LOVE WILL TEAR US APART: Zombie Romance and Generic Blending

One of the more interesting developments in contemporary horror is the expansion of its ability to cross-pollinate with other genres. The 2000s have seen a number of ambitious experiments in hybridization. At the most manic end of the scale, one might cite something like Brotherhood of the Wolf – whose gonzo combination of martial arts, quasi-werewolves, and heritage drama prompted Roger Ebert to describe it as “an explosion at the genre factory.”[1] Less hyperbolic examples abound, of course. The typical approach is to apply what Rick Altman would refer to as horror’s “semantic” elements to the “syntactical” structure of a dramatically different genre. For the uninitiated, a genre’s semantic codes refer to its recurring visual iconography (or “building blocks”) – characters, locations, visual style – and affective tropes. By contrast, its syntax refers to the “relationships linking [these] lexical elements” (the structures into which these “blocks” are arranged, if you will) – i.e., meaningful oppositions, themes, attitudes, etc.[2] Thus, the Twilight franchise serves as the most wildly successful example of this type of hybridity – i.e., a pre-existing syntax (romance) adopting new semantic elements (horror). The positing of vampire as idealized lover in the series requires very little generic recontextualization – just an amplification of the figure’s “dangerous,” Byronic eroticism. Twilight’s success signals a broad willingness to accept horror’s “crossover” potential. An arguably hermetic or niche genre seems to have gained a broader generic respectability through its dalliances with putatively more “mainstream” production cycles.

On the other hand, however, there remain certain hesitancies. A number of horror subgenres remain less conducive to taxonomical blending than others. While vampires are currently enjoying a successful degree of upward social mobility, their other undead brethren – zombies – still shamble along certain well-trodden paths. To aficionados, this proposition must seem counterintuitive. Without question, we’re still in the midst of a Zombie Renaissance that started to kick into high gear in the early 2000s. What makes the popularity of this production cycle distinctive is (1) its pervasiveness throughout all forms of pop media, and (2) its concomitant readiness for generic blending. A brief list of examples that capitalize on the novelty of this hybridity would include the zombie invasions of canonical literature (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), superhero comics (Marvel Zombies), musical biography (Paul is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion), and WWII drama (Dead Snow). The winning formula: familiar generic syntax + arbitrary application of zombie semantics = “awesome.” Its ubiquity has become pernicious enough to be spoofed in (of all things) a direct-to-video Barbie feature, A Fashion Fairytale. “Zombies are in this year,” insists a hack director who randomly throws a musical number featuring zombie peas into a production of “The Princess and the Pea.” Barbie’s reasonable protest – they’re making a fairytale for kids – gets her thrown off the set. Take that, purist!

But despite the zombie’s newfound ability to penetrate even the most venerable of genres, their application to these other fictions are rarely as innovative as their authors believe them to be. Simply put, the syntax of the “host” genre concedes ground to the well-worn survivalist syntax of the “invading” sub-genre. This apocalyptic discourse is typically expressed in clichéd, “We-Are-the-Walking-Dead!” sentiments, whereby a brute survivalist imperative and/or a penchant for unchecked consumption reduces humanity into an unthinking mass devoted solely to its own fulfilment. Zombies and humans begin to pass for one another, and consequently, these creatures frequently serve the purposes of simpleminded social criticism (i.e., anti-consumerism, commentary on the new militarism, etc.). Zombies’ appearances in other genres simply extends this tendency (e.g., Fido uses zombies as emblems of suburban bunker mentality). Or, apolitical artists simply transfer the zombie sub-genre’s apocalyptic rhetoric onto an ostensibly non-conducive milieu for shock-value and/or humour. The results, however, are often predictable or superficial. At worst, we get fanboy thought-experiments like Versus, which simply exists to settle the age-old question, “Who would win a fight between zombies and a gang of yakuza?”

These clichés are to be expected. Zombie cinema is perhaps the most prescriptive of horror subgenres. Its semantic features are often regarded as inherent dictums. Note the so-called “Zombie Rules” – e.g., zombies are cannibals, they are animated corpses, they must not be able to run, etc. – which drive zealots to reject certain films as “inauthentic” for their perceived heresies. 28 Days Later is not a “true” zombie film, so goes the logic, because its Rage-infected denizens are not undead. If nothing else, the Horatian dogmatism of these rules have a good deal of pedagogical value. I have occasionally employed Shaun of the Dead to teach students about the pedantry of prescriptivist approaches to genre. Why? Despite this romzomcom’s brilliant application of zombie semantics to the syntax of the contemporary romantic comedy, it is remarkable how many viewers categorize the film as “a zombie movie” and insist on discussing it accordingly: i.e., the film is primarily about Shaun’s efforts to ward off the horde of oncoming dead, and “getting the girl” is just a by-product of his heroism.

