Customer Reviews

The Dead Walk

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Overall I would have to rate this book as an OK look at horror films through the years. But several things stop this volume from being a good look at Zombie films.

1st of all, the book is riddled with mistakes, nothing major but enough to make the average horror fanboy (like myself) cringe while reading it. At one point while referring to the career of the late Lucio Fulci, the author mentions the thrillers of his seventies career, siting "Don't Torture a Duckling", "A Lizard in a Woman's Skin", and "Schizoid" as examples. Lizard and Schizoid are the same movie, Schizoid being the American title and Lizard being the European one.

At another point he mentions that Dawn of the Dead was called Zombie in its American release, and because of this Fulci's Zombie was released in the US as Zombie 2. This again is incorrect, as Dario Argento made his own edit of Dawn of the Dead for the European market, that Romero thought he would have a better grasp of. It was in this foreign market that the film was known as Zombie, and this same market that Fulci's film was called Zombie 2.

Those are just a couple of examples of this. My other major beef with the book is it strays pretty far from its intended subject matter. Now the while the ideas of society turning us into zombies in a figurative sense may be an interesting one for discussion, and definitely one that is often touched upon in film, I don't think that it falls into the parameters of this book. Movies like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "A Clockwork Orange" are discussed at great length, while great Zombie films such as "Dead Alive" "Afterdeath" and "Burial Ground" are hardly, if at all even mentioned.

I believe that the cause for this is in the book (or author's, I'm not sure) country of origin. This appears to be a British novel, and while the UK is known for many great and dazzling horror films (hammer, amicus), they are not known for their horror films. But the author keeps stretching the definition of zombie films to come back to British works again and again, spending no more than a few pages on the Italian film industry which created more great Zombie material in the late 70's and early to mid 80's than any other country out there. An entire chapter is dedicated to Britain's one great true Zombie film, hammer's "The Plague of the Zombie's", and discussion of other hammer non-zombie films abound, particularly the Quartermass series.

The result is an interesting read, but one that leaves the viewer wondering where all the zombies in this book about zombie's are.

There have been a number of books on zombie films come out in the past few years but none quite as fun as Noir's The Dead Walk. Rather than present a bland guide listing the usual information, Black and Earles go in a bit of a different direction by segmenting their film by clever categories dealing with style, era, and types of zombie films. Add to that they have meticulously research their subject matter and present it with lively text and anecdotes about the films. They don't seek to list every zombie film ever made (although they do cover a LOT of them) but they tend to focus on the more well-known films and some you wouldn't necessarily consider zombie films.

The Dead Walk doesn't list cast and crew details but rather looks at these films and what made them unique to their own era or sub-genre with astute critical analysis. Monochrome Zombies looks at Hollywood's early zombie films like White Zombie and its roots in German Expressionism and I walked with a Zombie. Black and Earles provide plot details but rather that just trying to make another guide they place great emphasis on the film's themes.

One category is solely devoted to the zombie films of George Romero from Night of the Living Dead to Diary of the Dead but also including non-Romero re-makes like Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, noting it's key theme differences and similarities. The book delves into the various Italian and Spanish-produced zombie films like the "Blind Dead" series in a category called Zombies around the Globe.

What I really enjoyed was the inclusion of films not typically thought of as zombie movies...call them cousins...such as the various Mummy films, the Evil Dead series, and others. The book contains over 300 photos in all, most in color. The Dead Walk is a new twist on zombie culture and a must have for fans of the genre.