Introduction to a book I will never write - Warm Bodies (2013)

Introduction

Early spring of 2013, I was sitting in a movie theater and as the lights came up, tears began running down my face. I didn’t know why, but the movie we just watched touched me in a place I didn’t know needed touching.  

Warm Bodies was a 2013 zombie romance, set in a post-apocalyptic America. It was part of the zombie renaissance inspired by AMC’s long running Walking Dead show. The gritty series, where survival was the ultimate crucible of humanity’s ability to thrive, posited that other humans are our greatest threat.  While humans fighting legions of the undead among the ruins of society was far from a new thing (George Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead is kind of the king of that scenario), the show pushed living dead entertainment from niche audiences to much wider cultural acceptance.  

Since 2010, when Walking Dead first appeared, a wide variety of genres found themselves crossing over into zombie-hunting survival mode. Movies like Warm Bodies, One Cut of the Dead, Life After Beth, Anna and the Apocalypse, and Maggie salted emotional dramas with the same flesh-hungry, undead ghouls and social commentary that Romero introduced to viewers. The living dead were merely a MacGuffin, a plot point to prop up the real, personal story behind the gory mayhem. Sometimes humorously, sometimes painfully anguished, all these movies told relatable stories of grief, dysfunctional family dynamics, and teen angst. 

Although never reaching the elevated horror status of films like Train to Busan or The Girl with All the Gifts, Warm Bodies, directed by Jonathan Levine, is an imperfect film — vacillating between lukewarm and tepid — that nonetheless touched me deeply.  The arc of living-dead R (Nicholas Holt) regaining his humanity, leaving his monstrous, flesh-eating self behind, moves quickly. While there is no shortage of action, attachment to the characters is hard to come by. As the zombies chase humans and fight amongst themselves and the skeletal, scary über-zombies fight everyone, the main relationship between the polar opposite love interests lacks cohesion. Other than inheriting the memories of Julie’s (Teresa Palmer) ex, Perry (Dave Franco), by eating his brains, there is little attraction or chemistry for the viewer to latch on to, making R seem more like a frightening stalker and Julie his too willing victim than two star-crossed lovers.

So, why did this mediocre horror-comedy-romance have such a powerful effect on me? The short answer was that at that point in my life, I was R. The struggles and losses of the last two years had derailed the person I thought I was, hollowed me out, and forced me to accept an utterly repugnant self that I was now shedding, like R, in pursuit of something better.