Zombie films have a tradition of social satire going back to George Romero's skewering of consumer culture in Dawn of the Dead. For the first part of Lee's film, the high-functioning undead (as opposed to the menial-suited low functioning and dangerous feral zombies) appear as metaphor for any alienated ethnic or other oppressed demographic group who want their fair place in the American dream machine. But as we dive into the struggles between Director Lee, playing herself, her collaborator and the zombies themselves, the movie becomes an anti-p.c., irreverent shot at the liberal documentary's relationship to such an interest group, and what it says about the documentarians.
Lee achieved IFC programming and a lot of accolades with The Grace Lee Project, about the surprising number of Asian-American women who have been given her same name, so there's a sense of American Zombie commenting on her own practice, which certainly informs the believability of the filmmaking-within-a-film side of the story.
The handling of the zombies is more ambiguous, as the high-functioning ones Lee and co-writer Rebecca Sonnenshine have chosen to focus on sometimes (particularly early on) don't seem very zombie-like, save for patches of dry skin or alarming moles on their cheeks. Even their zombie frailties, like loss of memory, seem almost human. The cast plays even the most comic moments naturalistic and the shooting is more documentary than horror film, with satisfying payoffs in the last third of the movie, when the doc crew follows their subjects to the "Live Dead" festival retreat, and the narrative builds most clearly.
It will be interesting to see where zombie film fans place this in their canon in the years to come. Its premiere at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival, which runs as an even indier counter to the Sundance Film Festival (also in Park City the very same January dates, but in fewer and smaller venues), makes it the zombie Sundance film, i.e. the zombie social satire of the Sundance film.
Most of all, there's several moments near the end that unsettle as they wrap up the coverage of several key characters. Zombie is a one-way trip, from healthy living tissue to endlessly rotting flesh, and all the zombie characters are growing differently now, darker. They may band together to protest, "We're here, we're dead, get used to it," but maybe that's not what's most important to them.
After all, you've got to kill the brain to kill the ghoul.
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