Zombies! the Ultimate Guide to Zombie Movies Vol. 1: 1914 - 1969
- ISBN-10
- 1521301654
- ISBN-13
- 9781521301654
- Pages
- 125
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2017-05-17
- Author
- Joe Glancey
Description
White Zombie, the movie considered to be Hollywood's first zombie movie, was released in 1932, but cinema had already depicted creatures which, while not technically zombies, shared some of their recognisable characteristics. In James Young's Lola (1914), a grieving Doctor brings his kindly deceased daughter back to life only to discover that the permanent loss of her soul has turned her into a cold-hearted temptress; German filmmaker Robert Weine's classic 1920 expressionist horror, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, featured the wretched pale-skinned Cesare, a somnambulist under the control of a malevolent fairground showman. Other notable antecedents of the zombie sub-genre are two Czechoslovakian horror films: Arrival from Darkness, in which a wealthy landowner finds himself competing with a reanimated ancestor for the affections of his wife, and The Wedding Shirt, which tells of a young girl whose prayers for the return of her lost lover resurrects a malevolent spirit.Until George A. Romero transformed the sub-genre with Night of the Living Dead in 1968, the zombie was found shuffling listlessly around the movie-making basement, the domain of impoverished Poverty Row studios who cared little about art or characterisation. The films were cheap, and usually quite bad - but there was the occasional exception: Val Lewton delivered a nuanced, thoughtful addition to the sub-genre with 1943's I Walked with a Zombie (based in part on Charlotte Bronte's 19th Century romantic novel, Jane Eyre!); Herk Harvey's haunting Carnival of Souls (1962) provided an unusual perspective on returning from the dead, while Hammer applied their usual brand of quality to Plague of the Zombies, a chilling horror movie featuring a nightmare sequence in which the dead are seen rising from their graves that has provided inspiration for a whole generation of filmmakers.However, it was Romero's low-budget Night of the Living Dead that would prove to be the game changer. After his movie, filmmakers would no longer play on our fears of being turned into a zombie by some twisted madman; instead, they would terrify us with the prospect of becoming their prey, of having our flesh ripped apart by predatory - if shambling - monstrosities of nature made all the more horrifying by the fact that they were once like us.This book is the first in a series that aims to chronicle, review and rate every feature-length zombie movie ever made. The good, the bad and the indifferent will all come under scrutiny, with as much consideration given to the obscure, low-budget rarity as to major studios' blockbusters.
