Zombies! A corrupt reading of cinema
by Karim Sharredib
Release date : October 3, 2022
Publisher : deep red
Language : French
Number of pages : 348 pages
This book is neither a guide nor a dictionary of zombie movies. Rather, he proposes to think of cinema through the prism of these strange shadows that keep coming back to pile up in the field, one after the other, from saga to saga. The living dead could be considered a missing cinematic link, from the catastrophic tightrope walkers of burlesque to the losers of film noir; from the demotivated heroes of New Hollywood to the unmarked characters of contemporary non-horror cinema. This link in a state of more or less advanced putrefaction is morally insituable: neither benevolent nor really evil, these wandering corpses cross the frame and, by their lack of will, put the stories at fault. These contradictory bodies are understood as cracks and their apparent neutrality accompanies the decline of ideologies, particularly Hollywood. An essentially plural organism, zombies are mass in every sense of the word. By their ordinariness, their funereal banality – simple “dead neighbours” to use George Romero’s terms – they require the foreground to be put to death, that is to say the star-system and the beliefs that support it. accompany. Anyone can play an undead; moreover, the latter must be anyone. It is the foregrounding of the background that manifests itself here, like a disastrous horizon devouring the hierarchies.