In 2008 and 2009, the zombies have taken over. From the multiplex to the classics of 10th grade literature, the shambling undead hordes have gnawed their way into America’s hearts and skulls since they first appeared in 1968.

But the real origins of today’s zombies don’t lie with George Romero or Dan O’Bannon. Nor do they come from the Voo-Doo mind-control zombie films of the 1940’s. No, the first zombies to invade our popular culture died 3700 years ago, appeared in popular American literature in 1868 and appeared on screen in 1932. They were called Mummies and it seems that they’ve been forgotten this Halloween.

The seasonal shelf at Barnes & Noble. Lots of zombies, several vampires, a couple of ghosts, a pack of Shechner's werewolves and a Frankenstein. Where my Mummies at?

The ancient Romans, the world’s first tourists, used to visit Egypt to see the pyramids and look at mummies because those things were old. 2,000 years ago, they were 2,000 years old. Like us and Madonna, the Romans believed that the ancients knew magical secrets that we have since forgotten. We look for those secrets in the page of Dan Brown novels, but the Romans only had Virgil, so they brought home real unearthed mummies instead. Either as souvenirs in an age before site-specific shot glasses or ground up and ingested as medicine, thousands of mummies made their way to Europe and into the public imagination as something powerful, mysterious and potentially sinister.

If Mummyx causes plague, boils, frogs or the death of your firstborn, stop taking Mummyx and consult your physician.

After the Arabs conquered Egypt, the trade dried up and the European fascination with Egypt didn’t return until the end of the 18th century when Napoleon’s archaeologists found the Rosetta Stone. The 19th century was simply giddy over Egyptology. (What other country should have its own ‘ology’? Sound off in the comments.) As the fine folks at the British Museum plundered every grave they could find, Western writers recognized the inherent creepiness of grave robbing and started writing books about it.

Three major mummy works of the 19th and early twentieth centuries were, in order of coolness, “The Mummy’s Foot” by Theophile Gautier (1847), Jewel of the Seven Stars by Bram Stoker (1903), and “Lost in the Pyramid, or The Mummy’s Curse” by Louisa May Alcott (1868). That’s right, in between Little Women and Little Men, Alcott wrote a short story about the undead.

The three stories basically follow the same plot: person comes into possession of a mummy or a piece thereof, mummy is not as dead as originally hoped, vaguely magical bad things happen until whatever is disturbing the mummy’s rest is put right. Moral of the story: stop robbing graves you sick bastards.

Ultimately, you’ve never heard of any of these. They’re not that good, whatever the New York Times says. Stoker’s plot cowers behind impenetrable prose, Gautier’s story focuses on his protagonist’s great taste in home décor (the titular mummy’s foot is a new paperweight), and Alcott’s most horrific moment involves deadly Egyptian flower seeds. In none of them is there an ancient, rotting corpse coming to get someone. That took the magic of cinema.

In 1922, Howard Carter discovered the previously un-grave-robbed tomb of King Tut and the world’s Egypt fetish hit an all time high. Why it took ten years to greenlight, we’ll never know, but in 1932, Boris Karloff first played an undead creature, shambling across the screen, bringing inevitable doom. He and director Karl Freund, who served as cinematographer on both Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and “I Love Lucy,” where he’s credited with developing the first three-camera sit-com, gave us many of the tropes that horror has come to rely on.

Mouth technology has come a long way since 1932.

Their story, most familiar to us from the once fun and now thoroughly unwatchable Brendan Fraser franchise, has Prince Imhotep cursed for all eternity for falling in love with the Pharaoh’s main squeeze, then killing the boss. Instead of just having him buried/eaten alive, they have him buried/eaten alive in a way that leaves open the possibility that he’ll come back with god-like powers. Say what you want about the American penal system, it has at least replaced apotheosis with a parole board.

The real Imhotep was one of the ancient world’s great architects. To someone from the Old Kingdom, these movies would be like us running from a reincarnated Frank Lloyd Wright.

