No more room in hell
And these dead are walking tall.

Dawn of the Dead
Directed by Zack Snyder

According to movie lore, one can kill a zombie by destroying its brain. But there is no way to kill the zombie metaphor. As a cinematic symbol of chaos, groupthink and generally uncivilized behavior, the ghoul is the most resilient and versatile monster around. It is infinitely and easily adaptable–a fact proven by the current, excellent Dawn of the Dead remake, which pulls off the difficult trick of pouring new wine into an old bottle.

Although the zombie is commonly thought of as the invention of West African-derived voodoo mythology, every culture has its own undead mythology. Accordingly, zombies have been a part of cinema almost from the medium’s inception. Notable early examples include the 1932 Victor Halperin movie White Zombie, which stars Bela Lugosi as a slavemaster who owns a mill staffed by zombies, and the haunting 1943 Jacques Tourneur film I Walked with a Zombie, in which a nurse goes to the West Indies to take care of a plantation owner’s wife only to find that the woman has been transformed into a ghoul.

George Romero perfected the zombie movie template with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. Since that landmark independent film, filmmakers have dusted off the shambling cannibal every few years. Sometimes the tributes are straightforward, even official (Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, Peter Jackson’s marvelous Dead/Alive.) Others are oblique, stealthy. For instance, Romero’s 1973 The Crazies and 2002’s 28 Days Later both feature infections that made living people behave like zombies, landing the films in a category I call "zombie-movie-by-proxy." That zombie pictures are almost always interesting, despite a film’s esthetic merits or lack therof, suggests that the zombie itself is (unsurprisingly) the true source of the film’s excitement–a beast so symbolically vital that not even bad filmmaking can kill it.

Robert Hood’s dazzling 1995 essay "Nights of the Celluloid Dead: A History of the Zombie" says zombies "have provided symbols encapsulating the desire for and consequences of revenge; adolescent angst; puritanism and, equally, sexual excess; the frustration of ambition; the futility or the triumph of violence; the desire for immortality; consumerism; scientific irresponsibility; grief; suburban malaise; the transcendence of love...and many more." He goes on to isolate four recurring themes as the most basic and powerful: images of control, the erosion of meaningful qualities in life, the tyranny of the past and images of mortality. And that’s just the short list.

Better still, for modern agitprop purposes, the zombie inherently represents a collective threat–more accurately, a collectivist threat. (Has there ever been a movie about one zombie?) Unlike werewolves, vampires or Frankenstein’s monsters, which tend to be depicted as individuals, the teeming hordes of Blade II and Underworld notwithstanding–zombies have no personality, no living essence and no self-consciousness. To steal a phrase from Gertrude Stein, when you look into a zombie’s eyes, there’s no there there. Hood quotes a passage from William B. Seabrook’s The Magic Island, a 1929 book about Haiti that detailed the traditions of "the walking dead" and brought the word "zombie" into common English use. "The eyes were the worst," Seabrook wrote. "It was not my imagination. They were in truth like the eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing. The whole face, for that matter, was bad enough. It was vacant, as if there was nothing behind it. It seemed not only expressionless, but incapable of expression."

Perhaps the zombie has become even more widespread and terrifying during the past 100 years because the same period has seen the spread of democracy, secularism, demands for racial and sexual equality and the industrialized Western notion that social good flows from individual autonomy. The zombie represents a repudiation of all that. To gaze into its milky, bloodshot eyes is to witness the total loss of self, the surrender of autonomy to the crowd.

The most moving scene in 28 Days Later is of Brendan Gleeson’s kindly father writhing in pain and fury after becoming infected by a drop of tainted blood. His howls of anguish express his horror at losing his individuality, his sense of self, while friends and family look on. A variation of this scene recurs in every zombie picture. A related image is a wide shot of a rubble-strewn street or spooky stretch of farmland dotted with dozens or more of zombies: a tidal wave of unhumanity rolling toward a band of hardy mortals who still have warm blood, personalities, even beliefs. On some level, every zombie film is about the annihilation of the individual by a mob.

The pressure to conform re-animates Dawn of the Dead, first-time feature filmmaker Zack Snyder’s ferociously effective cover version of Romero’s 1978 zombie epic. This outwardly unnecessary, just-for-the-money remake turns out to be an amazingly good–and defensible–movie. Like David Mamet’s symbolically turbocharged military fantasy Spartan, it proves, yet again, that genre pictures often go where more "respectable" movies fear to tread–and faster. Like Spartan, the new Dawn succeeds both as a meat-and-potatoes genre picture–well-acted, well-constructed and quite engrossing–and as an imaginative working-through of post-9/11 anxieties.

Romero had little to do with this movie beyond inspiring it, but his spirit animates every frame. Just as Night addressed fears about Vietnam, civil war and urban unrest, and the original Dawn of the Dead was a bloody slapstick sendup of 70s consumerism and Me Decade obliviousness, Snyder’s remake is a melting pot of contemporary phobias. It plays on fears of terrorism, fanaticism and the destruction of cities. Like 28 Days Later–only bigger, louder, glossier, funnier and, frankly, better–it’s a seriously fun movie, rich enough to capture the fancy of viewers across the political spectrum.

