There was a noticeable shift in American genre filmmaking as the New Hollywood-dominated 1970s faded and gave way to the more cynical zeitgeist of the Reagan era. While countercultural sentiment found its niche even amongst a mainstream audience by catering to young, eager, educated, and politicized cinemagoers beginning in the late ‘60s, left-wing idealism and fervor had all but dissipated a decade later. Even the counterculture itself shifted from the overt politicization of what came to be known as the “Hippie era” — a historically problematic and imprecise term — toward the more individualistic and frequently reactionary and nihilistic ideologies of the punk rock and, beginning in the early ‘80s, hardcore punk subcultures.
In the realm of cinema, this sea change manifested itself in a variety of ways, two of the most prominent being the widespread popularity of both the slasher film and the lead-heavy action cinema exemplified by films such as Commando (1985), Cobra (1986), and Rambo III (1988). While proto-slashers were associated with more subversive, critical political positions — the feminist subtext of Black Christmas, the scorching Vietnam War-era nightmare of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, both released in 1974 — the subgenre framework and conventions soon played into more conservative anxieties surrounding a menacing Other invading the safe haven of suburbia. Subsequent readings have obviously complicated this rather clear-cut political dynamic but this was a level on which these films resonated, both at the time and in the present.
It was against this cultural backdrop that zombie pictures, whose modern incarnation came with George A. Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, took a turn for the farcical. Already an avenue for satire and social commentary, filmmakers began zeroing in on the genre’s comedic undercurrents and bringing them to the fore. John Landis’ 1981 comedy horror An American Werewolf in London featured an appearance of a comic relief zombie early in the decade, but the zombie comedy proper got its contours from 1985’s Return of the Living Dead, made by first-time director Dan O’Bannon. On a strictly narrative level — two supply warehouse workers accidentally release a toxic gas from a drum, mistakenly delivered there years earlier by the United States Military, which ends up reanimating the corpses of a nearby cemetery into zombies with an appetite for human brains — the film could be said to boast a similarly satirical edge as its forebears, both within the genre and outside of it. But the escalation of stakes — nuclear weapons eventually factor into the goings-on — and the ratcheting up of the comedy aren’t merely an intensification of already-present elements as much as they push them toward something resembling a farce.
To understand just how much the mood had changed and, significantly, also fractured during the era, it’s worth contrasting films like Return of the Living Dead or Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) with where Romero was pushing his Night of the Living Dead series with 1985’s Day of the Dead, a slow, dreary film which, at the time, earned him mixed reviews and also underperformed commercially. Romero, whose other films during that decade were also mostly comedic, had a vision for the film which was out of step with a zeitgeist where sillier, louder, and more absurd were better. The introduction in Return of the Living Dead of a cast of characters comprised mainly of young punk kids who happened to have been drinking, blasting music, and stripping at the aforementioned cemetery, is actually fairly instructive: not only does their destructive behavior and nihilistic worldview set them apart from, say, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s laid-back teenagers, it also illustrates how much even subculture had been consumed by a pervasive, top-down cynicism. Sure, the military’s decision, made toward the end of the film, to solve the mounting zombie problem by nuking Louisville isn’t presented as moral or even rational, but it’s remarkable just how much of it comes down to a sheer inability to actually engage with the problem.
In that way, there is hardly a difference between government officials, warehouse workers, and wastoid punk rockers — everyone is varying shades of jaded, incompetent, disillusioned, and mostly out to save their own ass. Return of the Living Dead‘s comedic tone, of course, amplifies these tendencies, but, given the film’s cultural legacy — the undead’s exclamation of “Brains!” is certainly prominent, but also undersells how much the film’s overall sensibility, and indeed its very construction, altered the subgenre — the downstream effect was a dulling of the subversive power that the zombie film once had. It’s peculiar, however, that both the approachable and comedic Return of the Living Dead and the slow and psychological Day of the Dead took steps to add depth to what had become something of a stock character. While Day gave the world what is likely the first zombie emotional breakdown — the docile “Bub” mourns the death of his instructor and goes out in search of revenge, indicating that zombies do retain some parts of their human selves — the reasons for the Return zombies’ fixation on brains is rather heartbreaking as well: a female undead, strapped to a mortuary table, explains that eating brains is the only thing that eases the pain as they feel their bodies rotting away.
Perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that neither of these attempts at giving an otherwise one-note horror staple extra dimensions lingered much in the cultural memory. While the Night of the Living Dead series is still held in high regard, the more serious-minded zombie films and television shows that have come in its wake mainly operate somewhere in the proximity of hollow prestige (The Walking Dead) or po-faced and politically idiotic fare like World War Z (2013). Return of the Living Dead opened the floodgates for the likes of Evil Dead II (1987), Dead Alive (1992), and, later on, Shaun of the Dead (2004), all of which not only ramped up the comedy proper, but also utilized the gore and genre-typical apocalyptic vision toward comedic ends. (The eventual zombie craze of the 2010s — which so completely sank its claws into film, television, literature, and video games — can also be traced back to this shift.) It wasn’t just zombies, though: the ‘80s would turn out to be the era where American horror lost its bite. The genre learned to have fun, but it was a far cry from the incendiary force it was once able to conjure. First as tragedy, then as farce.
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