Having endured that harsh/stupid form of punishment for thousands of years, Imhotep comes back, as Belinkie put it, as an ancient, bandage wrapped, unstoppable Terminator whose existence means certain death for someone. Unlike a zombie, the mummy takes things personally. If you spent much of your life and fortune preparing for the afterlife, had your viscera removed and your brain pulled out of your nose, then found out that eternal life meant millennia of dust and darkness followed by grave robbers screwing with you, you might take things personally too.

So this Halloween, go ahead and put on your zombie costume (or better yet, an Overthinking It “Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains” shirt) and have your fun. Just remember the wisdom of the ages, respect your elders and show the mummies some respect.

Karl Marx: Even hairier than the Wolfman. Coincidence... OR IS IT!?

[I want to thank Professor David Graeber, whose anthropological dissection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and accompanying lectures) very much forms the basis of this post.]

Let’s begin with two observations. First: the Vampires that inhabit our most recent pop cultural works differ so dramatically from the classic archetype of Golden-Age Hollywood that they are are almost unrecognizable. Second: Werewolves are lame.

Or at least, compared with their undead, blood-sucking, vaguely-Carpathian cohort, werewolves of late have occupied a far less enviable position in the collective pop cultural landscape. These are not the subtle, nuanced, infinitely malleable characters vampires are–the sort capable of carrying their own novels, TV-shows, Movies and crappy Movie-Tie-In Video Games. Rather, lycanthropes end up as the stock types passively added to spice up a Vampire vehicle. Sure, some immortal genius might figure out a way to breathe new life into the old dogs, but for now, Buffy’s Oz remains a werewolf’s best case scenario. In the worst cases it’s… well… I’d rather not say.

However, there is something to be said about the sheer frequency with which werewolves pop up in Vampire works. Is your horror-story turned teen-abstinence-parable getting a bit too stale to survive a sequel? Throw in some werewolves! Is having a psychic heroine dating a vampire proving an insufficient allegory for southern race relations? Make her boss a werewolf! At least…sorta’. The point is, as the length of a Vampire epic approaches infinity, the probability that the spinning “let’s throw in a different kind of monster” wheel will stop on “Werewolf” approaches 1. And it does so far earlier than all of the other forms. As the old aphorism goes: no ghosts, witches, reanimated corpses, mer-people, vengeful pagan gods or giant, radioactive slugs before werewolves. And for heaven’s sake, NO MUMMIES.

The delicious exception that proves the rule.

Yet–and this is important–despite the number of appearances Werewolves (or the equivalent) make in predominantly Vampire (or equivalent) works, the converse is never true, because Werewolves remain lame.

But why? What is it about our culture that causes us to perpetually dwell on one classic occult figure, while paupering the other of such attention?

The answer, of course, lies in the failure of Marxism.

For those of you who are not aware, back in the 1980s, a man named Samuel Raimi made a series of films called The Evil Dead Trilogy.  These films, particularly the second and third of the trilogy, are beloved as cult classics from the horror-comedy genre.  Evil Dead 2, for example, has a scene where its protagonist (Bruce Campbell) gets in a slapstick duel to the death with his hand.  The third movie, Army of Darkness, involves Bruce Campbell’s character traveling back in time to train a medieval army to fight his evil clone and a legion of living skeletons.  These movies were made, shall we say, with a tongue firmly in cheek.

Ah, but what of The Evil Dead (a.k.a. Evil Dead 1), the first film of the series?  Although it is not nearly as amusing as its sequels, and though its violence is possibly more brutal than even Oscar-winner Peter Jackson’s classic Dead Alive, I would nevertheless characterize it as a horror-comedy, as well.

Here’s the difference, though.  Where Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness show a blend of horror and comedy, Evil Dead 1 seems to be two separate movies: one a horror movie and one a comedy.

The interesting part to me is the point at which the film switches from type A (B-movie horror) to type B (gross-out zombie comedy): the famous tree rape scene.  And thus, my question for today–which, incidentally is a question that many have asked before and that many will likely ask again–is:

WHY THE HELL WAS THERE A TREE RAPE SCENE IN THIS MOVIE?!

