The idea for this T-o-M is simple enough (hell it's probably been done before!)... a list of directors who should make (or should have made) a zombie movie. After all, zombies are the new vampires... or is that the other way around?
First and foremost this is supposed to be fun. I didn't set up any real criteria, other than to do a list of directors who are currently working and a second list for the deceased. Though I didn't want to go for pretty obvious choices, you know, Guillermo del Toro, David Cronenberg, Richard Kelley and Ridley Scott.
First and foremost this is supposed to be fun. I didn't set up any real criteria, other than to do a list of directors who are currently working and a second list for the deceased. Though I didn't want to go for pretty obvious choices, you know, Guillermo del Toro, David Cronenberg, Richard Kelley and Ridley Scott.
I should also state I'm no zombie expert by any stretch of the imagination. I'm just an admirer of this particular storytelling avenue; of the possibilities and commentaries it can present, either humorous, serious, or both.
Extra special thanks goes to Dustin and Nicole for the Jewish-deli-food-infused conversation I had with them that gave birth to this here entry.
Alive and Kicking!
Nacho Vigalondo:
With a double-fisted slam of shorts and his first feature Timecrimes, this Spaniard has brought a refreshing whimsy and imagination to the cinematic dinner table. Like the best short story writers of the 20th century (I'm thinking of Ray Bradbury) Vigalondo is childlike in reflexes, but daring and frightening in his implications. With Timecrimes, he turned the time travel tale on its head, and spun, spun, spun... it was like putting a puzzle together while on an amusement park ride. The man knows how to entertain and get people thinking by way of pulpy, speculative fiction loopdeloops. One has to think those would be great assets to have when telling a tale of the undead.
Claire Denis:
As Dustin put it... " skeletal narratives, Agnes Godard's unassumingly gorgeous photography and spots of unexpected violence. I think she'd pull off a stunning one..."
From Chocolate to Beau Travail, Denis has woven a web of often ambiguous racial, political and sexual undertones. Like her or leave her, she's got the chops to play with genre tropes (see Trouble Every Day), and twist them into something new or at least existential and foreboding.
Jim Jarmusch:
Somebody has to do a remake, so why not Jarmusch? Gus van Sant remade Psycho, Jarmusch could remake Night of the Living Dead. Set it in the Louisiana Delta, have it star Jarmusch regular Issach De Bankole (The Limits of Control, Ghost Dog) in the Ben role. Per his use of musicians, eccentric New Yorker Nellie McKay can play Barbara. Oh, and shoot it in black and white. Roberto Benigini, Tom Waits and Bill Murray can cameo.
Leos Carax:
Perhaps this is less about the Mauvais Sang and Pola X director and more about his long time leading man, Denis Levant, that venerable "grotesque Chaplin" of a performer. It all started with Nicole asking the question, "Why hasn't Denis Levant played a zombie? Denis Levant needs to play a zombie." Too true, and who better then Carax to guide the way. After all his segment in the triptych Tokyo wasn't too far off, with Levant as a gnarled mutant man terrorizing the Japanese metropolis with some Godzilla-like gusto.
Carax's take on love - and thus the world - may seem almost repulsive, despicable and down right self-involved, but ain't that the truth? Plus under that twisted skin is a poetic pulse. Get Levant in zombie makeup, take a Frankenstein retelling route, and if Carax's ambitions don't get the better of him, you're good to go.
Lynne Ramsay:
It was after watching Spencer Susser's amazing short I Love Sarah Jane that I asked myself where the hell was Lynne Ramsay and why wasn't she making a zombie movie?
Granted if you know Susser's film and one by Ramsay - such as Ratcatcher - the similarities are few beyond both's focus on youth. But it couldn't stop me from thinking... Ramsay's films carry a loneliness and desperation to them. She primarily focuses on abandoned women and children. Her worlds even when over run with color have a worn, washed out, exhausted feel. The gray streets of 1973 strike-ridden Glasgow could very well be post zombie apocalypse, where a lone child survivor wanders in fear of what the adults have now wholly become...
Nicholas Roeg:
(author's note: Roeg, originally, and rather embarrassingly appeared on the dead directors list. He is in fact not yet deceased. This author needs to be a better editor)
Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Feel to Earth and the underrated children's flick The Witches; one has to look no further than these films to know that Roeg could have, should have, made a zombie picture. This cinematographer turned director was something of an acrobat, a chameleon, yet if one singular current ran throughout his body of work it was a sense of eeriness. Whether executed through a scream or a whisper, something was not quite right, things were always on the edge of collapse, in his films it was a fight for survival.
Just think of it: Existential woes wrapped around the little finger of guilt, sexual malaise, man vs. nature... all in a zombie wasteland.
