Audrey Fox
Zombie movies were experiencing a renaissance from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, thanks to the efforts of George A. Romero. But by the time the mid-1980s rolled around, audiences were more than familiar with the tropes of the subgenre, and were ready for something a little different. That’s where The Return of the Living Dead comes in – it fully deconstructs what came before it. The quirky, punk rock film completely changes the rules that cinematic zombies play by, it never takes the genre (or itself, for that matter) too seriously, and perhaps most importantly, it dispenses with the need for a traditional horror film hero entirely. Is Return of the Living Dead the best zombie movie the world has ever seen? Maybe not. But through sheer force of irreverence, it breathes fresh life into a subgenre rapidly in danger of growing stale, and you have to respect it for that alone.
The trouble in Return of the Living Dead all begins when Frank and Freddy, two well-intentioned but oafish warehouse employees, accidentally release toxic gas from a long-abandoned military canister. It has the power to reanimate the dead, and to slowly turn anyone who was directly exposed to it (sorry, Frank and Freddy) into zombies. But these undead creatures are not the familiar, lumbering monsters popularized in Night of the Living Dead and its various sequels. There’s a lingering sense of humanity that makes them compelling in a different way. They’re capable of speech, for one, even if most of their vocabulary revolves around brains.
And we do learn why they’re so keen on eating brains, by the way – their bodies are in a perpetual state of decay, and they can only briefly stave off the horrific pain of living inside a deteriorating vessel through the jolt of energy they get from a tasty hippocampus. The awareness they have of their plight is accompanied by a certain artfulness: they’re capable of tricking humans in their all-consuming hunger for gray matter. The zombies of Night of the Living Dead are terrifying because they lack motivation, with glassy stares and nothing at all within them but the uncontrollable urge to feast on human flesh. The zombies in Return of the Living Dead, on the other hand, have an unexpected poignancy (in spite of their inherent ridiculousness) when we’re given a reason for their hunger.
But it’s not only the zombies that are different in Return of the Living Dead – it’s the entire approach to the concept of a zombie outbreak. In Romero’s zombie films, an element of social commentary is baked into the interpretation of the undead. And that’s great. Who doesn’t love a horror movie that has something to say? But sometimes you want your zombie flicks to take a more “no thoughts, just vibes” approach, and that’s Return of the Living Dead with bells on. The closest this thing comes to a message is a vaguely cynical depiction of military incompetence. But as a whole, it’s got nothing more profound going on than an intrepid group of punk misfits trying to survive the night. It’s a horror movie, sure, but it’s also a comedy, and it never falls into the trap of thinking it needs to take things seriously in order to make audiences buy into its premise.
Return even goes further than that, though. It makes the decision fairly early on that in its particular battle between humans and zombies, there won’t be any heroes – or at least not the kind we normally expect from this sort of film. We don’t get the heroic figure who keeps a cool head and becomes the de facto leader of the group, serving as a Henry V of sorts in one last stand against the onslaught of zombies. They protect each other, sure, and we’re rooting for them all to varying degrees, but the protagonist that would normally headline the narrative is nowhere to be found. Instead, we’ve got a ragtag group of randoms who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, making them less impressive but perhaps more relatable.
To be fair, some would point to all of these choices as examples of why Return of the Living Dead is simply not as good a zombie movie as its illustrious predecessors. But its boldness and anarchic attitude, a willingness to tear down genre conventions and dance naked in the acid rain (metaphorically speaking), give The Return of the Living Dead an undeniable likeability factor. Between its goofy but captivating special effects and irreverent sense of humor, it tapped into something that audiences responded to. Night of the Living Dead might be the first son of zombie horror, but Return of the Living Dead is its much cooler younger brother selling weed out of the back of his pickup truck.
“The Return of the Living Dead” is streaming on Amazon Prime, Tubi, and Hoopla.
