Five Torches (Out of Five)

Warning: This review contains spoilers for the “Days Gone Bye” episode of The Walking Dead.

When was the last time there was a post-apocalyptic TV series? Has there ever been a post-apocalyptic TV series? Because I honestly can’t think of any. TV is a mass market medium — the original mass market medium — and definitely not one to dwell on the dark side.

I think it speaks pretty accurately to how hopeless and depressed people feel these days that we’re finally seeing such a series right now.

And they didn’t pull any punches, did they? When was the last time you saw a child killed on TV — by the good guy no less? Sure, it was a zombie-child, but seeing the actual killing — in the first five minutes — speaks to the daring tone of this show.

Zombies may have been done to death in the movies and in fiction, but this show truly looked and felt like something different.

One reason why is surely because it’s the work of film director Frank Darabont, who created the series and wrote and directed this pilot.

Clearly, Darabont had the clout to be able to do whatever the hell he wanted. (And I’m sure it helped that cable channels like AMC actually encourage quality programming, as opposed to dumbing everything down for the widest possible audience.)

I loved that the episode got right to the point, both before and after the opening tease, even as it also varied the tone — something that made the moments of incredible intensity and suspense seem even that much more heart-wrenching.

The economy of the storytelling was extraordinary. They didn’t bother telling us things we already know and haven’t already seen in other zombie projects. And when it came to communicating important info, they couldn’t have done it any better than that scene with the half-corpse crawling along the grass: it told us everything we needed to know about the new world Rick was now in and, later when he goes back to put it out of its misery, everything we need to know about Rick.

Meanwhile, the episode had many other moments of incredible creepiness:

• Rick waking up, confused and disoriented, into a world of “walking dead.” It was similar to the opening of 28 Days Later, but felt completely different too.
• The young boy seeing the return of his mother the zombie outside the house.
• The inevitable “crowd” of zombies in Atlanta and their attack. (His escape from the attack up into the tank was pretty cool too.)
• The closing scene of the horse being devoured — to music, no less!

My few quibbles:

• Rick has nice period of confusion, but then he seemed to adapt to the reality of a zombie apocalypse pretty quickly — too quickly. I’m all for moving the story forward, but I just didn’t buy this.
• It was a great and classic set-up for the entire show when Rick finds evidence that his family left in a hurry (and, therefore, may still be alive), but I thought they squandered that by telling us too quickly that they were, in fact, alive.

Truthfully, I’ve long since had my fill of zombies, and I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this show. But Darabont is clearly a storytelling master, and he has created something here that feels genuinely different from anything else I’ve seen on TV.

I’ll definitely be watching.

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• A couple of new stills from The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader have been released, and they seem to mostly exist to highlight the fact that Ben Barnes is the only cast member who can grow a beard (save Aslan).

• Speaking of Treader, for a movie that’s already got two trailers and tons of marketing materials, the fact that it appears that Reepicheep has been recast yet again at this late stage is disturbing. Plus, I like Simon Pegg.

• Has George R.R. Martin written himself into corner on A Dance with Dragons? Is it possible that he’s built such rich characters in his world that he doesn’t have an actual narrative? These are conclusions being reached by people with absolutely no knowledge of the facts.

• Some folks are so impatient for A Game of Thrones (the series) to begin, they have started creating concept art for the characters. I can’t fault the quality of the sketches, but I do think the artist overestimates the ability to sculpt cool facial hair before the advent of stainless steel and electric trimmers.

• Before Denis O’Hare was ripping spines out of newscasters, he was creating a 2,800 old backstory for Russell Eddington, the Vampire King of Mississippi on True Blood. I have to admit, his character has deviated so far from the books at this point, I’m not sure where the story is going.

• New high-res screenshots have been released for Lord of the Rings: Aragon’s Quest, but while the detail is excellent, I’m not sure there’s anything that wasn’t in the trailer.

• Dragon Age 2 won’t let you do character creation, but instead mandates that you fight as Hawke. For a game that’s always played fluidly with gender and sexuality this sounds like dangerous ground. But they have launched a microsite to keep new information flowing.

• So exactly what is in the free-to-play version of Lord of the Rings Online when the switch happens September 10^th? Nearly everything. You don’t get to play as a monster, and you have some limits on what you can earn at a time, but it’s possible to play the entire game for free. Paying opens up some new options, and likely makes advancing easier, but it’s not required. I may have to try this. Who am I kidding? My friends should visit me now, because come September 10^th, I’m off the grid.

• The Torchwood story arc and basic character descriptions for Captain Jack, Gwen, and the new CIA agent Rex Matheson have been posted. The storyline sounds half fairy tale, half Jason Bourne. I’m a little disturbed by: “The only thing that could call Jack Harkness back is his unstated love for Gwen Cooper.” I thought we were past that?

• In Vanishing on 7th Street, Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton, and John Leguezamo are in a massive power blackout when everyone disappears. Then the world shrinks some more.

• Seth Rogen is set to star in Boo U, an animated tale about a ghost has to return to ghost school in order to learn how to better do his job. So I’m guess half Casper, half Beetlejuice?

