Kobal Collection

Youngsters these days

“FROM a corner of the room, Mr Darcy watched Elizabeth and her sisters work their way outward, beheading zombie after zombie as they went.” That sentence springs from “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, a surprise literary hit (it was a bestseller in America last April) that imagines Regency England being overrun by the undead. Elizabeth Bennet and her beau flit from dancing at balls to employing Asian martial arts, a sort of Fred Astaire and Ninja Rogers.

In a sense, the author of this pastiche, Seth Grahame-Smith, has turned Jane Austen into a zombie, reviving her text from the grave and turning it into a grisly version of the original. Hollywood is planning a film version next year, the latest in a series of movies to star the undead. The recently released “Zombieland”, one of the more successful versions, combined romance, the undead and comedy (a romzomcom, in the jargon), and garnered more than $85m in worldwide sales.

Zombies spring from the Caribbean superstition that sorcerers could use voodoo to revive the dead and turn them into slaves. In early film treatments, such as “I Walked With a Zombie” (which drew on the plot of “Jane Eyre”), zombies were eerily passive rather than the crazed flesh-eaters of today. The cannibalism really started with George Romero's 1968 cult film, “Night of the Living Dead”.

Perhaps the zombie has achieved greater cultural resonance as the world has become more crowded. Filmic depictions often involve a small group of individuals under siege from the undead or fleeing a flesh-eating mob. Any resident of a big city will understand the feeling of being overwhelmed by the mass of humanity on a subway train or high street.

Modern zombies are usually created, not by voodoo, but by infection. During the cold war, when nuclear tensions were at their height, rampaging B-movie monsters were the result of accidental exposure to radiation; nowadays plague seems a greater threat to humanity. A single drop of blood from an infected patient turns humans mad with rage in “28 Days Later”. In the most recent film version of “I Am Legend” (a 1954 story by Richard Matheson), the zombie-like mutants are the result of an attempt to cure cancer.

With its pagan roots, the zombie may be the ideal monster for those who do not believe in life after death. Zombies are denied the comforts of the afterlife, and destroyed, not with anything as elaborate as a stake through the heart or a silver bullet, but with a whack on the head.

The undead also serve as a wonderfully utilitarian cultural symbol. In “Dawn of the Dead”, his 1978 follow-up, Mr Romero created a satire on consumerism, as survivors take refuge in a shopping mall, besieged by zombies driven by a “primitive memory” to gather there. A British film, “28 Weeks Later” (a sequel to “28 Days Later”), showed American troops gunning down infected natives roaming wild in London's docklands, and was perceived as an allegory of the Iraq war.

But the zombie, with its staggering gait and glassy expression, can also be comic. In “Shaun of the Dead”, the hero, recovering from a hangover, easily mistakes the undead as Londoners stumbling through a drunken haze similar to his own. The hero of “Zombieland”, a nerdish teen, makes the mistake of giving the neighbourhood prom queen shelter for the night, only to see her awake as a slobbering monster. Having desperately defended himself with every household implement to hand, he finally beats her into submission with a toilet lid, before lapsing into double entendre: “The first time I let a girl into my life and she tries to eat me.”

From a film-maker's point of view, the zombie has many advantages. It is not necessary to spend a fortune on special effects—a horde of extras spattered with fake blood can do the trick, and tends to look a lot more realistic than a computer-generated werewolf. Whereas vampires can be charismatic and sexy, zombies lack personality; audiences do not mind when they are killed since they are dead already. Indeed, “Zombieland” ends in a theme park, with Woody Harrelson mowing down row after row of attackers, like any teenager with a Nintendo.

One part intriguing allegory to nine parts gore, zombie films are hard to love. But as the reworking of Austen's classic shows, their territory is expanding. Much more of this, and zombies will find they have bitten off more than they can chew.