As the title indicates, Zombie Movies is a guide. That means it’s full of plot synopses, trivia, images of stills, lobby cards, and posters. The ultimate? I can’t imagine a more extensive guide—it even includes some short films, two Simpson’s episodes, and Scooby-Do on Zombie Island. And like any decent guide, it’s chockfull of useless trivia (who knew Zombie Strippers was loosely based on Ionesco’s Rhinoceros? Kay did!)
Kay begins with an impressive history of the zombie’s Haitian origins, and then takes us from the genre’s humble beginnings, White Zombie (with Bela Lugosi), to where the zombie film finds itself today, on primetime cable television. The book’s chapters are organized by decade, and the films ordered chronologically within each chapter. An informative short essay puts each decade in context. This organizing principal works as well any, and is certainly preferable to the straight up alphabetic approach. The essential indexes of film titles and directors could have been rounded out by an index of country of origin, but this is a small complaint.
Along with the short essays, Kay includes a handy guide for those who need a primer on the difference between zombies, ghouls, pod people, and rabid sickos; interviews with actors, directors, and, most lovingly, the make up artists and special effects people whose work makes these films come alive. Kay also includes a detailed account of his time as an extra on Land of the Dead, a must read for anyone who wants to be one of the stumbling dead in a zombie film. These sidebar bits are what make the book worth your time.
The synopses can become tedious, but it must be remembered
that 1. there are only so many ways you can summarize the same, simple plot, and 2.
this is not a book you are supposed to read cover to cover. You dip into it
occasionally for a laugh. Or you consult Kay’s list of “Greatest Zombie Films
Ever Made,” a list I have no qualms with, though I would have put Cemetery Man
even higher, maybe even number one, but that’s just me.
Kay’s smarty-pants writing style owes plenty to Joe Bob Briggs and the Phantom of the Movies and most of the time, he’s quite funny (his caption for the poster of the computer animated film, Resident Evil: Degeneration: “…it [the film] seeks to emulate the experience of watching another person play a video game”), but sometimes he’s not (the caption for a still depicting a zombie feeding scene: “It’s buffet time for a group of flesh-eaters in Hell of the Living Dead).
If you enjoy zombie films as entertainment, Kay tells you what need to know. How gory is it? Is the zombie make up good or bad, and are the zombies fresh corpses or rotting one? CGI or old school effects? Are these zombies lumberers or fast moving? Traditional voodoo zombies doing the bidding of a master or uncontrollable and ravenous flesh-eaters? Living dead back to life for no known reason or because of some insidious virus or toxin?
Kay will sometimes delve into the subtext of a film, especially when it comes to a Romero-directed film, but otherwise, he’s leaving the eggheading of “zombie cinema” to others. And rightly so, I think. “These films are outrageous,” he writes in the introduction, “and it’s silly not to at least acknowledge it and have a little fun with their eccentricities.” Kay knows his audience and he addresses their needs well. If you or someone you know is a member of that audience, you might want to pick it up. It’s perfect for Halloween.
