An American university is offering a new class on zombies. The course is being offered by the University of Baltimore and will be taught by the author Arnold Blumberg, who wrote a book on zombie movies, and the curator of Geppi’s Entertainment museum, which specialises in American pop culture. Students taking English 333 will watch 16 classic zombie films and read zombie comics.
Zombies were ushered in with the Haitian vodoun chillers White Zombie (1932)...
..and I Walked with a Zombie (1943)...
...before evolving into the racially-unspecific, shuffling, moaning hordes we now recognise in George A Romero's seminal Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Zombies are gregarious beasts. Because they lack the power of independent thought, filmmakers have latched on to them as embodiments of the herd mentality: Romero especially saw the potential for allegory here. His great Dawn of the Dead (1978), remade for a different age by Zack Snyder in 2004, had them overrunning an abandoned shopping mall, drifting up and down the escalators to anaesthetising musak, like every chain store's ideal customer
Zombies have a virulent way with a franchise, from the video-game derived Resident Evil series...
...to 28 Days Later...
...and 28 Weeks Later...
...not forgetting 2004's Shaun of The Dead...
...and Charlie Brooker's Big-Brother-with-zombs E4 thriller Dead Set
Some of Hollywood's best-known directors cut their teeth (so to speak) on zombie films. Sam Raimi was just 21 when he made The Evil Dead (1981)...
...Raimi went on to make several sequels, including 1992's Army Of Darkness, before becoming one of Hollywood's most bankable directors, responsible for the Spider-Man trilogy
Peter Jackson is another Hollywood fixture who made zombie films earlier in his career. The effects in 1992's Braindead, also known as Dead Alive, are a million miles away from the CGI in the Lord of the Rings trilogy
In 1983, Michael Jackson and John Landis brought us dancing zombies in Thriller, considered by many as the greatest pop video ever made.
The 2009 film Zombieland - starring Jessie Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson with a cameo by Bill Murray - drew comparisons with Shaun Of The Dead for its slapstick treatment of horror
2008's Zombie Strippers starred Robert Englund (from endless Nightmare on Elm Street films) and Jenna Jameson (from endless adult films). The film's plot is summed up in its title.
Zibahkhana, also known as Hell's Ground, was Pakistan's first gore film. The ultra-low-budget film's title is Urdu for Slaughterhouse.
The latest genre mash-up in the works is a film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - 15 per cent written by Seth Grahame-Smith, whose previous books include How to Survive a Horror Movie and The Big Book of Porn, and 85 per cent by some upstart called Jane Austen. It keeps all the main characters from her best-loved novel, but adds a few who aren't alive, don't speak, and would presumably rather eat the Bennet sisters than propose to them.[/align]
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Zombie Strippers? Why has no one told me about this?!
