I was interested to read Simon Pegg's views on Charlie Brooker's zombiefest DEAD SET in his blog at PEGGSTER.net (The blog link is on the side panel), as he is of course a zombie fan as well as co-creator of Shaun Of The Dead.
Here's what he wrote (I spoiler-tagged it as it's a long post):
Yep, he's a Top Geek who would fit in here very well, I think!
Here's Brooker's reply, introduced by Pegg:
Interesting stuff! It's clear that both men like and respect each other, even if they do have slight differences of opinion about zombies!
Here's what he wrote (I spoiler-tagged it as it's a long post):
Hello all,
Last week E4 screened Dead Set a five part zombies meet Big Brother drama, written by Charlie Brooker, which was really rather excellent. It did however commit a cardinal sin that I take issue with in today's Guardian. Call me an old reactionary but if it ain't dead, don't revive it.
The Dead and The Quick
As an avid horror fan, I found the prospect of a five night zombie spectacular rather exciting. Admittedly, the trailer for E4's 'Dead Set', made me somewhat uneasy. The sight of Krishnan Guru-Murthy warning the populous of an impending zombie apocalypse induced a sickening sense of indignation in me. Only five years previously, Edgar Wright and myself had employed Krishnan to do the very same thing, in our own zombie opus, Shaun Of The Dead. I immediately experienced the sensation one might feel witnessing an ex lover walking down the street pushing a pram. My response was of course a reflex. It's not as if Edgar and myself weren't pushing someone else's baby up the cultural high street with our own effort. To some degree, that was the point. The very creative crux of Shaun Of The Dead was its transposition of a pre-existing set of ideas into a new context. We lifted the mythology established by George A. Romero in his seminal 1968 feature, Night Of The Living Dead and offset it against the conventions of a romantic comedy.
Accepting the hypocrisy of my initial response, I was pleased to note Dead Set's undoubtedly impressive credentials. The concept was clever in its simplicity; a full-scale zombie outbreak coincides with a Big Brother eviction night, leaving the house as the last refuge for the survivors. Penned by Charlie Brooker, a writer whose scalpel-sharp incisiveness and gleeful ire I have long been a fan of and featuring top talents such as Jamie Winstone and the always-outstanding Kevin Eldon, the show significantly heralded the arrival of genuine homegrown horror, scratching at the fringes of network television. With things looking promising and expectations high, I sat down to watch a show that proved smart, inventive and enjoyable but for one key detail. ZOMBIES DON'T RUN!
I know it's absurd to debate the rules of a reality, that does not exist, but it genuinely irks me. You can't kill vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can't fly; zombies don't run. It's a misconception, a bastardization that diminishes an all time classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable, anchoring plausibility to the fantastic. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I'll buy, some sort of super virus? Sure, why not... but death? Death is a disability, not a superpower; it's hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.
More significantly, it is the negation of this key factor that leaves the fast zombie bereft of the poetic subtlety demonstrated by its down tempo counterpart. As monsters from the id, zombies out tussle even vampires and werewolves for the title of most potent metaphorical monster. Whereas their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are the physical manifestation of our fate, our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.
However (and herein lies the sublime artfulness of the slow zombie), their ineptitude actually makes them avoidable, at least for a while. If you're careful, if you keep your wits about you, you can stave them off, even outstrip them - much as we strive to outstrip death. Drink less, cut out red meat, exercise, practice safe sex; these are our shotguns, our cricket bats, our farmhouses and our shopping malls. However, none of these things fully insulates us from the creeping dread that something so witless, so elemental may yet catch us unawares - the drunk driver, the cancer sleeping in the double helix, the legless ghoul dragging itself through the darkness towards our ankles.
Speed also serves to simplify the zombie, clarifying the threat and reducing the response to an emotional reflex. It's the difference between someone shouting BOO and hearing the sound of the floorboards creaking in an upstairs room; a quick thrill at the expense of a more profound sense of dread. Pace may intensify the rush but it also infers emotional motivation. The absence of rage or aggression in slow zombies makes them oddly sympathetic, a detail that enabled Romero to project depth onto their blankness, to create tragic anti-heroes, figures to be pitied, empathised with, even rooted for. The moment they appear angry or petulant in the pursuit of their goals, the second they emit furious velociraptor screeches as opposed to the mournful moans of longing, they cease to possess any ambiguity; they are simply mean.
