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 film we just watched had reached into a place I didn’t know needed touching.

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

Since the show’s inception in 2010, a wide variety of genres found themselves crossing over into zombie-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 essentially 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 Hoult) 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 R and Julie (Teresa Palmer) lacks cohesion. Other than inheriting the memories of Julie’s ex, Perry (Dave Franco), by eating his brains, there is little attraction or chemistry between the lovers 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 have such a powerful effect on me? The short answer: at that point in my life, I was R. I didn’t realize it until the house lights came up, but I had been watching a reflection of my own return to the living. Between a chronic, debilitating illness that left me paralyzed and in pain, the unfathomable grief of losing my daughter, and the searing, soul-searching agony of recovering from suicidal drug abuse, the person I thought I was had been derailed. Life had hollowed me out. It had brought me to a threshold where I had to either succumb to the void or, like R, begin the ugly, awkward pursuit of something better.