Zombies keep coming after being knocked down, refusing to truly die, and the same could be said of their popularity. From their early beginnings in George A. Romero and Lucio Fulci movies to their cultural dominance in series like The Walking Dead, they’re still growing strong. One big appeal of this kind of undead is the variety of horror stories they fit into, whether it’s blood-gushing free-for-alls where any and all kind of tools and weapons are used to dispatch them or even quieter affairs where the audience watches characters deal with the fact that the dead no longer stay dead. Good stories are able to straddle this line of gory mayhem and emotional moments. Two such examples are the movie Blood Quantum and Stephen Graham Jones’s zombie grudge match novella Zombie Bake-Off.
Blood Quantum, written and directed by Jeff Barnaby, begins in the Red Crow Indian Reservation at the edge of the world’s end. There are many people living, working, and trying to survive here, including Sheriff Traylor (Michael Greyeyes) as well as his two sons Joseph (Forrest Goodluck) and Lysol (Kiowa Gordon). Then the world is overrun with the living dead, and somehow the people of the reservation are immune. This leads to a flipped script, with everyone else in the world now cast as refugees, breaking down the doors to get into the reservation along with the zombies. Prejudices and resentments soon fester, and everything falls apart. This movie is both gratuitous as well as a social experiment of how a few can ruin it for the many.
Zombie Bake-Off doesn’t have quite the deep social commentary of Blood Quantum, but Jones’s tale of zombies, pro wrestlers, and soccer moms, does show people gathering together for survival. There’s a scheduling mishap at the Coliseum in Lubbock, TX, where soccer moms are showing off their greatest recipes and pro wrestlers like Jersey Devil Jill and Tiny Giant are showing off their penchant for violence, but that’s not the worst part. The worst part is a zombie virus infecting the wrestlers. Then again, there’s also the doors to the coliseum being chained up, and infected wrestlers are stalking the living. There are many examples of violence and mayhem (the grudge match foreshadowed in the book eventually happens) but there are also many instances where the survivors find an inner strength they didn’t know they had. And in both Blood Quantum and Zombie Bake-Off show how good horror is made not through tidal waves of viscera but also quiet moments of pathos.
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