So how did this lore breaking come about? Culturally, it's easy to track a process that has unfolded with all the infuriating dramatic irony of an episode of Fawlty Towers. To begin at the beginning, Haitian folklore tells of voodoo shaman, or 'Bocurs', using foxglove or digitalis to induce somnambulant trances in individuals who would subsequently appear dead. Weeks later, relatives of the supposedly deceased would witness their lost loved ones in a soporific malaise, working in the fields of wealthy landowners, and assume them to be 'Nzambi' (a West African word for spirit of the dead). From the combination of Nzambi and Somnambulist (sleepWALKER) we get zombie.
The legend was appropriated by the film industry and for twenty or thirty years a steady flow of voodoo based zombie cinema emerged from the Hollywood horror factory. Then, a young filmmaker from Pittsburgh by the name of George A. Romero changed everything. Romero's fascination with Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, the story of a lone survivor, struggling in a world overrun by vampires, lead him to fixate on an aspect of the story leapfrogged by the author; namely the process by which humanity is subjugated by the aggressive new species. For the purposes of his own work, Romero adopted the zombie from Haitian folklore, combined it with notions of cannibalism and the viral communicability characterised by the vampire and werewolf myths and in doing so, created the modern zombie.
After three films spanning three decades and much imitation from filmmakers such as Lucio Fulci and Dan O'Bannon, the credibility of the zombie was dealt a cruel blow by the king of pop. Directed by John Landis with make up effects by Rick Baker, Michael Jackson's Thriller video, though groundbreaking and entertaining, rendered it rather difficult to take zombies seriously, having witnessed them body popping. As a result, the dead went quiet for a while. That is until the Japanese Video Game company, Capcom developed the game, BioHazard, or as it was called here in the West, Resident Evil. The game brilliantly captured the spirit of Romero's shambling antagonists (Romero even directed a trailer for the second installment). Slow and steady, the zombie commenced its stumble back into our collective sub-consciousness.
Inspired by the game and a shared love of Romero, Edgar Wright and myself began to hatch a plan to reanimate the genre, appropriating Romero's mythos to create a black comedy. Meanwhile, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland were developing their own end of the world fable, 28 Days Later, an excellent film misconstrued by the media as a zombie flick. Boyle and Garland never set out to make a zombie film per se. They drew instead on John Wyndham's Day Of The Triffids, as well as Matheson and Romero, to fashion a new strain of survival horror, featuring a London beset by rabid propagators of a virus known as 'rage'.
The success of the movie, particularly in the States, was undoubtedly a factor in the creative decisions surrounding a loose 'remake' of Romero's Dawn Of The Dead. Zack Snyder's effective but pointless reboot parlayed Boyle's 'infected' into the upgraded zombie 2.0, likely at the behest of some cigar chomping, focus group happy movie exec desperate to satisfy the MTV generation's demand for quicker everything; quicker food; quicker downloads; quicker dead people. The hegemonic elite thus ushered the zombie onto the mainstream stage on the proviso that it sprinted up to the mic. Subsequently, the genre was diminished. Highly irrelevant and hardly tragic I know but I think it's a shame.
Despite my purist griping, Dead Set was quality fare with solid performances, imaginative direction, good gore and the kind of inventive writing and verbal playfulness we've come to expect from the always brilliant Brooker. As a satire it took pleasing chunks out of media bumptiousness but more significantly, the aggressive collectivism demonstrated by the lost souls who waste their Friday nights, surrounding the Big Brother house, baying for the blood of those who beat them inside. Like Romero before him, Brooker simply nudges the metaphor to a literal conclusion and spatters his point across our screens in blood and brains and bits of skull. If he had only eschewed the zeitgeist and embraced the docile, creeping weirdness that has served to embed the zombie so deeply into our grey matter, Dead Set might have been my favorite piece of television ever. As it was I had to settle for it merely being bloody good.
******
Dead Set is available on DVD and despite the controversy, any self respecting zombie fan should watch it.
Last week E4 screened Dead Set a five part zombies meet Big Brother drama, written by Charlie Brooker, which was really rather excellent. It did however commit a cardinal sin that I take issue with in today's Guardian. Call me an old reactionary but if it ain't dead, don't revive it.