The extended opening finds our nurse heroine, Ana (Sarah Polley), who followed up a tryst with her boyfriend by sleeping through news reports of the zombie menace, fleeing her suburban neighborhood as all hell breaks loose. Zombies are everywhere, and like the flesh-eaters in 28 Days Later, they don’t shamble; they haul ass. The plague begins with a potent nightmare image–a spooky intrusion by a cute little neighborhood girl who is not as cute as we think. This gambit is eerily redolent of news reports from the Middle East of children recruited as suicide bombers. The association is not arbitrary; soon after Ana’s escape from the suburbs–which ends with an overhead helicopter shot of a greater metropolitan area dotted with 9/11-like pillars of smoke–we’re treated to a brilliant opening-credits sequence by Prologue Film that starts with a grainy video image of a roomful of silhouetted, kneeling figures bowing forward at once, as if praying to Mecca.

Like Romero’s original, this one is set mainly in and around an abandoned shopping mall, and like the 1978 version, it switch-hits between spooky stalkings, splatterrific action scenes and sly bits of social satire. But the similarities end there. This isn’t a nostalgia piece; it’s a Pandora’s Box of current frights, transformed into marvelous doodles. The core group of heroes is an ethnic melting pot. The self-righteous liberal Ana hooks up first with uniformed patrolman Kenneth (the great Ving Rhames, continuing the Romero tradition of black man as savior). Then this dyad joins with a triad consisting of mild-mannered Mike (Jake Weber), jumpy but big-hearted Andre (Meki Phifer) and his extra-pregnant Russian wife Luda (Inna Korobkina). (If the sight of that massively swollen belly doesn’t fill you with dread, you haven’t seen Larry Cohen’s 1974 horror flick It’s Alive!)

At the mall, the gang reluctantly joins with three very spooked security guys, one of whom–white, baseball-capped, moustachioed leader C.J. (Michael Kelly)–is a tightly wound racist who hates letting anybody else be in control. Watching news reports of destroyed zombies being piled like cordwood and set ablaze, C.J. mutters, "America always sorts its shit out." (Delightfully, C.J. and the two black male characters don’t resolve their animosity in the predictable way; instead, the characters put aside their racial animosity and bond through action–a trope also represented in Spartan.)

This colorful group is menaced by the zombies, a collective Other that wants nothing but to feed and reproduce. The group of mall holdouts swells and shrinks in size. Some of the new additions are quite wonderful (my favorite is an arrogant yuppie with an irresistibly sarcastic sense of humor). They all have one quality in common: a fear of annihilation/absorption that seems not just physical, but ideological, even spiritual. Dead acknowledges religion throughout. Rhames and Phifer have a thoughtful men’s-room conversation about fear of eternal damnation. Romero stock company member Ken Foree, who played Rhames’ role in the original, has a chilling cameo as a tv pundit who repeats the tagline of the original Dead: "When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth."

The sheer human-ness of these humans is moving, and for a Hollywood remake, unusual. They fear becoming something other than themselves; they fear the destruction of what they believe, feel and know. The film’s most powerful sequence–the equivalent of Gleeson’s absorption by the virus in 28 Days Later–finds the group deciding to kill a mortal they know has been bitten by a zombie. This man–well-played by Max Headroom star Matt Frewer–is the father of a teenage girl, and he does not want to say goodbye to her and meet his death. But he accepts his fate, and Rhames’ Kenneth waits for the man to die and then come back from the dead before killing him for good–the result of a heated argument, prompted by Ana, over the moral fine points of killing mortals who’ve been bitten. That these characters bother to work out a set of rules is perversely honorable; it suggests that even when civilization is crumbling, one still has a moral obligation to distinguish between murder and killing.

Snyder and his screenwriter, James Gunn, attack this material like a couple of punk Spielbergs. Dead is a rare horror movie that switches from dread and shock to laughter on a dime, yet always remains firmly in control of its material–and anchored in emotional reality. Despite the usual amount of horror-movie stupidity (it seems to take the mortals forever to figure out that zombie bites spread zombie-ism), it’s an intelligent piece of filmmaking, by turns ruthless and humane. While watching Dawn, it occurred to me that it’s the same kind of movie as Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill–a self-conscious, even deconstructionist genre film, a catalog of styles and techniques, self-aware and intricately designed and chock full of ultraviolence. The key difference, I think–the reason I liked Dawn and hated Bill–is that the former film takes every death seriously even when the killing generates a shock or a laugh. The characters and situations aren’t abstractions; they have thematic and emotional weight. In Tarantino’s postmodern samurai picture, even the liveliest characters seem oddly dead onscreen; it’s a zombie of a movie. Dawn is a zombie movie, but it’s alive.