I’m all kinds of excited about the new AMC miniseries THE WALKING DEAD, adapted by Frank Darabont from the Image Comics graphic novel first published in 2003.  Yeah, I know that through overexposure zombies are rapidly approaching the complexity of vanilla but it’s a wonderful game when it’s played well and THE WALKING DEAD has (if the Halloween premiere episode is any indication) a winning combination of heart, suspense and some surprisingly nasty gore and violence for TV.  The title might confuse some folks, who may remember Sean Penn’s Oscar-nominated turn as a Death Row convict in Tim Robbins’ DEAD MAN WALKING (1995).  (That title had been used previously, for a 1988 Wings Hauser post-apocalypse caper costarring a bug-eyed Brion James.)  That same year, there was also a Vietnam War drama called THE WALKING DEAD, which focused on black soldiers in country and featured Allen Payne, Eddie Griffin, Joe Morton and the late Bernie Mac; and who can forget Umberto Lenzi’s classic 1980 zombies-on-the-run movie NIGHTMARE CITY, which was released on VHS in this country as CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD?  If you’re an old MonsterKid like me, though, the title THE WALKING DEAD will take you somewhere else entirely.

Warner Brothers’ THE WALKING DEAD (1936) was directed by Michael Curtiz, between the Hungarian emigre’s innovative work on DOCTOR X (1932) and MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933) and the wartime classic CASABLANCA (1942).  The film stars Boris Karloff as John Elman, an recently-paroled crime of passion perpetrator who wants to get on with his life but is instead duped by racketeers (led by the silky Ricardo Cortez) and railroaded into the electric chair.  Within minutes of riding Old Sparky, Elman is permitted to return from his undeserved grave by dint of science and Edmund Gwenn, who has made some of his own modifications to the real life “Lindbergh Heart.”  Horror wasn’t the Warners stock-in-trade but like a lot of the studios during this time they turned their collective hand to occasional Gothic and grotesque themes in an attempt to cash in on the spookshow craze sparked by Universal’s monster rallies.  Karloff was by this point riding high as the King of Horror.  He had starred in both FRANKENSTEIN (1931) and BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935), had played THE MUMMY (1933), had sailed to England to be THE GHOUL (1933), and had paired with DRACULA (1931) star Bela Lugosi for a well-received triptych of fright films: THE BLACK CAT (1934), THE RAVEN (1935) and THE INVISIBLE RAY (1936).  Enmeshed off-camera in the struggle to establish the Screen Actor’s Guild, Karloff was a soft-spoken but vocal proponent of actors’ rights but otherwise enjoyed a quiet private life in the home he had bought up in the Hollywood Hills.  THE WALKING DEAD would have presented the actor with no great challenge, apart from the tack of distinguishing his reanimated John Elman from all of the other unearthly characters he had already played.  Warners offered him a competitive one-shot salary of $3,750 a week and with Universal in a bit of a creative slump the offer surely was one “the Great KARLOFF” (as publicity materials for THE INVISIBLE RAY had trumpeted him) could not refuse.

Growing up in the late 60s and early 70s, you looked at a lot of stills from THE WALKING DEAD but there was no opportunity to actually see the movie itself and even critical comments were few and far between.  Beyond its inclusion in an appendix filmography, THE WALKING DEAD got no mention in Ivan Butler’s The Horror Film (reissued as Horror in the Cinema) and was only a passing reference in Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies, while ” … quietly effective…” was all Carlos Clarens had to say in An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (and even then his remarks were specific to Karloff rather than the movie as a whole).  Ed Naha included an appreciative paragraph in his Horrors: From Screen to Scream but it was William K. Everson’s chapter-length discussion of the film in his landmark genre study Classics of the Horror Film that sold all of us Junior Weirdos on THE WALKING DEAD, with which it took me 37 years to catch up.  I finally did meet THE WALKING DEAD face to face a night or two before Halloween.

