Zombie freakout!

Run for your lives! It's a zombie freakout!

I have to credit Craig Davidson here---"Zombie Freakout" is the title of a funny little screenplay he wrote. But I'm borrowing it for now.

I've got zombies on the brain because I've renewed my love/fear affair with Resident Evil 4. I originally played and finished this game about a year ago. Once I finish a video game I don't usually feel like playing it anymore, but RE4 is so enthralling and creepy that it was all I could do to not immediately start from the beginning again. I waited about a year and then a few weeks ago I popped my favourite game back in the Cube and got ready to be scared. Turns out a year is just enough time to forget all the spots where zombies jump out from behind things to startle me half to death.

So what makes RE4 so much better than other games? Let's start with the premise. You control Leon Kennedy, an agent who has been sent to a boondock Spanish village to find Ashley Graham, the kidnapped daughter of the U.S. President. Okay, maybe that's not the best place to begin a defense of the game's merits; it's pretty unlikely that if one of the Bush gals was kidnapped, G-Dubya-B would send one lowly agent off to Spain to rescue her. Even he is smarter than that. But being all alone ups the fear value, so I'm willing to overlook the implausibility. Anyway, you get dropped off way out in the woods on the road into a village that looks like it hasn't had contact with the outside world since the 1800s. It looks like November; all the trees are naked, the fallen leaves are various shades of grey, fog prevents you from seeing far through the trees and the only sound is Leon's footsteps and some spooky crows. There is a loosely defined path to follow, but you get the sense that bad things could come rushing at you from any direction. You follow a rotten fence down to a decrepit little stone house. Inside, a tattered villager tends to a fireplace...when you ask him if he's seen Ashley he snarls something in Spanish and out of nowhere takes a swing at you with his hatchet. The creepy music starts and he comes shuffling toward you...

The setting in this game is so much more effective than in any other scary game I've played. The previous RE games relied on over-done settings like zombie-crawling cities and mansions. In addition to the pastoral-village-gone-wrong, the game's locales include ancient graveyards, cultish churches, an abandoned mine, a decadent castle, a twisted laboratory and so on. The graphics are incredibly vivid and the music gives you the chills. The game takes place in third person view, but rather than the camera being set back several feet like in, say, Zelda games, you view everything from just behind Leon's right shoulder. This gives it a wonderfully claustrophobic feeling; unlike other games you don't have greater vision than the character you control. It always feels like something is behind you and when Leon gets swarmed by bad guys, they are right there. You can almost smell their bad guy breath as they lunge to bite Leon. And they do more than bite...some give an overhead swipe with a hatchet, others strangle, some shoot flaming arrows and you don't want to know what one guy does with a chainsaw. As the game progresses Leon can buy nastier weaponry with which to fight back, such as the Striker shotgun which can send a bevy of bad guys flying from point-blank range, or the sniper rifle, one bullet from which can liquify a bad guy's head from long range. Yes, this game is as graphic and nightmarish as they come. Never, ever let a child play Resident Evil 4. I feel guilty that I find the game so fun...at the same time that, like no other game, it makes me want to jump under the covers and hide, it is more satisfying than any other game when Leon gives a bad guy a round in the face or sends him stumbling with one to the knee.

But perhaps the most intense feature of the game, though, are the 'bad guys' themselves. Now, any one familiar with the RE series knows its games are about zombies. But the enemies in RE4 are not your typical mindless, moaning, decomposing undead who shuffle toward you so slowly you've got about twenty minutes to decide whether to hand them flowers or a bullet. In fact, by the traditional definition, they are not zombies at all, as they are not undead. Instead, these fellows, called Los Gannados in the game, are regular, living people that have been taken over by an insect-like parasite called Las Plagas. These parasites allow them to be controlled by the game's evil mastermind, Lord Saddler. Sometimes the parasite in a particular Gannado will make its appearance if Leon removes said Gannado's head. Mainly the parasites make their hosts act zombie-like; they are a bit stiff, they are single-minded in their drive to mutilate Leon, and they make no effort to get out of the way of whatever weapon Leon wields. But shuffle mindlessly they do not. Los Gannados either rush at Leon as fast as their parasitic legs can carry them, or coyly walk toward him then break into a sprint for his jugular. It's not quite like having a zombified Donovan Bailey bearing down on you, but acting snappy is of the essence.

And this brings me to the general subject of this post: the contemporary zombie.

Gone are the days of the shuffler, the moaner, the reanimated corpse dropping rotten apendages left and right. The B-movie zombie was never much of a threat. Its outstretched arms suggested it would grope you to death if it ever got ahold of you. It seemed just bloodthirsty enough to gnaw on your elbow. Part of what made zombie movies of yore so B was the sheer stupidity of the characters who fell victim to the moaning masses. Instead of turning and running, or even walking briskly, away, the characters stood their ground and screamed or otherwise acted like ostriches. In the array of supernatural creatures, the zombie has traditionally occupied the lowest position. The poltergeist haunts us by intruding from a spookier plane. The werewolf gives us the fear of the pursued and represents the union of humans and tooth and claw wilderness. Faced with the vampire, we really know what it is to be prey, drinking boxes for creatures of superior strength, intellect, consitution and a penchant for being at their best when we are at our weakest. Even skeletons have their lipless perma-smiles and empty eye sockets. But zombies...well, they bear a similarity to old men bumbling about in slippers and shabby cardigans. (To those of you who may confuse the two, Dave Hickey is not a zombie...or is he..?)