The Dead and The Quick
As an avid horror fan, I found the prospect of a five night zombie spectacular rather exciting. Admittedly, the trailer for E4's 'Dead Set', made me somewhat uneasy. The sight of Krishnan Guru-Murthy warning the populous of an impending zombie apocalypse induced a sickening sense of indignation in me. Only five years previously, Edgar Wright and myself had employed Krishnan to do the very same thing, in our own zombie opus, Shaun Of The Dead. I immediately experienced the sensation one might feel witnessing an ex lover walking down the street pushing a pram. My response was of course a reflex. It's not as if Edgar and myself weren't pushing someone else's baby up the cultural high street with our own effort. To some degree, that was the point. The very creative crux of Shaun Of The Dead was its transposition of a pre-existing set of ideas into a new context. We lifted the mythology established by George A. Romero in his seminal 1968 feature, Night Of The Living Dead and offset it against the conventions of a romantic comedy.
Accepting the hypocrisy of my initial response, I was pleased to note Dead Set's undoubtedly impressive credentials. The concept was clever in its simplicity; a full-scale zombie outbreak coincides with a Big Brother eviction night, leaving the house as the last refuge for the survivors. Penned by Charlie Brooker, a writer whose scalpel-sharp incisiveness and gleeful ire I have long been a fan of and featuring top talents such as Jamie Winstone and the always-outstanding Kevin Eldon, the show significantly heralded the arrival of genuine homegrown horror, scratching at the fringes of network television. With things looking promising and expectations high, I sat down to watch a show that proved smart, inventive and enjoyable but for one key detail. ZOMBIES DON'T RUN!
I know it's absurd to debate the rules of a reality, that does not exist, but it genuinely irks me. You can't kill vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can't fly; zombies don't run. It's a misconception, a bastardization that diminishes an all time classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable, anchoring plausibility to the fantastic. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I'll buy, some sort of super virus? Sure, why not... but death? Death is a disability, not a superpower; it's hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.
More significantly, it is the negation of this key factor that leaves the fast zombie bereft of the poetic subtlety demonstrated by its down tempo counterpart. As monsters from the id, zombies out tussle even vampires and werewolves for the title of most potent metaphorical monster. Whereas their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are the physical manifestation of our fate, our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.
However (and herein lies the sublime artfulness of the slow zombie), their ineptitude actually makes them avoidable, at least for a while. If you're careful, if you keep your wits about you, you can stave them off, even outstrip them - much as we strive to outstrip death. Drink less, cut out red meat, exercise, practice safe sex; these are our shotguns, our cricket bats, our farmhouses and our shopping malls. However, none of these things fully insulates us from the creeping dread that something so witless, so elemental may yet catch us unawares - the drunk driver, the cancer sleeping in the double helix, the legless ghoul dragging itself through the darkness towards our ankles.
Speed also serves to simplify the zombie, clarifying the threat and reducing the response to an emotional reflex. It's the difference between someone shouting BOO and hearing the sound of the floorboards creaking in an upstairs room; a quick thrill at the expense of a more profound sense of dread. Pace may intensify the rush but it also infers emotional motivation. The absence of rage or aggression in slow zombies makes them oddly sympathetic, a detail that enabled Romero to project depth onto their blankness, to create tragic anti-heroes, figures to be pitied, empathised with, even rooted for. The moment they appear angry or petulant in the pursuit of their goals, the second they emit furious velociraptor screeches as opposed to the mournful moans of longing, they cease to possess any ambiguity; they are simply mean.
So how did this lore breaking come about? Culturally, it's easy to track a process that has unfolded with all the infuriating dramatic irony of an episode of Fawlty Towers. To begin at the beginning, Haitian folklore tells of voodoo shaman, or 'Bocurs', using foxglove or digitalis to induce somnambulant trances in individuals who would subsequently appear dead. Weeks later, relatives of the supposedly deceased would witness their lost loved ones in a soporific malaise, working in the fields of wealthy landowners, and assume them to be 'Nzambi' (a West African word for spirit of the dead). From the combination of Nzambi and Somnambulist (sleepWALKER) we get zombie.
