ACMI Film and TV Curator and Focus on the Dead programmer Reece Goodwin wanted to draw a line from Romero to modern zombie films. The program, he says, aims to offer a “thought-provoking exploration of the horror genre and its many forms.”

What is it about the zombie that has seen it endure? “There’s more to all (zombie films) than meets the eye, but they all ask the audience one question,” Goodwin says. “What would you do to survive in this situation?”

Zombies themselves have changed since Romero’s ghouls, and so has the idea of survival. “Romero’s trilogy is based in left-wing politics, but zombie films today are actually getting a bit more right-wing and almost … survivalist,” says Goodwin.

Popular contemporary zombie apocalypses today tend to feature incapable governments, societal collapse, and the only survivors those who are heavily fortified. “Which is almost far right, in a way,” Goodwin says. “They’re still asking ‘what would you do to survive?’, but they’re steering us towards … stocking up on guns and weapons, battening down the hatches and locking yourself away, waiting for the attack and being prepared.”

It’s now a “silent majority” descending on us,” he says. “We’ve said for a long time that horror films capture the fears and anxieties of society, and I think zombie films are really capturing and articulating those fears, in Western society at least, today.”

The creatures themselves have also evolved. In Danny Boyle’s 2002 post-apocalyptic horror 28 Days Later, for example, the vicious zombies are shockingly athletic, as are the hyperkinetic undead on board the high-speed train in Train to Busan.

“Focus on the Dead really reflects that fracturing of the genre,” says Goodwin. “We cherry-picked the outliers – the ones that weren’t necessarily going in that (right-wing) political direction. I think because there are lots of different offshoots of the subgenre, it has infiltrated a lot of different parts of life.”

Not all zombie fiction involves gun-toting preppers – the undead have also shuffled their way into comedies (Shaun of the Dead; Zombieland), queer films (Bruce LaBruce’s LA Zombie), Nazi action (Dead Snow), “zom-rom-coms” such as Warm Bodies and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and even porn titles (best to Google those yourself).

“As long as you get the scares in, you can do almost anything you want with horror, and tell messages that reflect cultural or national fears and anxieties,” says Goodwin. “An Australian-made zombie movie, such as Cargo, will obviously speak to cultural fears differently than a South Korean film would, but you can use them for all sorts of things.”

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Where to next? In The Last of Us, currently streaming on Binge, The Infected (we know what that really means) are afflicted by a fungus that has flourished as a result of climate change.

“I think next maybe we’ll make it a bit more personal,” says Goodwin. “We might find ourselves indoors again at any moment, so maybe the horror is within the house and not outside.”

The resilient message, even since Romero’s films, adds Lynch, is that “zombies are bad, but maybe cooped up or intolerant people are even worse”.

“You would think we’d have gotten sick of these monsters, but vampires, werewolves, mummies – they’ve had nowhere near the cultural staying power of zombies.”

Focus on the Dead is at ACMI, March 16 - April 2. Mapping Global Horror: Australia, Japan and Beyond is March 17 & 18. acmi.net.au

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