On second thought, let me whittle down my question to one that’s a little more specific.  What I want to know is, how are we meant to read the tree rape scene?  Is it meant to be the end point of Evil Dead’s B-horror movie, or is it the beginning point of the gross-out zombie comedy?  Or is it neither?  All this and more after the jump.

Waaaay back in the day, Fenzel and I decided that it would be a good idea to write an elaborate Broadway musical.  About zombies.  There have actually been zombie musicals before, mind you, but what sets ours apart is that it would be played completely straight.  Or rather, as I think one of us said at the time, “No parody element that we can dream up is going to be more fundamentally ridiculous than the fact that there are singing zombies on the stage.”

Anyway, that was a long time ago.  We put in a lot of work.  But we did not put in enough.  And for a long time, it looked like no part of Brains! The Musical of The Living Dead would ever see the light of day.

But since we mentioned the project on the podcast a while back, it seemed only appropriate to toss something up this week.  This isn’t necessarily the best song we wrote for the show, but it’s definitely the most stand-alone-y.  All that you need to know to enjoy this is that the heroes are about to make a stand against the zombie hordes, and they’re reviewing strategy.  The guy who is singing is named Hank.  (That might not have made the final draft.)

Here’s the sheet music:

The Only Way To Kill A Zombie (PDF)

Here’s a terrible MIDI realization (think of it as lo-fi, if that helps).

The Only Way To Kill A Zombie (MP3)

And here are the lyrics…

As you no doubt noticed, in this week leading up to Halloween, Overthinking It becomes Overmurdering It, the site that subjects popular culture to levels of brutality it probably doesn’t deserve.

We’ll have plenty of terrifying content for you all this week. For now, enjoy some of our ghoulish best from years past:

Jordan Stokes gave us five horror films that will leave you gleeful, as well as five horror films that will leave you feeling unclean. Our advice: sample one from each list!

Matt Belinkie ran down the critical oeuvre of Dan O’Bannon, unsung creator of the modern zombie. He compares O’Bannon’s take on zombism to Romero’s to see whose had greater staying power.

Finally, don’t forget our guest post from Eco-comics on Zombie Economics. Would zombies solve or exacerbate domestic labor problems?

We promise we have some content coming up this week that’s not entirely about zombies. Though why you’d want any is a mystery.

[Stokes and Fenzel kick off Halloween Week 2009 by engaging in a spirited debate about the morals of Zombie Atrocity.  Note: Spoilers for Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead follow.]

Resolved: In most zombie movies, the characters are undone when they become more zombielike (i.e. betray each other selfishly).

Stokes:  This premise is wrong, and what’s more it’s incoherent. You say that to become zombielike is to betray    selfishly. When did a zombie ever betray anyone?

Fenzel: Have you gone off your nut? Zombies betray people all the time! They just don’t think of it as betrayal because loyalty has become meaningless. When a parent tries to eat their kid, that’s betrayal from one perspective – and lunchtime from the other.

Stokes:  This is just typical misguided attempt by my opponent to drag zombies into a moral system that has no place for them. There’s a certain ghoulishness to the scenario you describe, sure, but – as zombie movies have told us SO many times – “She’s not your mother anymore!” Which means you aren’t her child, which means she is not betraying you. Also, let’s focus in on that other word: “selfishly.” I submit it to you that a zombie cannot behave selfishly, because a zombie does not have a sense of self.

A recent post on the zombie in popular imagination gives an excellent general sense of what we talk about when we talk about the living dead. But there’s a conflict inherent in the system. We basically think of zombiism as a virus, transmitted by zombie bite. We do think that zombies eat brains. But we also think that zombies are pretty much mindless. And we do think that they are dead.

As Matt pointed out, this last point doesn’t sit terribly well with the “virus” argument. It also doesn’t sit all that well with the original zombie folklore! But no one ever accused the popular imagination of being consistant. The definitive zombie movie will always be Night of the Living DEAD, and that idea isn’t going anywhere.

