October 30
#26 The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
#27 Isle of the Dead (1945)

Today on NPR’s Science Friday, Ira Flatow was interviewing Steven Schlozman, Co-Director of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, professional child psychiatrist, and author of a new paper on the science of zombies.  Inevitably a caller asked why some zombies move slowly (George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead) while others can run (the remake of Dawn of the Dead).  Schlozman patiently answered, “Neurobiologically speaking, [zombies who run] gotta be different, they gotta have better cerebellar function than the Romero-type zombies because they move too fluidly…and they also kind of use pack behavior, hunting behavior, which suggests higher cortical involvement than you would see in Romero zombies, which literally stumble around and get stuck in windows and can’t figure out how to open them.” 

Naturally, this study deserved further research, and so I pushed forward into 1985’s The Return of the Living Dead.

Here, we have an early example of the running zombie, and this zombie also demonstrates the pack-hunting behavior which Schlozman noted.  They run after paramedics screaming, “Brains!  Brains!” and then chew upon the paramedics’ skulls.  But even more impressive, and which Schlozman should certainly look into, is their ability to adapt and learn.  For example, when a dispatcher calls into the ambulance’s radio, a zombie picks it up and responds with, “Bring more paramedics.”  Not very much later we see more ambulances arrive, and these paramedics are immediately ambushed by a horde of brains-hungry zombies.  Later in the film, the exact same tactic works in fetching delicious policemen.  Schlozman also mentioned the theory that zombie-ism spreads like influenza.  In The Return of the Living Dead, writer/director Dan O’Bannon demonstrates a more ecological variant of that theory.  At an army surplus store, the virus is unleashed by a chemical developed by the government and stored in a vat dating from 1969, which was when, according to a testimonial in the film, the events which inspired Night of the Living Dead originally took place.  (This seems odd seeing as Night was released in 1968, but perhaps the unreliability of the testimony’s source should be taken into account.)  This major discovery – that there was in fact an incident involving re-animated corpses in the 1960’s - at last settles the decades-old question as to what caused the outbreak in Romero’s film: it was, in reality if not in Romero’s fictional version, a gas developed by the government for purposes unknown, but most likely military.  When the gas is accidentally released again, it brings to life a corpse, which, when a pickaxe to the brain proves ineffective, is subsequently chopped into pieces by the brave men stationed at the warehouse.  Even these pieces still throb and wiggle with life.  With the coroner’s help, all the pieces of the corpse are incinerated, and the fumes caused by the cremation device drift up into the clouds, causing a toxic rain to fall upon the local cemetery.  Here, an army of corpses rise from the tainted soil, attacking a group of teenagers who had been merely enjoying simple pleasures such as drinking, dancing naked upon a sarcophagus, and moaning soulfully, “I just want to party.”  Later, after a group of survivors take shelter in the morgue, one zombie, severed at the waist and with a spinal cord that thrashes about, is tied to a table and interrogated.  The zombie explains that devouring brains eases the pain of death, the agony of rotting.  So it appears there is some kind of narcotic effect in brains-consumption.

Isle of the Dead, the latest entry in my ongoing Val Lewtonathon, unfortunately does not bring to light any useful information into a scientific inquiry of the zombie’s biology, although quite a few corpses turn up.  Boris Karloff plays Pherides, a general in Greece during the First Balkan War.  A rigid and sometimes callous leader of men, during a break in fighting he wishes to visit his wife’s tomb, so he takes a boat to a local island guarded by a statue of the three-headed gatekeeper of Hades, Cerberus (Pherides is himself called the “Watchdog” by his men).  Enraged upon finding that the tomb has been violated and his wife’s body is missing, he visits what appears to be the only habitation on the island to question everyone inside.  The house is owned by an archaeologist who was studying the ruins on the isle, and there are enough guests staying with him to warrant an Agatha Christie novel.  Sure enough, soon someone dies, and when a doctor declares it’s the plague, the general assists in quarantining the lot of them on the island.  But the weird, raving woman in black–a requisite of every household–is convinced the escalating deaths are being caused by a vorvolaka, a sort of vampire, taking the form of the beautiful young Thea (Ellen Drew).  Although Isle of the Dead does not concern itself with zombies, it does dwell, as so many Lewton films do, almost obsessively on the subject of death.  Here, on this island which might as well by the Underworld, one woman is mistakenly buried alive, and the result upon her psyche turns her into a sort of zombie, staggering, inarticulate, and murderous.  Director Mark Robson takes his time developing the plot, withholding the supernatural to the extent that one is quite sure, early on, that nothing supernatural will happen at all.  But slowly a spooky atmosphere settles in, fittingly claustrophobic, and at last we get some very satisfyingly eerie moments indeed, and even a pair of brutal murders with a trident.  If Ingmar Bergman ever adapted an Edgar Allan Poe story, it might have come out like this.