BONUS! Terrence Malick + Bela Tarr:
This may very well be the biggest what-if film geek-gasim of all time. To even consider that these two directors would team up, let alone... ugh... the possibilities are maddening, but let me try anyway... I'll keep it simple, feeding off of Malick's never made Q (which reportedly was retooled into the upcoming Tree of Life), Malick and Tarr could set their zombie flick during World War I, in the middle east. There. Done.
WWI. Middle East. Malick. Tarr. Zombies. Heads. Would. Explode.
Undead Directing!
F.W. Murnau:
Okay, maybe an obvious choice... After all his film Nosferatu is to horror cinema as the combustion engine is to the, uh... automobile.
Had Murnau not passed away under tragic circumstances, who knows what the man would have done. Had he made a zombie film in the 30s or 40s would it have been any different from the Jamaican voodoo daddies of the day? Considering what he did to the vampire, one would assume, yes... perhaps even revolutionizing "the monster of the lower class" a whole two decades before Georgie boy.
Hiroshi Teshigahara:
Describing his own work as documentary fantasies, Teshigahara played in a dirty and deep sand trap of venerable crises that spoke to great length of Japanese consumer/industrial age anxieties; dreams of the lower class shattered, desires of the upper class twisted into nightmare. Riding the Japanese New Wave of the 60s, the director of Pitfall and Woman in the Dunes created haunting, inner and outer voids within the middle of the bustling city... desperate, amoral creatures that called themselves human lurked in the corners of his frame... By watching the closing scenes in his third feature The Face of Another one could argue that Teshigahara did include zombies in one of his films... or at least denizens that embodied some of the allegorical traits we soon would be attributing to the walking dead. For this was still two years before the Zombie Renaissance across the pacific.
Herk Harvey:
The similarities between the ghouls in Havey's Carnival of Souls and the zombies in Romero's Night of the Living Dead are striking. At least on a practical, make-up level anyway.
Made several years before Night, Harvey's film was a different beast entirely, yet something of a parallel to Romero's game changer in the low budget, DIY market.
A mid-western ghost story with European touches, Harvey and screenwriter, John Clifford were more influenced by Bergman and Cocteau than EC horror comics and Sci-fi matinees.
Had this Kansas based industrial filmmaker made more features, would he have made a zombie film? Probably not... but it's hard not to argue that he had made his contribution to their history already.
Extra special thanks goes to Dustin and Nicole for the Jewish-deli-food-infused conversation I had with them that gave birth to this here entry.
Alive and Kicking!
Nacho Vigalondo:
With a double-fisted slam of shorts and his first feature Timecrimes, this Spaniard has brought a refreshing whimsy and imagination to the cinematic dinner table. Like the best short story writers of the 20th century (I'm thinking of Ray Bradbury) Vigalondo is childlike in reflexes, but daring and frightening in his implications. With Timecrimes, he turned the time travel tale on its head, and spun, spun, spun... it was like putting a puzzle together while on an amusement park ride. The man knows how to entertain and get people thinking by way of pulpy, speculative fiction loopdeloops. One has to think those would be great assets to have when telling a tale of the undead.
Claire Denis:
As Dustin put it... " skeletal narratives, Agnes Godard's unassumingly gorgeous photography and spots of unexpected violence. I think she'd pull off a stunning one..."
From Chocolate to Beau Travail, Denis has woven a web of often ambiguous racial, political and sexual undertones. Like her or leave her, she's got the chops to play with genre tropes (see Trouble Every Day), and twist them into something new or at least existential and foreboding.
Jim Jarmusch:
Somebody has to do a remake, so why not Jarmusch? Gus van Sant remade Psycho, Jarmusch could remake Night of the Living Dead. Set it in the Louisiana Delta, have it star Jarmusch regular Issach De Bankole (The Limits of Control, Ghost Dog) in the Ben role. Per his use of musicians, eccentric New Yorker Nellie McKay can play Barbara. Oh, and shoot it in black and white. Roberto Benigini, Tom Waits and Bill Murray can cameo.
Leos Carax:
Perhaps this is less about the Mauvais Sang and Pola X director and more about his long time leading man, Denis Levant, that venerable "grotesque Chaplin" of a performer. It all started with Nicole asking the question, "Why hasn't Denis Levant played a zombie? Denis Levant needs to play a zombie." Too true, and who better then Carax to guide the way. After all his segment in the triptych Tokyo wasn't too far off, with Levant as a gnarled mutant man terrorizing the Japanese metropolis with some Godzilla-like gusto.
Carax's take on love - and thus the world - may seem almost repulsive, despicable and down right self-involved, but ain't that the truth? Plus under that twisted skin is a poetic pulse. Get Levant in zombie makeup, take a Frankenstein retelling route, and if Carax's ambitions don't get the better of him, you're good to go.
Lynne Ramsay:
It was after watching Spencer Susser's amazing short I Love Sarah Jane that I asked myself where the hell was Lynne Ramsay and why wasn't she making a zombie movie?