The conflict between the zombies-as-corpses and zombiism-as-virus isn’t actually all that hard to resolve. A virus, after all, is a living thing that takes over the body of another living thing. All you have to do for zombies is imagine a virus that can take over a dead body. That way you get zombies that are dead, but a zombie virus that is alive (at least in so far as viruses are alive). But there’s another conflict, and one that’s not so easy to resolve.

There exist within the horror genre certain films that are concerned less with scaring you than with making you question the essential goodness of mankind.  I don’t really want to write about most of these movies, because it means that I have to think about them.   Nevertheless, if you want to kick your Halloween off with a bang – or you just enjoy counting gross-out coup with friends – you’ll want something from this list.  Of their uniquely loathsome kind, these are the most perfect examples that exist.

5) Dead Alive

This image has nothing in particular to do with the moive, btw.

This gonzo kiwi zombie movie is actually pretty tame for this list, and that’s despite the zombie sex scene, the zombie baby, the disembodied zombie gastrointestinal tract, and the infamous “lawnmower” and “ear in the soup” scenes.  Peter Jackson invests the proceedings with a dose of levity and humanism, and the central love story is just too sweet for words.  Plus, where else are you going to find a kung-fu fighting priest who dives into the thick of a zombie uprising while shouting “I kick ass for the lord!”  And yet… the various puppet effects ARE decidedly unpleasant, especially the aforementioned zombie gastrointestinal tract and the slow disintegration of the protagonist’s mother.  And just when you think there’s nothing Jackson can do to gross you out physically any more (the lawnmower sequence required fake blood to be pumped onto the set through a fire hose), the climax of the film takes a startling left turn into psychologically disgusting territory.  I don’t want to spoil the surprise, so suffice it to say that it is very surprising.  And gross.  Definitely gross.

In the aftermath of the lawnmower scene.

On the whole, Dead Alive is a remarkably enjoyable film, so much so that I do sometimes sit down and watch it again.  I always think I’m ready for that ending – that it will have lost it’s power over me.  So far, it hasn’t.

Dan O'Bannon, apparently wearing some sort of bathrobe or kimono.

If you’re any kind of a geek, you’re currently saying to yourself, “But wait, isn’t George Romero the undisputed creator of the modern zombie?” Night of the Living Dead did indeed make zombies into one of our collective nightmares. But it was Dan O’Bannon’s lesser known Return of the Living Dead that introduced some of the big “rules” for zombies that are now almost universally accepted in the genre.

What’s interesting about the zombie is that it’s the only major movie monster that didn’t reach maturity in the 30’s or 40’s. Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Wolf Man (1941) created pop culture archetypes that were pretty cemented by Pearl Harbor. There were also plenty of zombie movies being made during this period. In fact, I had the pleasure of interviewing Scott Kenemore, the author of the very clever self-help guide The Zen of Zombie, and he told me one of his favorite zombie films is actually from 1941.

[As we count down to Halloween, Overthinking It presents you with a guide to some of the best in horror, compiled by our resident master, Stokes. --Ed.]

At first we were just going to do a top ten list… but after three rough drafts, I got tired of comparing apples and oranges.  Is Murnau’s atmospheric classic Nosferatu a better horror film than Hiltzik sublimely, uh, campy Sleepaway Camp?  Well obviously it is (by most rational standards of goodness)… but that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to slap it in the DVD player at my Halloween party.  So instead of one top ten list, we’re bringing you four top fives, beginning with the horror comedy.

A couple of notes on the selection process:  I didn’t bother putting Evil Dead 2 or Army of Darkness on the list, because I couldn’t figure out anything to write about them.  Suffice it to say that if you haven’t seen them already, you should do yourself a favor and add them to your netflix cue.  I also disqualified all movies that are unintentionally funny, like the infamous Plan Nine From Outer Space.  In my experience, these movies might make you laugh, but they don’t make you happy.  That much failure crammed into 90 minutes is never anything but depressing. Now on to the winners!