Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema

Given that the zombie films of George A Romero and his Italian imitators have been so thoroughly discussed, the obvious question when faced with Jamie Russell's Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema is whether it has anything new to say.

The answer, happily, is yes, with Russell's decision to chart the chronological development of the monster from the first references to it in the 19th century through to the present paying dividends.

The first chapter, “Caribbean Terrors”, establishes the Haitian voodoo background of the creature and the importance of colonialist and racist themes: as an independent black nation born out of an uprising against the white masters, Haiti fundamentally could not be allowed to succeed by western powers who found voodoo useful as a way of proving the ‘innate’ savagery and backwardness of the island's population and thereby the need for their ‘benevolent’ interventions.

The next two chapters, “The Zombie Goes to Hollywood” and “Down and Out on Poverty Row”, trace the impact of the zombie in 1930s and 40s Hollywood, pointing out its difference from other classic monsters as the product of independents rather than major studios, and featuring useful discussions of key films as White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie – the latter unusual in its implicit critique of the standard white/black, civilised/primitive, science/superstition oppositions of the form – along with less celebrated entries.

Chapter four, “Atomic Interlude”, covers the 1950s, a period when science-fiction horror saw the eclipse of the traditional voodoo zombies and Caribbean island settings for alien or red zombies and US locales in the likes of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and Quatermass II, where the allegorical possibilities of the zombie were brought closer to the realities of their audiences than ever before.

The next chapter, “Bringing it all Back Home”, looks at the international spread of the zombie film in the 1960s – a trend that was to continue in the following decades – and, of course, Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead, whose impact is charted in the sixth chapter, “Dawn of the Dead”, taking us from the likes of Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby’s Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things and Deathdream (the politics of the two films curiously opposed) through Jorge Grau’s Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue and Amando De Ossorio’s Blind Dead series onto the Romero film that gives it its title.

In turn Dawn of the Dead provides the backdrop to chapter seven, beginning with an examination of the Italian zombie cycle inaugurated by Fulci’s Zombie – correctly identified by Russell as innovative in its own right for heralding something of a return to the Caribbean and voodoo – before moving onto the comedy horror represented by films like Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead, which Russell has less patience for as a mere divertissement compared to the deadly seriousness of the contemporaneous Day of the Dead. But, while recognizing the achievements of Romero’s film and the ironic way in which it posits a return to the Caribbean – original home of the zombie – after the US has become overrun, Russell is also acutely aware of the blind spots in Romero’s discourse in the way actor Terry Alexander sometimes appears a return to the Mantan Moreland or Willie Best style black stereotypes of the 1930s. Equally insightful is his critique of Wes Craven’s much-praised The Serpent and the Rainbow for its implicit condoning of US policy towards Haiti.

The final chapter, “Twilight of the Dead”, brings things up to date with an insightful examination of Tom Savini’s ill-starred Night of the Living Dead remake; Michele Soavi’s ambitious Dellamorte Dellamore, and the assorted SOV low-budget gore productions made for zombie fans by zombie fans after it became apparent that no-one else was going to make such product, R-rated horror-lite being the order of the day. Yet, ironically, it was this same approach that was ultimately to pave the way for the recent resurgence of the zombie, with the survival horror of the rightly criticized Resident Evil ultimately helping pave the way, through 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead 2004, for the zombie to become an ever more recognizable horror figure with wider audiences, and for Romero, the man who has done more than anyone else to bring about this state of affairs, to finally have the opportunity to make another Dead film for the new millennium.

Book of the Dead is very well researched for the most part, with Russell proving to be equally at home quoting from Fangoria or Julia Kristeva and achieving that rare balance between enthusiastic-but-uncritical fan and dull-and-over-interpretive academic styles. The only area where he is weak is the non-Western zombie film, with his brief discussions of Hong Kong and Mexican zombie films suggesting a relative lack of understanding of the different cultural traditions of these territories in which the Haitian Voodoo aspect plays little or no part. (Of course, it could also be argued in his defence that the rootlessness of the zombie in Mexican horror compared to the Aztec Mummy is precisely the problem within the films themselves.)

The physically impressive 320 page volume is well illustrated, with most pages including at least one black and white image and no less than 64 pages of full colour posters, production and so forth, and is rounded off nicely by a comprehensive zombie filmography listing numerous obscurities for those who absolutely have to see everything – even if in many cases it may just be to confirm for themselves how bad something really is.