Hi all. With all the changes around Mobius and various changes in my personal life, the column, needless to say, has been thrown in a bit of a limbo. Exacerbating that is that I'm on a 3 1/2 week trip around the states right now. But so and anyway, I figured with Halloween on the way I'd be remiss at least not publishing this column that I've had on a tap for a few weeks now.

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To be honest, zombie movies have historically scared me more than zombies themselves. Partially because I don't believe in the undead, but more because of my habitual inability to stomach gore. And then, also, the belief that the reason for zombie movies to exist was as a vehicle for gore. I don't like gore for its own sake, and the idea of watching a movie just for that perplexes me, at best.

But then, something changed: I got a copy of the first zombie film, George Romero's original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, in the mail a couple years ago from a friend who had a redundant copy, and amidst his assurances that it was no gore-fest, gave it a spin. He's totally right that it's not a gore-fest (okay, there is one kind of squirmy shot, but by and large it's pretty digestible), but moreover, it's a damn powerful film, with a gutshot of a left-field ending. If you really want to mock it, you can find moments here and there, but for me NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is one of the best low-budget films ever, regardless of genre.

From there, it was DEAD ALIVE (or, as they call it down here, BRAIN DEAD). This, to put it politely, is not the recommended path, as BRAIN DEAD is as willfully gruesome as you can imagine, with its only saving grace being its incessant silliness. There is absolutely nothing to recommend BRAIN DEAD outside of its gore and silliness - which, granted, goes a hell of a long way here. In the right mood, and with the right stomach, BRAIN DEAD can be a complete blast. But it's not anything like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in terms of its dramatic success as a film.

Anyway, BRAIN DEAD turned me off from further explorations of the zombie culture for a while. But it wasn't just that: it's not like you'd habitually bump into zombie films at your local theaters. In the late 90's and early 2000's, zombies were pretty much unheard of, or at very least, completely disrespected.

Then 28 DAYS LATER hit, and everything changed. Yes, yes: technically the "infected" in 28 DAYS LATER aren't zombies, since they aren't undead. But they have almost all the characteristics of zombies: desire to feast on human flesh, complete implacability, negligible higher brain activity. (The one exception, of course, was the "fast zombie" innovation.) It's hard not to see 28 DAYS LATER as the film responsible for restarting the zombie phenomenon, even if the internal politics of making new zombie films has been much more complicated than that.

It's been this year that I've fully immersed myself in zombie culture. I've been helped along by the studios, of course: there's that surprisingly non-awful remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD, for instance. (Shamefully, I saw it before the original, which may have impacted my judgment; more on that below.) While it willfully pinches the "fast zombie" trope from 28 DAYS LATER, and has a couple too many screenwriting 101 moments of unnecessary exposition and overstated characterization, there are some terrific moments in DAWN '04 (Sarah Polley's initial drive away down the highway in extra wide shot as chaos ensues all about is one of my favorite shots in any film in 2004) and - probably most pointedly - lots of resonance.

Because the thing about the zombie movie is that it's rife with potential for metaphor. In 28 DAYS LATER, the metaphor is rage, and that it's within all of us. In DAWN - which, unlike 28 DAYS LATER, was conceived of post 9/11, and which can't be ignored as an influence - the metaphor is more apocalyptic. It's one of survival against an incomprehensible enemy that's overwhelming us. Horrible catastrophe can strike any moment in a zombie film. Anyone you trust, love, or care about can suddenly turn on you.

For another take on that metaphor, there's the recently-released SHAUN OF THE DEAD. Easily the best comedy of the year, SHAUN manages to milk not just lots of laughs but decent amounts of poignant and thoughtful moments out of the situation as well. The beauty of SHAUN is that it manages to take plenty of these metaphors and situations - from the "we are already the undead" shots of the opening to the eventual dramatic turns of confronting loved ones at the end - and place it within the unlikely context of the romantic comedy. The evolutionary step here can't be entirely overlooked: it's no longer just the case that we have zombie movies, but now movies that just happen to have zombies in them. While it's debatable as to whether this is a positive development in total - one can already imagine UNDERCOVER ZOMBIE, ANACONDA 3: THE ZOMBIE ANACONDAS STRIKE!, SPACE ZOMBIES, and the like as zombies infect other genres - it works wonderfully in SHAUN, a film for zombie fans and zombie haters alike.

All of these zombies made me feel like I had to take the long overdue step of diving back through the remainder of Romero's original trilogy, films I'd avoided because of their legendary gore content but that I figured I'd steeled myself properly for by this time. Going in trilogy order meant the next film was DAWN OF THE DEAD, which - I suppose I should say this quietly - was a huge disappointment. At 138 minutes or something, this thing just goes on and on, without any of the strong characterization or narrative drive of the original film. (I understand there's three different cuts, so it's possible that the cut that I saw worked much less well than the others.) It's possible that watching DAWN, which is clearly the template for many other films, is like watching the original draft of something that's been endlessly reworked in varying forms - by the time you see it, there's nothing new there. Even the much-lauded political content (zombies in shopping malls! get it?) seemed pretty bland by comparison.

Which left me not looking forward to DAY OF THE DEAD, a film which wound up really surprising me. DAY OF THE DEAD is encumbered with some over-the-top acting, to be fair. But its story of an underground bunker where scientists and military fight to stop the zombies when they're not busy fighting each other has much more sharply drawn characters than DAWN - even, or perhaps especially, amongst the zombies. By really exploring what it means to be a zombie, DAY ratchets the potential directions the film can go in up several notches, leaving the ending much more potent and sad than it would be otherwise. Not for the meek of heart by any means - but at this point, I have a curious detachment when watching zombie films, and the gore doesn't bother me. It's part of the point, seeing zombies tear people open and the like.

Meanwhile, at the video store, the zombies keep plodding in, unabated. Not new - I believe it predates 28 DAYS LATER - but new to me and to video stores in New Zealand is the Japanese VERSUS. Insane, gleefully over-the-top, and almost completely metaphor-free, VERSUS is the sort of adrenaline-filled low-budget epic that's so audacious as to bring joyful laughter. I mean: this is a film that opens with a black screen, only to have picture emerge from the center as the corpse the camera's behind splits in half and each half falls to the ground. This is the kind of a film with yakuza zombies and samurai swords and gates to hell and some badass guy that can punch holes in people's bodies and the like.

And maybe that's the endstate of the transformation from mild-mannered film viewer to zombie fan. VERSUS has absolutely none of the emotional impact or dramaturgical coherence of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, or any of the metaphorical content of SHAUN OF THE DEAD, but is merely a love letter about the joy of making a zombie film. It's probably telling that my flatmate who isn't really bothered with zombie films hated VERSUS while my friends who love idiosyncratic, crazy filmmaking flipped for it. Maybe this is the final stage of infection with zombie fandom: the joy of making zombie films catapults over virtues like coherence and metaphor in evaluating its quality. If so, consider me fully infected. Please do not use this as an excuse to show up at my door with a shotgun. Thanks.