Phil Smith
Dartington College of Arts
Terrain, State and Tread: Demons, Zombie Flesh Eaters and the Blind Dead
Windows Media Video
[Download Windows Media Player]
Some tentative suggestions about the cultural connectedness of the walk of some 'non-living' or 'post-death' characters in European horror movies of the 1970s, particularly those provoked by the Living Dead movies of George Romero, and European traditions of walking as an aesthetic or political practice: the Dada tours, the ambulations of the Surrealists, the 'derive' of the situationists, the ‘traces’ of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, the explorations of Rome's Stalker group, etc.
Focussing on Ossorio’s Blind Dead quartet, the two Zombie Flesh Eater movies inspired by Dawn of the Dead, and Demons and Demons 2, I will attempt to draw some conclusions from the particular motion of the walking dead in these movies, their relations with the terrains of the modernist city, ‘historic’ ruins, the ‘natural stage’ of the sea and the cinema itself and their similarities with certain aesthetic and subversive everyday walking strategies.
In contrast to US zombie ‘living dead’ movies the European dead are rarely inhibited by the forces of the state. If they are policed it seems more by history, by the ideological exchange of ideas and images, or by nature. I will attempt to show how this ‘free’ walk of the European ‘dead’, their interaction with their environments and their derivatively driven re-making of extreme events as an “everyday” all echo and finesse crucial theoretical and tactical cultural practices: the “mobile city” of de Certeau resisting the “conceptual city”, the atmosphere, ‘dread’ and ambience of neo-romantic English and situationist writing and exploring, and the construction of ‘situations’ that resist the reduction of social relations to an endless accumulation of the means to survive.