Using Altman’s terms, we might say that not only do zombie mashups become preoccupied with the prescriptive semantics of the zombie film, but the subgenre’s syntax infects and overruns the meaning-bearing structures of the genre with which it is combined. Does that mean blokes who don’t choose to respond to Shaun of the Dead as a romantic comedy are engaging with the film “incorrectly?” Not necessarily. It’s just a testament to the forcefulness of the zombies’ invasive apocalyptic rhetoric.

(Or, maybe a film about the vital role that romance has to play in a young man’s maturation isn’t as “awesome” as watching said young man taking a cricket bat to the heads of rotting corpses.)

One of the difficulties, perhaps, of making creative use of zombie tropes is due to the creatures’ minimal dramatic valence. Unlike their more glamorous vampiric peers, zombies are utterly devoid of interiorities. Without a subjectivity a zombie has little opportunity to contribute to a work’s structural or dramatic interest. As automatons they lack intentionality, and therefore, lack the capacity for malice (i.e., attractors for our antipathy) or, indeed, any feeling whatever (i.e., the potential for pathos). Instead, they function as blank surfaces onto which we project our social ills (e.g., Dawn of the Dead’s simple-minded Zombies ‘R Us analogy: zombies in the shopping mall!), or as empty bags of meat that stand in the way of an ass-kickin’ protagonist (e.g., the Resident Evil series). Their emptiness helps explain the subgenre’s affective preference for disgust rather than terror. Moreover, the generation of anxiety in the average zombie film has nothing to do with their deliberate wickedness, but rather is produced through the massification effect: one zombie = gross; many zombies = Please, God, no. First-person shooters like Left 4 Dead help accelerate this trend. While its splendidly desolate art direction is impressive, playing Left 4 Dead is a curiously inert experience that consists of instinctually blasting at whatever dark shape hurls itself at the screen. The insistence on positing zombies as meatbags for target practice therefore helps explain the subgenre’s affinity for gung-ho action (e.g., Planet Terror) or comedy (e.g., splatstick romps like Dead Alive – admittedly a bloody good time), but precious little else. At a glance, the romzomcom seems to offer more subversive opportunities – particularly the occasional heretical suggestion that zombies might be put to better use than serving as exploding flesh-sacks. And yet films like Shaun of the Dead (despite its generic brilliance), My Boyfriend’s Back, Boy Eats Girl, Wasting Away and Zombieland rarely make the effort.

To be clear: one need not agitate for a more humanist approach to the subgenre. The zombie film is laden with prescriptions enough as it is. And besides, the (blasphemous!) “Zombies are People Too” mandate has been employed to varying degrees of seriousness in such films as the aforementioned Fido, Dead Men Don’t Die, I Zombie, Colin and even by Romero himself in Land of the Dead. Jesse Stomel has provocatively asked, “What is lively about meat and how does the corpse become vital again?” But I’m not sure that offering Romero’s brief rejoinder, “It is reborn. Always already,” is enough.[3] Could this vitality be found through the subgenre’s adoption of certain romantic syntaxes? That is, if the vampire can be a love object – or, even better, a lover her/himself – why not the zombie?

The question is also not a rhetorical call for more pervasive and gratuitous representations of necrophilia in horror, nor an invitation to model the campy eroticism of Return of the Living Dead or (sigh) Zombie Strippers. Rather it is a suggestion that the romance film might consider the zombie film for appropriative possibilities in order to consider other visceral affairs of the heart. The subject has been treated charmingly in Kelly DiPucchio and Scott Campbell’s endearing children’s book, Zombie in Love.[4] It has also been brilliantly explored in Michele Soavi’s rather neglected 1994 masterpiece, Cemetery Man (aka Dellamorte Dellamore).

