gimmie your thoughts below. End transmission.

Tags: horror, monsters, movies, top ten