The legend was appropriated by the film industry and for twenty or thirty years a steady flow of voodoo based zombie cinema emerged from the Hollywood horror factory. Then, a young filmmaker from Pittsburgh by the name of George A. Romero changed everything. Romero's fascination with Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, the story of a lone survivor, struggling in a world overrun by vampires, lead him to fixate on an aspect of the story leapfrogged by the author; namely the process by which humanity is subjugated by the aggressive new species. For the purposes of his own work, Romero adopted the zombie from Haitian folklore, combined it with notions of cannibalism and the viral communicability characterised by the vampire and werewolf myths and in doing so, created the modern zombie.
After three films spanning three decades and much imitation from filmmakers such as Lucio Fulci and Dan O'Bannon, the credibility of the zombie was dealt a cruel blow by the king of pop. Directed by John Landis with make up effects by Rick Baker, Michael Jackson's Thriller video, though groundbreaking and entertaining, rendered it rather difficult to take zombies seriously, having witnessed them body popping. As a result, the dead went quiet for a while. That is until the Japanese Video Game company, Capcom developed the game, BioHazard, or as it was called here in the West, Resident Evil. The game brilliantly captured the spirit of Romero's shambling antagonists (Romero even directed a trailer for the second installment). Slow and steady, the zombie commenced its stumble back into our collective sub-consciousness.
Inspired by the game and a shared love of Romero, Edgar Wright and myself began to hatch a plan to reanimate the genre, appropriating Romero's mythos to create a black comedy. Meanwhile, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland were developing their own end of the world fable, 28 Days Later, an excellent film misconstrued by the media as a zombie flick. Boyle and Garland never set out to make a zombie film per se. They drew instead on John Wyndham's Day Of The Triffids, as well as Matheson and Romero, to fashion a new strain of survival horror, featuring a London beset by rabid propagators of a virus known as 'rage'.
The success of the movie, particularly in the States, was undoubtedly a factor in the creative decisions surrounding a loose 'remake' of Romero's Dawn Of The Dead. Zack Snyder's effective but pointless reboot parlayed Boyle's 'infected' into the upgraded zombie 2.0, likely at the behest of some cigar chomping, focus group happy movie exec desperate to satisfy the MTV generation's demand for quicker everything; quicker food; quicker downloads; quicker dead people. The hegemonic elite thus ushered the zombie onto the mainstream stage on the proviso that it sprinted up to the mic. Subsequently, the genre was diminished. Highly irrelevant and hardly tragic I know but I think it's a shame.
Despite my purist griping, Dead Set was quality fare with solid performances, imaginative direction, good gore and the kind of inventive writing and verbal playfulness we've come to expect from the always brilliant Brooker. As a satire it took pleasing chunks out of media bumptiousness but more significantly, the aggressive collectivism demonstrated by the lost souls who waste their Friday nights, surrounding the Big Brother house, baying for the blood of those who beat them inside. Like Romero before him, Brooker simply nudges the metaphor to a literal conclusion and spatters his point across our screens in blood and brains and bits of skull. If he had only eschewed the zeitgeist and embraced the docile, creeping weirdness that has served to embed the zombie so deeply into our grey matter, Dead Set might have been my favorite piece of television ever. As it was I had to settle for it merely being bloody good.
******
Dead Set is available on DVD and despite the controversy, any self respecting zombie fan should watch it.
Here's Brooker's reply, introduced by Pegg:
Last week I wrote a piece for the Guardian about why I prefer slow zombies to fast ones. You'll find it in the blog before last. The whole thing was sparked off by Charlie Brooker's undeniably excellent Dead Set (it's out on DVD, get it). Well, Charlie has formulated a riposte and exposed me as the old reactionary that I am.
CHARLIE SAYS
Speaking of fantasy worlds, apologies for being:a) indulgent and b) nerdy, but I have to defend myself here. Last week Simon Pegg wrote a piece for this paper complaining about the running zombies in my preposterous horror series Dead Set. Proper zombies don't run, they walk, he said. I was all ready to write a stinging riposte until I read his article all the way through and realized it was dauntingly well-argued. So I'll keep this short and combative and hope I get away with it.
