Zombie movies have become hopeless cases that work as neither satire nor as horror

Inside Film: Jim Jarmusch’s new film, ‘The Dead Don’t Die’, highlights the increasing aimlessness of the zombie genre

Geoffrey Macnab
Thursday 11 July 2019 17:07 BST
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Adam Driver and Bill Murray stumbling around in the latest zombie flick
Adam Driver and Bill Murray stumbling around in the latest zombie flick

We are all zombies now... according to Jim Jarmusch’s new film, The Dead Don’t Die – but it also highlights the increasing aimlessness of the zombie genre. When the lines between the living and the undead are so blurred, zombie movies become hopeless cases. They stop working either as satire or as horror. We’ve had far too many of them in recent years. They all have the same scenes in shopping malls, airports or supermarkets, in which the zombies shuffle along in the same daze that humans do, listlessly looking for two-for-one deals on groceries, or waiting to be processed through security.

The zombies in Jarmusch’s film gravitate towards what gave them the most pleasure when they were still alive. In the case of Iggy Pop’s character, he doesn’t have a lust for life so much as a desperate need for coffee – flesh eating is just a sideline. His main instinct is to go in search of that shot of caffeine that used to make him feel alive. He doesn’t drink instant either. As you would expect in a film from a self-respecting arthouse auteur like Jarmusch, the zombie prefers the real stuff.

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