Reconsideration for the historical view of zombie films

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  • FUKUDA, Asako
    Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University

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  • ゾンビ映画史再考
  • ゾンビ エイガシ サイコウ

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We know what zombies are. They are referred to as the "walking dead" or "living, dead". They have started to decompose, zombies walk in a tottering. manner, and they attack humans en masse for flesh meat. If a zombie attacks someone, that person will either be eaten alive or if he is lucky to escape, the victim himself will transform into a zombie and start to attack others. Such an image of zombies was rendered around the 1970's, by the Zombie trilogy filmed by George Andrew Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead). However, zombie films produced after 2002 portray them in another way. Zombies in these films arc called "running zombie" or "game zombie" and it is explained that they are vastly different from Romero's zombies. In this paper, we reconsider the historical view of zombie films and how zombies, who were in fact born in the West Indian nation of Haiti around 1930, have transformed in terms of representation and narrative thanks to the influence of Romero's works. Romero's zombies, in addition to the above-mentioned features, were human-like monsters. Furthermore, the effect of the gore genre, where Romero's zombies are also classified, created another image of the zombie : the one with more brutality and blood-shed. These two types of zombies, one as a human-like monster and another more grotesque and bloody, exist in their own works and frighten audiences in their own ways. Yet, in works containing "running zombie", these two types of zombies co-exist in the same film in various ways. It is in this special co-existence that a specificity of the "running zombies" is found.

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