Based on a story by Tiziano Sclavi (creator of the sprawling fumetti series, Dylan Dog), Cemetery Man revolves around the amorous obsessions – and eventual existential crisis – of a graveyard watchman, Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett). Dellamorte manages a cemetery in the tiny northern Italian village of Buffalora – a burial ground with unique restorative capacities. As the recently interred dead insist on returning to life, Dellamorte – and his idiotic companion Gnaghi (who is only capable of saying, “Gna!”) – are charged with ensuring that the “Returners” don’t overrun the town. Rather than contending with the bureaucratic nightmare of filling out forms to request help, Dellamorte claims “it’s easier just to shoot them.”

The story turns on Dellamorte’s obsession with a beautiful woman – simply credited as “She” (Anna Falchi) – who becomes aroused when he shows her the graveyard’s ossuary, and eventually insists on having sex with him on the grave of her dead husband. Unsurprisingly, her former husband is none too happy about the pair trysting on his bed of rest, and he rises from the grave to take a chunk out of her comely frame. Believing her to have died, Dellamorte waits by her body and shoots her in a panic when she regains consciousness. Although Dellamorte believes he has murdered her accidentally, it remains ambiguous as to whether or not She had, in fact, “returned.”

Unfortunately for the forlorn watchmen, his obsession persists after her de facto death, and She persistently returns (as three different women, all embodied by Falchi). Her second resurrection is as a lusty zombie, and Dellamorte is fortunate enough to escape her hungry embrace with a mere neck wound. The bereft watchman encounters her again – this time as an assistant to the utterly oblivious Mayor of the village. When this version of She confesses to a fear of men’s genitalia, Dellamorte undergoes a painful procedure to be rendered temporarily impotent, only to find she has been “cured” in the interim by the unwanted sexual advances of her boss. He will be denied access to the object of his obsession a third time when the final manifestation of She reveals herself to be a prostitute who has simply been indulging his fantasies. By this point, Dellamorte has been driven to mania by this uncanny compulsion towards repetition, and he murders both the girl and her roommate by setting fire to their bedroom with a space heater.

Bizarrely, his misogyny (and more generally misanthropic outlook) evolves into a crisis of existential proportions. Specifically, his actions cease to be acknowledged by others, and Dellamorte goes on a nihilistic killing spree – shooting a group of local hoodlums (who previously mocked his rumored impotence), and randomly killing a nurse and doctor at the local hospital. None of these actions have the slightest consequence: his attempted confessions are ignored by the police; no one reacts to his public acts of murder; his first two crimes are pinned on his suicidal acquaintance, Franco, who is eventually inexplicably unable to recognize him. Dellamorte finally drives out of Buffalora – accompanied by the ever-faithful Gnaghi – only to discover that the road comes to an abrupt end at a deep chasm. The “rest of the world,” it seems, doesn’t exist. Dellamorte is about to kill himself, but Gnaghi prevents him by throwing his revolver off the cliff. “Could you take me home, please?” Gnaghi asks, unaccountably speaking clearly for the first time. Dellamorte’s response is comically eloquent: “Gna,” he says simply.

The extensive summary has been necessary given that the film is not widely known, but also because its dramatic departure from the scope and ambition of most zombie hybridizations deserves full acknowledgment. Even this synopsis cannot fully express Cemetery Man’s wild vacillations in tone and style – from oddly beautiful surrealism, to political satire, to slapstick, to visceral body horror, to unchecked eroticism. And yet these logic-defying generic leaps never seem arbitrary or schizoid. Rupert Everett deserves the lion’s share of credit here, as his performance gives what might have been a scattershot film a surprising degree of coherence. Evidently, the titular character of Sclavi’s Dylan Dog was modelled after Everett’s beautifully hangdog physiognomy, and so his casting here is a masterstroke. Moreover, Everett’s consistently impassioned straight playing gives the film a weird emotional heft – despite scenes which treat the undead for yuks (e.g., an attacking troupe of hungry, undead boy scouts is particularly memorable).