• Stan Lee and Ming-Na are both taping guest roles on SyFy’s Eureka. Little is known about the roles, but it has been made clear that, with Ming-Na’s role, this is not a crossover with Stargate: Universe. Unlike Warehouse 13, it exists in its own timeline and universe.

• Sam Worthington has confirmed for Dracula: Year Zero. He’s going to play Prince Vlad, who really existed, though likely not in the form the movie will portray.

• AMC has release five more stills from AMC’s upcoming plague/zombie series The Walking Dead. What does it say of my expectations that I’m truly impressed that there are piles of zombie extras and everything isn’t added digitally after the fact?

The notion of the zombie existed long before George Romero’s seminal 1968 horror flick, The Night of the Living Dead, spooked a generation of film-goers.

Zombies actually have their grisly origin as a component of the magical religion, Vodun (more commonly called ‘Voodoo’). They were corpses that had been reanimated by a witch doctor called a bokor, who uses the bodies to do his bidding.

Often these zombies, as the stories go, were mistaken for being living human beings. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, western scientists went on expeditions to Haiti to get to the bottom of the zombie legends, and while no hard conclusions were reached, some of the scientists speculated that zombies were, in fact, real, and that they were victims of a bokor who used the poison found in pufferfish to essentially cause them brain damage, making them susceptible to the bidding of their masters. They weren’t dead, but they were basically automatons with no will of their own.

Fun stuff, huh?

Zombies took quite a different turn when adapted by Romero in the first of his undead features. In his black-and-white classic, the dead return to life and begin killing the living and eating their flesh. (For those keeping score, the cannibalism aspect was not a part of the Vodun zombie lore. That was all Romero.) A small group of people take refuge in a farmhouse and do their best to fend off the oncoming horde, only for each person to die a horrible death.

What was (and still is) clever about Romero’s work is that he was not simply telling a story to make you afraid of the dark. He would carefully weave biting social commentary into all of his zombie movies, subverting our expectations to the point where humanity can seem more evil than the zombies.

After Romero produced Day of the Dead in 1985, he took a 20-year hiatus from zombies, and the genre faded into the background.

But then in 2002, Danny Boyle (now of Slumdog Millionaire fame) directed a chilling little horror movie called 28 Days Later. Praised as a reinvention of zombie fiction, the film’s version of ghouls were actually normal people (who were, blasphemously, alive) who had been infected with what is essentially a concentrated form of simple, human rage.

Perhaps most terrifying is that while the Romero zombies lurched along at a snail’s pace, Boyle’s zombies booked at their victims like a freight train, intent on obliterating their prey, stopping at nothing. If you haven’t seen this film before, do it. You’ll thank me.

Zack Snyder, who would go on to direct genre pics 300 and Watchmen, took notice of just how freaky-deaky these new running zombies were, and incorporated them into his 2004 remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.

After that, the floodgates were opened. George Romero, the man himself, even returned to the genre with 2005’s Land of the Dead, and is still churning them out. Hollywood even went big-budget-zombie with the 2007 Will Smith movie I Am Legend.

And it wasn’t just Hollywood that was playing the zombie game. Media of all kind were cashing in. Image Comics produced a still-running title called The Walking Dead, in which humans attempt to survive in a world that has been devastated by a zombie apocalypse. As if Marvel Comics’ continuity wasn’t indecipherable enough, they began a “metaseries” called Marvel Zombies, which features many well-known heroes, like Spider-man and the Fantastic Four, as the brains-consuming undead.

Max Brooks, son of Mel Brooks, wrote two books which describe in tongue-in-cheek fashion the oncoming zombie apocalypse, The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z.

Even sweet little J.K. Rowling included zombies in her sixth Harry Potter novel, referred to within the story as Inferi.

In short, zombies have arrived.

And in addition to the ones pounding at the door, there are still more zombies waiting in the outskirts for the opportunity to feast on some flesh. All signs point to the fact that the zombie craze is still going strong.

Romero’s newest addition to his ourve, rumored to be called Island of the Dead but listed on IMDB simply as ... of the Dead, is allegedly due out later this year.

Meanwhile, both The Walking Dead and Marvel Zombies are going strong. A new flick called Zombieland, starring Woody Harrelson, is coming soon. Based on this image alone, I’ll be there on opening night:

Comic series Deadworld will be getting the feature film treatment in the near future. And to my eternal delight, a new book is out that revisits Jane Austins riveting masterpiece, entitled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is a retelling of the original novel…with zombies.

(If there is any justice in this world, Keira Knightly will reprise her role as Elizabeth Bennet in the film version, and in her delicate, refined, British way, kick some zombie ass.)

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow, young indy filmmakers continue to cut their early chops on super low-budget zombie flicks. And while it makes me cringe now, I was certainly not above the call of zombies when I made a little comedic film in college that served as an intro to a concert for my a capella group, The Earth Tones. And never being too proud to embarass myself for my fellow fantasy fans, here’s a short clip from the film below.

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