Return of the Living Dead: Punk Zombies and Brains

Every zombie in every film made after 1985 that groans for brains owes a debt to one picture, and most people who make that joke have never seen it. The rule is not Romero’s. Romero’s dead eat anything with a pulse and never say a word about it. The brains business, the articulate corpse, the idea that being dead is agony and human grey matter is the only anaesthetic — all of that arrives with Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead in 1985, and it arrives fully formed, in the middle of a comedy, at the exact moment the film stops being funny.

I came to it on a rental tape sometime in the mid-nineties, expecting a Night of the Living Dead sequel and getting something considerably stranger. It has aged better than almost anything else in the eighties horror-comedy pile, and the reason is structural.

The lawsuit that wrote the film

The film exists because of a business split. When Night of the Living Dead was made, John Russo and George Romero were partners, and when the partnership ended the rights were divided in a way that let Russo use the phrase “Living Dead” in his own sequels while Romero took the “Dead” branch that produced Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. Russo wrote a novel and a script. Tobe Hooper was attached to direct for a period. When Hooper moved on, Dan O’Bannon took the job on the condition that he could rewrite it, and what he handed back was a comedy about the same materials.

O’Bannon’s own credits explain the tone. He had co-written and starred in Dark Star with John Carpenter, a science-fiction comedy about boredom, and he had written Alien, a film about a working crew being eaten on company time. Both are about labour. So is this one. The film opens in a medical supply warehouse on a Friday evening, with an experienced employee explaining the job to a new hire, and the entire catastrophe follows from two men on minimum wage poking at company property they were told to leave alone.

Why the comedy holds

The mechanics here are worth pulling apart, because horror-comedy fails far more often than it works, and the tightrope essay covers the general problem. This film’s solution is that the jokes are all about people, and the horror is allowed to stay horrifying.

James Karen plays Frank, the veteran, and Thom Mathews plays Freddy, the new man; Karen’s performance is the load-bearing wall of the film. He is funny in the way a specific kind of workplace bore is funny — a man who cannot stop talking, who oversells, who tells the new kid a story he should not tell. When the consequences arrive, Karen plays them absolutely straight and the comedy drains out of him in real time, on camera, over the length of the picture. The film’s cruellest trick is that you watch a comic performance decay into a tragic one without a single tonal cut. Clu Gulager as Burt, the owner, and Don Calfa as Ernie the mortician run the same trajectory: broad, then desperate, then quiet.

The second thing the film does right is the rule set. Romero’s zombies are slow and destructible; a hit to the head ends them. O’Bannon’s are fast, they think, they use tools, they operate a radio, and destroying the brain does nothing at all. Dismembered pieces keep moving. The film establishes this early with a sequence in the mortuary that is played for laughs and then, on reflection, is horrifying — because it means there is no procedure. Every zombie film before this one is a resource-management problem. This one removes the solution and leaves the panic.

Then there is the half-corpse. A woman cut in two at the waist, strapped to a table, asked why the dead eat brains. Her answer is the best three lines in eighties horror and I will not spoil them here: it reframes the entire subgenre from a threat model into a description of suffering. The film pays for its whole comic first act with that scene. The gag economy suddenly reads as denial.

What the punk soundtrack is for

The punk material is doing structural work. The film’s teenagers — Trash, Suicide, Spider, Scuz, Casey, Chuck, Tina — hang around a cemetery next to the warehouse, and the soundtrack runs the Cramps, 45 Grave, T.S.O.L., the Damned and Roky Erickson under them. Linnea Quigley’s Trash gets a monologue about how she would like to die and then a nude sequence in a graveyard that the film treats as an aesthetic statement by the character rather than a leer at her. These kids are already playing at death for fun. The film’s dark joke is that the universe takes them at their word.

