Well, why not? Actually, it’s more a consumer paradise, open to all races, as long as they have sufficient firepower, as is the case with the remnant of human survivors in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979). Fleeing the plague that has turned its victims into flesh-eating zombies, this disparate group holes up in a shopping mall. They help themselves to the goods available, but the zombies are also drawn to the same place. Why? “Some kind of instinct,” explains a character in a line echoed in Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake. “Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” Even zombies love to shop. After all, what was the first thing our commander-in-chief urged Americans to do after 9/11?
Unfortunately, the consumers have also become the consumed. Nonetheless, they don’t dare stray far from the confines of this bastion of capitalism — not in Romero’s version nor in the remake. In Snyder’s film, the survivors not only resist abandoning the dubious security of the mall, they also cling to another relic of the past, the family unit. The futility of that hope is gruesomely illustrated in a scene reminiscent of Larry Cohen’s 1974 horror classic It’s Alive.
Futile though it may be, the belief in family has persisted in the more recent last-man movies, often as a counterpoint to the fanboy violence (Dawn inspired Dead Rising, a vastly popular XBox 360 video game). As was demonstrated in the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers more than five decades ago, however, even with family members — or especially with family members — it’s impossible to determine if they are one of them. Sometimes, you just have to take things on faith. Family values, which in more cynical times might be considered a weakness, have in recent movies proven to be an unexpected asset.
Certainly that is so in Alfonso Cuáron’s adaptation of the P.D. James novel Children of Men (2007). In this not-too-distant future, extinction occurs not through extermination, but through the failure of reproduction: women stopped giving birth. (That’s one way to put a stop to the pro-choice/pro-life debate.) By the end, motherhood has been elevated to Blessed Virgin status, with all individual needs and ambitions paling in significance.
In 28 Weeks Later (2007) — the sequel to 28 Days Later (2002), in which a “rage virus” has transformed most of humanity into hyperkinetic killers — a surviving brother and sister break out of a no-zombie quarantine refuge to search for their mother in no-man’s land. Their breach leads to a resurgence of the virus, but it also reveals a genetic trait that might provide the cure — if the kid possessing it, the last child in a sense, can be kept alive long enough.
Similarly, in this year’s Body Snatchers remake, the poorly received The Invasion, the fate of the world becomes secondary to a nasty custody fight between a bad dad (now one of the pod people), and the last mother, played by Nicole Kidman, whose endangered son might hold the key to defeating the alien, body-swiping spores.
When such faith in the family or in future generations fails, nihilism triumphs. In Frank Darabont’s recent adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist, a father wonders if the world has become a place in which life is unbearable — the scene is the most disturbing and terrifying in the movie. It’s an existential horror film, in which philosophical dialectic is more important than splatter and special effects.