Simon: your outright rejection of running zombies leaves you exposed, in a very real and damning sense, as a terrible racist. And if the recent election of Obama has taught us one thing, it's that the age of such knee-jerk prejudice is firmly behind us. Still, let's indulge your disgraceful bigotry for a moment by assuming speedy zombies need defending, and list the reasons why ours ran, shall we?
1) I like running zombies. I just do.
2) They HAD to run or the story wouldn't work. The outbreak had to knock the entire country out of action before the producers had time to evacuate the studios.
3) We had to clearly and immediately differentiate Dead Set from Shaun of the Dead, which had cornered the market on zombie-centric horror-comedy. Blame yourself, Simon: if you'd made that film badly, it wouldn't have been so popular, and drawing a distinction wouldn't have been an issue. Each time one of our zombies breaks into a sprint, it's your own stupid talented fault.
4) Even George Romero, the godfather of zombies, bent the rules from time to time. Witness the very first zombie in Night of the Living Dead, which moves at a fair old whack and even picks up a rock to try to smash a car window. Or the two kiddywink zombies in Dawn of the Dead, who burst out of a room and run - yes run - towards Ken Foree. I know you saw these scenes. You know you saw these scenes. And you also know that if this were a trial, this would be the moment where you splutter in the witness box and admit you're completely wrong.
5) Running zombies are, to be frank, cheaper than stumbling ones. You only need one or two to present a massive threat. I love a huge mass of shambling undead as much as the next guy, but we couldn't afford that many crowd scenes. The original plan was to set the final episode six months in the future, by which time the zombies were badly decayed and could only shuffle (although "freshies" would still run), but budget and time constraints ruled this out. Which would you rather see - running zombies or absolutely no zombies at all?
Hmm? HMM?
[Pegg] I SAY - (grumpy mumbling) Running ones Charlie...but if one of them kicks a football into my garden, I'm not giving it back!
CHARLIE SAYS
Speaking of fantasy worlds, apologies for being:a) indulgent and b) nerdy, but I have to defend myself here. Last week Simon Pegg wrote a piece for this paper complaining about the running zombies in my preposterous horror series Dead Set. Proper zombies don't run, they walk, he said. I was all ready to write a stinging riposte until I read his article all the way through and realized it was dauntingly well-argued. So I'll keep this short and combative and hope I get away with it.
Simon: your outright rejection of running zombies leaves you exposed, in a very real and damning sense, as a terrible racist. And if the recent election of Obama has taught us one thing, it's that the age of such knee-jerk prejudice is firmly behind us. Still, let's indulge your disgraceful bigotry for a moment by assuming speedy zombies need defending, and list the reasons why ours ran, shall we?
1) I like running zombies. I just do.
2) They HAD to run or the story wouldn't work. The outbreak had to knock the entire country out of action before the producers had time to evacuate the studios.
3) We had to clearly and immediately differentiate Dead Set from Shaun of the Dead, which had cornered the market on zombie-centric horror-comedy. Blame yourself, Simon: if you'd made that film badly, it wouldn't have been so popular, and drawing a distinction wouldn't have been an issue. Each time one of our zombies breaks into a sprint, it's your own stupid talented fault.
4) Even George Romero, the godfather of zombies, bent the rules from time to time. Witness the very first zombie in Night of the Living Dead, which moves at a fair old whack and even picks up a rock to try to smash a car window. Or the two kiddywink zombies in Dawn of the Dead, who burst out of a room and run - yes run - towards Ken Foree. I know you saw these scenes. You know you saw these scenes. And you also know that if this were a trial, this would be the moment where you splutter in the witness box and admit you're completely wrong.
5) Running zombies are, to be frank, cheaper than stumbling ones. You only need one or two to present a massive threat. I love a huge mass of shambling undead as much as the next guy, but we couldn't afford that many crowd scenes. The original plan was to set the final episode six months in the future, by which time the zombies were badly decayed and could only shuffle (although "freshies" would still run), but budget and time constraints ruled this out. Which would you rather see - running zombies or absolutely no zombies at all?
Hmm? HMM?
[Pegg] I SAY - (grumpy mumbling) Running ones Charlie...but if one of them kicks a football into my garden, I'm not giving it back!
You never hear vampire fans claim any interpretation that strays from Bram Stoker's original aren't "real vampires". Lord knows just about every unique characteristic of vamps has been interpreted differently over the last century.