The effects work is the other reason it survives. This is a film of latex, cable and animatronics, and the Tarman — a dripping, skeletal thing that comes out of a barrel and moves with terrible eagerness — remains one of the great practical creatures precisely because a performer is inside it making decisions. Why practical gore ages better is the general case; this film is the specific proof. The half-corpse is a full puppet rig with a performer buried in the table, and it holds a five-minute dialogue scene without breaking. Nothing in the film looks real. Everything in it looks present.

O’Bannon only directed twice

The career context sharpens the film. Dan O’Bannon spent most of his working life as a writer whose ideas were executed by other people, frequently better-funded people, and frequently badly. He got two features as director: this one, and The Resurrected in 1991, a Lovecraft adaptation that is genuinely good and that almost nobody has seen. Two films is a small body of work, and both of them are about the same thing — a contained space, a substance that should have stayed in its container, and professionals discovering that their expertise is worthless.

His writing credits run the other way: Alien, Dark Star, Lifeforce, Total Recall’s early drafts. The recurring O’Bannon subject across all of it is competent people meeting a problem that does not respect competence. In this film that idea gets its purest statement, because Frank and Burt are genuinely good at their jobs. They handle the crisis correctly at every stage. They call the right person, they follow the right procedure, they contain what they can contain, and every correct decision makes the situation worse. There is no version of that night where anyone behaves well enough to survive it.

The real ancestor of this is a Romero film nobody cites

The obvious lineage is Night of the Living Dead, which the film cheerfully claims in dialogue by asserting that the 1968 picture was based on a true event the government covered up. That gag is the film’s cleverest bit of positioning: it makes room for itself inside Romero’s universe without contradicting him.

The truer ancestor sits in a different corner of Romero’s own filmography: The Crazies, the 1973 picture where a leaked military container turns a small town lethal and the catastrophe is administered by men with clipboards. Trioxin is a chemical with a paperwork trail. Somebody signed for those barrels. Somebody shipped them to the wrong address. The film’s real monster wears a uniform and answers a telephone, and everything the dead do is downstream of a filing error.

For the running-corpse question, Nightmare City got there first in 1980 with a radiation-poisoned sprinting undead, and it is worth seeing for the precedent even though it is a much clumsier picture. For the descendants, Braindead takes the splatter-comedy line to its terminus, Re-Animator arrived the same year with the other half of the formula, and Night of the Creeps the year after is the film that most obviously took notes. The whole map is in the zombie canon.

The case against

The teenagers are thin. Beyond Trash and Spider, most of them exist to be counted down, and the film’s interest in them is visibly lower than its interest in the three men in the warehouse. The pacing sags in the second act while everyone waits for the storm to start. The synth score sits awkwardly against the punk cuts. And the film’s comic register in the first twenty minutes is broad enough that a viewer can reasonably bounce off before the trapdoor opens.

The defence is the shape. The film is engineered so that its funniest passages become unbearable in retrospect, and that only works if the comedy is genuinely broad first. You cannot get the second half’s despair without the first half’s cheerful stupidity. It is a machine for turning one thing into another, and the joins are meant to show.

Spoilers below

Frank and Freddy do not survive their infection, and the film’s bleakest sustained passage is Karen playing a man who knows exactly what is happening to his body, sitting in a mortuary, asking a friend to do something about it. Karen’s slow physical collapse across the picture is the best acting in any eighties zombie film, and it is done with no help from the writing — the script gives him nothing but the situation.

The end is total. There is no escape, no dawn, no survivor limping to the horizon. The military resolves the containment problem by nuking Louisville, which vaporises the town and vents the Trioxin into the atmosphere, where it seeds the rainclouds. The last shot is rain falling on another cemetery. The disaster gets redistributed by the same institution that caused it, using the only tool that institution owns.

That is the argument the whole film has been building. The people with authority over the barrels will always choose the option that makes the paperwork go away, and the dead are simply what that choice looks like from ground level.

Where to watch

It has been through several restorations and there is good disc coverage; the original theatrical cut is what you want, and the punk soundtrack is intact on the properly licensed editions, which has not always been true of budget releases. Follow it with Night of the Creeps and stop there — the sequels chase the joke and never find it.