Thus, the film can be viewed as a delirious employment of horror semantics to explore a familiar romantic syntax: the dilemma of amorous obsession and the ensuing consequences when this fixation turns morbid. One way of engaging with the film in these terms is to view Dellamorte as a man who is surrounded by death, yet cannot face up to its facticity. His erotic preoccupations aren’t Freudian, but simply a way to postpone acknowledging death’s finality. And so, She must return. Again, and again, and again. If She is kept alive, Dellamorte doesn’t have to come to terms with his own finality – the prospect of his own non-existence. For to die is to cease to be acknowledged – literally speaking. This crisis of acknowledgment has important connections with romance as a genre. In romance fiction, the obsessed lover becomes fixated on his “beloved’s” perceived ability to acknowledge him in a manner no one else seems capable of doing. In Cemetery Man, then, when She dies, Dellamorte becomes unglued since no one else in the town is prepared to see him (except perhaps the puppyish Gnaghi). Beyond the town limits of Buffalora, there doesn’t even seem to be a world in which he can be recognized.

So what of Cemetery Man’s zombies, then? Remarkably, they are not the brain dead automatons we have come to expect. Zombie Rules seem to mandate that the walking dead are mindless – obviously a carryover from their West African and Haitian origins as the entranced or resurrected slaves of a bokor. The most obvious point of comparison is Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2, in which the creatures are shambling, maggot ridden corpses – lively only when fighting sharks. By contrast, Soavi asserts that their mindlessness is arbitrary, serving only to maintain generic prescriptivism. Zombies in Cemetery Man still maintain cannibalistic impulses, but they also retain their subjectivity beyond the grave. Not only do they yearn for human flesh, but they are compelled to repeat the functional behaviours that defined their social roles whilst still alive. Bryant Frazer has astutely pointed out that the undead “may represent the dead archetypes of Italian society come back to haunt the living,” which represents one of the more robust social allegories in the subgenre’s history.[5] And yet, they still remain more than ghoulish emblems of conservative ideologies; many of them are represented as fully conscious subjects still desirous of interpersonal intimacy. Gnaghi even strikes up a tender relationship with the reanimated severed head of the mayor’s daughter, Valentina, that is somehow simultaneously tender and revolting. Miraculously, Soavi applies this impossible dynamic of revolting tenderness to the film as a whole. He does so principally by bestowing upon his lovelorn zombies the gift of interiority.

Soavi’s interest in granting an interiority to typically vacant figures extends to his extraordinarily innovative approach to framing. The most audaciously stylized moments occur when Soavi situates his camera inside impossible spaces, and shoots through the most outrageous apertures. As Dellamorte burns a pile of phone books, for example, a worm’s-eye-view of his face emerges within a slowly expanding circle, and we realize Soavi has somehow placed the camera within the bonfire and is filming through the burning pages. In the film’s most celebrated shot, Valentina’s decapitated head flies on its own accord from the TV where Gnaghi has placed it, and chews into her father’s neck (he has forbidden the romance, you see). But what is most spectacular here is that the camera captures the Mayor’s horrified expression from inside Valentina’s mouth as her head hurtles toward him – her chomping teeth creating the most demented iris effect in cinema history. The moment is hilarious and unforgettable, as Soavi’s demented framing provides a visual correlative for the impossible subjectivity of undead desire.

By proving itself capable of imagining the paradox of undead desire, Cemetery Man offers invaluable new possibilities for horror and its mongrel hybrids. The paradox of zombie desire is an inspired exploration of a recurring dilemma in romance fiction: love’s susceptibility to all-consuming mania, obsessive compulsiveness and helpless repetition. Dellamorte’s necrophilic use of his “returned” lover (in all her guises) guarantees his unceasing acknowledgement. But if a zombie itself can desire – and it is this desire that induces it to return and reprise its lost passions – then love itself is posited as an infection that compels helpless servitude. In lieu of the eternally devoted vampire lover, Cemetery Man offers the lovesick, obsessive zombie, and its depiction of undying romance is both ludicrous and courageous.

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[1] Roger Ebert, “The Brotherhood of the Wolf,” rogerebert.com, Jan 11, 2002, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20020111/REVIEWS/201110301/1023.

[2] Rick Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Genre,” Cinema Journal 23, no. 3 (1984): 12.

[3] Jesse Stomel, “Pity Poor Flesh: Terrible Bodies in the Films of Carpenter, Cronenberg, and Romero,” Bright Lights Film Journal 56, May 2007, http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/56/bodies.php.

[4] For a decidedly more meat-and-potatoes approach to the question, investigate the 2009 winner of the AVN Award for the “Most Outrageous Sex Scene” on your own time.

[5] Bryant Frazer, “Cemetery Man,” Deep Focus, http://www.deep-focus.com/flicker/dellamor.html.