I suppose the B-movie zombie still exists, still shuffles about in its undead stupor, but of late a few more polished movies have renovated the zombie concept. The zombies of RE4 and movies like Dawn of the Dead (the remake) and 28 Days Later are the best examples. To begin with, these zombies only shuffle mindlessly until they see living flesh---then they break into an all out, slavering, snarling sprint, like personifications of the Id, if you will. Take the scene early in Dawn of the Dead when when Ana's (Sarah Polley) newly zombified husband chases her out of her house and down the street. Reckless and slightly clumsy? Yes. Slow? No effing way. And in the precursor to this scene we see that an old chew on the elbow is not what these new zombies are after; a girl, formerly a friendly neighbourhood rollerblader and now a zombie missing part of her face, gives Ana's husband's neck her best vampire impression---with none of the cool two-cuspid precision of Dracula but way more biting, tearing and ripping. Even in Shaun of the Dead, a witty Britty zombie flick whose ghouls are more of the old shuffling, moaning variety, there is a shocking scene in which a crowd of zombies tear open a character's belly and pull out his stringy innards like a game of group cat's cradle. Whether symptomatic of the general increase in graphic displays of violence in the movies or not, the zombie of today is not good for your complexion.

The contemporary zombie isn't always undead, especially not in the sense of being one of a horde that has spontaneously thrust grasping hands through cemetary sod, as in Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. As I've explained, RE4's Gannados are infected and controlled by a parasite that effectively renders them zombies. The zombies of 28 Days Later are humans who have been infected with a virus, but it hasn't killed them. In fact, near the end of the movie we see that the zombies are dying for a very-alive need, the want of food and water. The one exception to this is Dawn of the Dead, where the living switch teams after being bitten by their opponents; they become infected with the unnamed virus, which kills them and immediately reanimates them as zombies. But in all these cases, there is no unexplained and sudden bursting forth from graves en masse. Instead, the zombies multiply, and swift apocalypse looms, through the spread of viral or parasitic infection. It's no great observation to say that this points to our fear that science and biology, rather than God-induced cataclysm, will bring about the end of the species. 28 Days Later even parallels the story of AIDS in that its virus first makes the jump to humans through a monkey bite.

In the same way that in the Old Testament God would clear away those who displeased him with a flood or other swipe of his fist, nature seems to have an almost sentient way of keeping populations in control. Whether it's through the introduction of a predator, the exposing of a genetic weakness or a change in climate, no one species can grow ad infinitum without nature taking it out at the knees every so often. This is no different with humans; right now we're due for a pandemic but we continuously try to stay one scientific step ahead. These zombie movies present pandemics that descend so swiftly that medicine, law and all other systems of order are quickly overloaded. Unlike sicknesses such as bird flu or SARS that take time to spread, the zombie pandemics have society turned upside down by dinner time. All the pandemics that I can think of use the over-population of the affected species against itself; individuals become contagious, and the greater number and density of these individuals, the faster spreads the virus or illness or whatever. However, the most effective thing about the zombie pandemic is that the infected actively seek to spread the infection. Rather than lay in bed or otherwise submit to quarantine, they're out there trying to convert us all, like ultra-persistent Jehovah's Witnesses. We become the agents of our own culling. Think about this next time you walk the streets of a city like Toronto or visit Walmart on a Saturday. The zombie fear is irrational, but is it the same with the fear of our own numbers?

I also enjoy the commentary of these movies. They're not the deepest or most subtle, but they manage to say a thing or two. Dawn of the Dead zombies flock to the mall, making plain the question whether mall-goers and consumers in general are not zombified in their own way. While the more recent Land of the Dead remake is ripe with corny lines and pleas for pathos (the main character closes the movie by reflecting that the zombies "just want somewhere to live") the best part of the movie is the scenario: the zombie outbreak has forced the regular humans to hole up across a river, in a barricaded city. Most live in slums at the edges of the city but those who are rich enough inhabit a controlled-climate tower at the city's centre. The tower is a reconstruction of the good life, with simulated bird song, sunshine and greenery, and the people who live there shop and dine and spend their time enjoying life's pleasures. It's ostriching of the worst kind; creeping death is just across the river but the wealthy ignore it as they sip their pinot. They're buffered by the lower classes, after all. The comment here is that we're so intent on maintaining our life of ease, our comfortable affluenza, we'll continue pursuing it even when we're surrounded by contagion---as long as it's happening to someone else.

So I think it's time the zombie got some respect. It's obviously a fictional creature, but what is more plausible, a virus that controls its host or a fanged guy who sleeps in a coffin, bites necks and is afraid of garlic? a regular joe who just happens to turn into a wolf once a month? a walking set of bones? Like these other figures, a zombie embodies certain fears. It's traditionally been the walking dead come to claim the living, but now it symbolizes the viral pandemic, the biological apocalypse, the danger that lies in our over-population. And sometimes it gets us to fess up to our own shuffling mindlessness.