Horror director George A. Romero's fourth zombie film, Land of the Dead, is shocking US audiences not by its gore but by its vicious satire, writes Anna Mundow from Boston.
A US city comes under attack - its tallest building is hit. Terrified citizens stampede as their panicked leader tries to escape to an undisclosed location. His mantra: "We don't negotiate with terrorists." Soldiers in armoured vehicles patrol ruined streets, brutally quashing a growing insurgency. Prisoners are tortured and killed, their corpses strung up and used for target practice.
This is not a new Michael Moore documentary. It is George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, the stealth movie of the summer that flew into mainstream US cinemas under the radar last month and is shocking audiences - not with its plentiful gore but with its satire. Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds may have Tom Cruise, Tim Robbins and quotable lines such as "occupations always fail", but Romero's latest zombie movie - his fourth after a 20-year hiatus - could prove to be the most subversive film on general release in the US since Fahrenheit 9/11.
Even the New York Times is taking it seriously. "Whatever else you think about these films," critic Manohla Dargis recently wrote in her review of the Romero movie, "whether you believe them to be sincere or cynical, authentic expressions of defiance or just empty posturing, it is rather remarkable that these so-called popcorn movies have gone where few American films outside the realm of documentary, including most so-called independents, dare to go."
The plot, as always, is simple. The place, as always with Romero, is the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (although you could mistake it for Manhattan).
Zombies, the living dead or "stenches" as they are affectionately called, roam the land, craving tasty human flesh. Only the river surrounding the city and the electrified fences within its limits keep the undead at bay. Inside this last remaining enclave, it is business as usual for the dwindling human population. Affluent corporate types live in a gleaming skyscraper mall called Fiddler's Green while, down on the streets, the underclass and the militia do the dirty work, foraging for provisions in zombie-infested neighbourhoods and killing as many "stenches" as possible.
Something, however, is up. The oppressed street people are restless, and across the river the zombies are beginning to put two and two together. Communicating in roars and arming themselves with primitive weapons, the living dead set their sights on Fiddler's Green. When they get there . . . well, let's just say they really make the most of the "food court".
Among the living there is, of course, a villain (Dennis Hopper), a hero (Simon Baker), his sidekick and his girl. The hero is a decent chap who dreams of leading his people to Canada. But now, for the first time, the zombies too have a leader - a black gas station attendant (Eugene Clark), who is an avenging version of an earlier black Romero character, the innocent man murdered by cackling militia men at the end of Romero's 1968 debut, Night of the Living Dead. A cult classic that reflected America's anxieties about the war in Vietnam and the race battles at home, Romero's first zombie movie was made during a summer when it seemed that US cities were about to go up in flames.
"I was trying to come up with the concept of a new society, revolutionary in political terms, that's taking over and devouring the old society," the 65-year-old director recalled in a recent interview. "It was a very angry time. We threw the final [ movie] reels in the trunk on the night Martin Luther King was assassinated."
TWO MORE ZOMBIE movies followed - Dawn of the Dead in 1978 and Day of the Dead in 1985 - along with other films, most notably an adaptation of Steven King's Creepshow and a vampire film called Martin. All of Romero's films have a political subtext, but the director stresses that his latest return to the zombie theme was not inspired by the war in Iraq - at least not initially.
"The original script for Land of the Dead was more about social ills, homelessness, Aids, things like that. We finally finished it literally a few days before 9/11 happened. And when 9/11 had happened everyone wanted to make lollipop movies. I couldn't get a deal. So we put it back on the shelf and sometime after the invasion of Iraq we took it back down and tried to put more emphasis on the new-normal, post-9/11 era. The idea of living with terrorism, of setting up a synthetic sense of comfort."
A similar preoccupation runs through most of Romero's films. His wild vision of a mindless consumer culture has not altered greatly since 1968, but his budget certainly has. He made Night of the Living Dead almost 40 years ago for $100,000 (€80,000) and Dawn of the Dead, shot in a mall late at night, for $1.5 million (€1.2 million) - it went on to earn $40 million (€32.8 million) worldwide.
Land of the Dead, by contrast, cost $19 million (€15.5 million). Romero nonetheless insists that "it still was pretty much guerilla film-making. It wasn't like we were rolling in money." Nobody could accuse this straight-talking, unpretentious director of selling out to Hollywood.
The special effects in Land of the Dead may be more lavish than Romero could previously afford, allowing him to present "demons right out of Bosch and Goya", as one critic put it. The landscape of this movie, on the other hand, is Romero's bleakest yet: a post-apocalyptic wasteland that is all the more terrifying for being so familiar. This not only could be Pittsburgh, it is Pittsburgh - or any US city - under siege. It is a place we recognise, which just happens to be encircled by monsters.
WE CAN STILL tell who the monsters are - they are the ones trying to kill and eat the innocent - but this time the enemy has a cause. And the innocent don't look so innocent any more - bored soldiers take potshots at zombies for fun; sleek executives and small-time hucksters promote war as a business opportunity and fear as a marketing tool.
"I've always liked the idea of the monster within," Romero once remarked, endorsing a fundamental creed of horror films such as Karl Freund's The Mummy in 1932 and any one of David Cronenberg's contemporary creations. In Land of the Dead Romero, like Cronenberg, blurs the line that we like to think separates the human from the non-human. Here the people in power are ruthless creatures driven by appetite and blind to reality, while the zombies are developing not only awareness but a primitive sense of justice.
In other words, the denizens of Fiddler's Green have it coming. We should not be surprised. As Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen point out in Film Theory and Criticism, "Although the more common impulse in the horror film is to exorcise the demon and save the community, there is a parallel track in which the community is rightfully destroyed."
Romero may not be able to bring himself to that point, but in Land of the Dead he comes closer than he ever has before. Aside from its radical political message, the biggest horror in this zombie movie is not that the people who look like us are no longer in control. It is that they do not deserve to be.