Granted if you know Susser's film and one by Ramsay - such as Ratcatcher - the similarities are few beyond both's focus on youth. But it couldn't stop me from thinking... Ramsay's films carry a loneliness and desperation to them. She primarily focuses on abandoned women and children. Her worlds even when over run with color have a worn, washed out, exhausted feel. The gray streets of 1973 strike-ridden Glasgow could very well be post zombie apocalypse, where a lone child survivor wanders in fear of what the adults have now wholly become...
Nicholas Roeg:
(author's note: Roeg, originally, and rather embarrassingly appeared on the dead directors list. He is in fact not yet deceased. This author needs to be a better editor)
Walkabout, Don't Look Now, The Man Who Feel to Earth and the underrated children's flick The Witches; one has to look no further than these films to know that Roeg could have, should have, made a zombie picture. This cinematographer turned director was something of an acrobat, a chameleon, yet if one singular current ran throughout his body of work it was a sense of eeriness. Whether executed through a scream or a whisper, something was not quite right, things were always on the edge of collapse, in his films it was a fight for survival.
Just think of it: Existential woes wrapped around the little finger of guilt, sexual malaise, man vs. nature... all in a zombie wasteland.
BONUS! Terrence Malick + Bela Tarr:
This may very well be the biggest what-if film geek-gasim of all time. To even consider that these two directors would team up, let alone... ugh... the possibilities are maddening, but let me try anyway... I'll keep it simple, feeding off of Malick's never made Q (which reportedly was retooled into the upcoming Tree of Life), Malick and Tarr could set their zombie flick during World War I, in the middle east. There. Done.
WWI. Middle East. Malick. Tarr. Zombies. Heads. Would. Explode.
Undead Directing!
F.W. Murnau:
Okay, maybe an obvious choice... After all his film Nosferatu is to horror cinema as the combustion engine is to the, uh... automobile.
Had Murnau not passed away under tragic circumstances, who knows what the man would have done. Had he made a zombie film in the 30s or 40s would it have been any different from the Jamaican voodoo daddies of the day? Considering what he did to the vampire, one would assume, yes... perhaps even revolutionizing "the monster of the lower class" a whole two decades before Georgie boy.
Hiroshi Teshigahara:
Describing his own work as documentary fantasies, Teshigahara played in a dirty and deep sand trap of venerable crises that spoke to great length of Japanese consumer/industrial age anxieties; dreams of the lower class shattered, desires of the upper class twisted into nightmare. Riding the Japanese New Wave of the 60s, the director of Pitfall and Woman in the Dunes created haunting, inner and outer voids within the middle of the bustling city... desperate, amoral creatures that called themselves human lurked in the corners of his frame... By watching the closing scenes in his third feature The Face of Another one could argue that Teshigahara did include zombies in one of his films... or at least denizens that embodied some of the allegorical traits we soon would be attributing to the walking dead. For this was still two years before the Zombie Renaissance across the pacific.
Herk Harvey:
The similarities between the ghouls in Havey's Carnival of Souls and the zombies in Romero's Night of the Living Dead are striking. At least on a practical, make-up level anyway.
Made several years before Night, Harvey's film was a different beast entirely, yet something of a parallel to Romero's game changer in the low budget, DIY market.
A mid-western ghost story with European touches, Harvey and screenwriter, John Clifford were more influenced by Bergman and Cocteau than EC horror comics and Sci-fi matinees.
Had this Kansas based industrial filmmaker made more features, would he have made a zombie film? Probably not... but it's hard not to argue that he had made his contribution to their history already.
Roeg is dead??
Denis Levant as a zombie is a brilliant idea.
And makes for an interesting choice between Claire Denis and Leos Carax for who would use Levant the best!!
But yes, is Roeg dead?
I can't find any news about it...
Surely Sergio Leone?
Oh spit... Roeg isn't dead. Why did I not catch that? It was one of those things everybody assumed, which is down right terrible.
Well, it's been changed, although now I think I'll need to add someone to the "undead" list.
Huh, now that I think about it in relation to the subject at hand, I find it kind of funny this happened.
And surely, Sergio Leone, James... indeed, indeed. There are another dozen or so names I could attach to this list, and I encourage folks to add more.
Thanks for putting me on the list!!!
What´s funny is that I have actually a zombie outline written. Its supposed to be a twist on the genre, you know. Closer to Polanski than Romero. But nowadays, even a twisted seems too cliché if you try to deal with the zombie thing. Maybe the trick is waiting two more decades and expect this whole thing sounds refreshing again.
By the way, Hello Twitch!!!!
If we must wait two decades for your zombie opus, Nacho, then I guess we'll just have to wait two decades. I'm sure it'll be worth it.
And thanks for dropping by and reading! It was a nice surprise.
And, sure enough, Polanski could have, should have, been on the list too.