White Zombie

First off I am absolutely obsessed with zombies. A quick bibliography would suffice in substitution of an explanation:

Night of the Living Dead
Dawn of the Dead
Day of the Dead
Land of the Dead
The Zombie Survival Guide
World War Z
28 Days Later
28 Weeks Later
Resident Evil Series (games)

And to add the slew of Fan Fiction level short stories and crap horror flicks regarding zombies wouldn't add much to the argument that I fuckin' love zombies. You should get the point by now.

And I know what you're thinking I'm going to say: I hated White Zombie because it wasn't a zombie movie.

No. I definately liked the idea of this movie. The acting, specific plot, the characters, quality, blah blah blah, was not on par for reasons I'm sure anyone has seen the film already understands. It's simply outdated on a technical level.

Now I know I should at least mention this, so I will: White Zombie: Haitian horror
by Tony Williams. I really don't know what to add to the article that might be of any real substance, it's pretty straight forward history that ties in with the movie on the level the article says it does. What interested me most about it was the fact that the movie really doesn't have a hero, as the article states and I agree with entirely. It's a good thing they had Lugosi to bring in the crowds since there's not really anyone to cheer for. I didn't for a second care for even Madeline's character. I'm not really into the completely helpless heroine motif.

I could say more on the matter but it disinterests me. What I'd really like to talk about is why I, a Zombie movie fanatic, really enjoyed such a non-zombie zombie flick.

It delves in the pyschology of what it really means to be a zombie a bit more than most films or books or games. Legendre sort of teases Beaumont in the scene where he's widdling his wax figure, saying something along the lines of "I wish you could speak right now. I've never been with a person as they went through the process. I'd like to know what the symptoms are like." (That was probably a horrible paraphrase, but you get the jist)

This little statement gave me the willies. Most zombie flicks depend on tons of guts and flesh eating shots but the aspect of being one of the mindless beings has always been another powerful fright in the genre. I remember in Dawn of the Dead one of the characters saying he was going to try not to come back, that he was going to fight it. In other films there's characters who have, after being bit, simply ended themselves right there and then. The Haitian's burying the corpse in the middle of the road is a powerful image; they fear not what the corpse will become, but the fact that the corpse could become something more than just a corpse.

I'm breaching a topic I don't quite understand because there's too many facets to it. Fear of mind control, fear of losing ones soul, fear of the desecration of bodies, it's hard to pin point the primal fear involved in it. Another scene in Dawn of the Dead has a character questioning why the tenants of a apartment building locked their living-dead loved ones in the basement. Another answers that maybe it's because some people still have a respect for the dead.

Alright, that's enough, I'm fried. But as a last note, the next time you hear "there are worse things than death", this is exactly the kind of thing they're talking about.