In a way, hooking up with THE WALKING DEAD at the distance of almost 40 years was a bit of a disappointment.  The title itself puts you in the mind of a zombie jamboree and Karloff’s cadaverous appearance in publicity materials and production stills only sells the illusion of a vengeful undead’un tramping the earth down on the path to retribution.  And those elements are certainly embedded in the script by Ewart Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert Adams and Lillie Hayward (working from an original story by Adamson and Joseph Fields) but the tone is altogether different.  As Everson pointed out in Classics of the Horror Film, “the film never really tries to scare its audience,” preferring instead to co-opt various horror tropes (the boiling/smoking laboratory, the rolling graveyard, lightning and thunder) to sell the audience on a religious parable in which the agents of evil are brought down ultimately by a jealous God through the agency of an undead Christian soldier.  In a way, it’s interesting to watch an unabashedly pious horror movie.  Religion is so often trucked into fright films (the glint on Van Helsing’s crucifix as the vampire averts its eyes) but goes no deeper than a special effect.  Here, the implication early on is that the Almighty Himself is directing John Elman, who marches menacingly after the conspirators who sent him to his death but looks confused and frightened after each man meets his death.  To look at it another way, with a more secular spin, THE WALKING DEAD plays like a comic book superhero’s origin story, with the at once fearsome and doleful John Elman growing steadily more accustomed to his powers before taking on his alternate identity.

But that never happens.  Apart from saying that it descends into treacly sanctimony, I won’t spoil the ending of THE WALKING DEAD and will swing the conversation to the film’s genre pedigree and relevance for the horror geek.  Not technically a zombie, John Elman is at least superficially every inch the flesh eater we’ve come to associate with that shuffling walk and purpose-driven dead-eyed stare.  Zombies were in 1936 the exclusive property of Haiti, written about by William Seabrook in his 1929 book The Magic Island and seen in such independently-produced films as WHITE ZOMBIE (1932) with Bela Lugosi and REVOLT OF THE ZOMBIES (1936) with Dean Jagger.  Even through the 40s, in such films as KING OF THE ZOMBIES (1941), REVENGE OF THE ZOMBIES (1943), I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943), ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY (1945) and VALLEY OF THE ZOMBIES (1946), zombies were blank-eyed automatons, living men who had their minds erased and had become the slaves of one zombie master (Lugosi) or another (John Carradine).  The zombies we all know and love now, those slack-jawed bitey gals and ghouls who walk as if their thighs are chafed, wouldn’t come into being until George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) redefined horror in general and that particular bogey.  The soberly-dressed Elman bears a passing resemblance to the Cemetery Zombie played by Bill Hinzman in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD; when the freshly-resurrected Elman pays a visit to the flop house hideout of the gladhanding gunsel (Joseph Sawyer) who set him up, the scene is like a blueprint for the karmic fade-out of Spain’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD ripoff LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE (1974), in which hardpressed hero Ray Lovelock pays a postmortem visit to the hippie-hating cop (Arthur Kennedy) who gunned him down as he tried to save the day.

While I would categorize Michael Curtiz’s THE WALKING DEAD as more of a curio than a gem, I recommend the film to those who are invested in the horror genre, those who care how all the pieces fit together, and those who are interested, as I am, in how our culture cobbles together our bogeymen-of-choice.  Given that Frank Darabont’s THE WALKING DEAD and the graphic novel that inspired it are beholden to George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD to the extent that, if it were not for the latter, the former wouldn’t exist, I think it’s worthwhile to go back and identify all the markers on the road that has brought us to where we now stand.  Even if THE WALKING DEAD had no direct influence on NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the connection remains, the association is inescapable.  Trapped between a material world that did him wrong and an afterlife that is just out of his reach, the restless, wronged John Elman is the grand-dead of all Romero zombies and their copycat progeny.  The partial paralysis that betrays an incomplete vivacity, the almost feral instinct to return to familiar places, and a worldview that is as angry as it is profoundly confused, are all hallmarks of the living dead in the 21st Century… making Boris Karloff in THE WALKING DEAD a very good candidate (even if we have to bend the rules slightly) for the designation of Zombie One.