Misunderstood Monsters: The Working Dead of THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD
By Matt Konopka
Welcome fellow monster kids to Misunderstood Monsters. This is where I, Matt Konopka, sink my fangs into all sorts of beasts, ghouls, and creatures from above while I search for the humanity behind their frightening exteriors. From monster favorites such as The Wolf Man to obscure monsters like the whistling Shadmock, there is more to these fiends than bad hair days and gooey tentacles. Within them all is a piece of ourselves.
“Do you wanna party?”
As a teenager, my answer was always an emphatic YES to 45 Grave’s lyrical invite from their song, “Partytime.” Parties were like a rallying cry for me back then. The reprieve after a long week of being scolded by adults and a society that attributed all its problems to my age group. Sex. Drugs. Loud music. That was our paradise.
And then I got old. Well, old-er.
In time, I learned the inevitable truth. Life is pain. You must get a job. A mortgage. An endless stream of bills to pay. Become a worker ant for a system that funnels all the wealth to whatever/whoever passes as the “queen.” All the while, our bodies are gradually breaking down. Rotting from the inside out. We become the living dead. Walking, talking corpses that just haven’t realized it yet.
A concept infused into the bones of writer/director Dan O’Bannon’s ultimate punk horror film, The Return of the Living Dead (1985).
When O’Bannon (the brilliant scribe behind films like Alien and Dead & Buried) set out to make Return, the goal was to deliver a unique take on the zombie film. Touted as an adaptation of the “true” story that George A. Romero based his Night of the Living Dead on, O’Bannon set his film at an industrial warehouse with a cemetery conveniently just outside. There, a group of punk teens happen to be partying when a toxic chemical dubbed 2–4–5 Trioxin is accidentally released into the air — the same chemical that Return claims raised the dead in Night — inevitably re-animating a host of bodies in the cemetery. It’s the first horror film to feature running zombies, as well as ghouls that can speak. Even more iconic was the fresh idea that zombies eat brains, with some curious reasoning as to why.
During a late scene where surviving members of the cast are holed up in a morgue, the group manages to capture a female zombie decapitated at the waist, blond hair soaked in blood and spinal cord whipping around like a pissed off cobra as she is tied down to a table. When asked why she and the other ghouls crave brains, she replies it helps “the pain of being dead,” adding, “I can feel myself rot.” Think about the horrific implications of that for a moment. The zombies of Romero’s films were always silent, generally mindless monsters operating on primal instinct. But O’Bannon’s zombies are intelligent. Self-aware. Their existence is agony. They are, in one too many ways for comfort, just like us. It wasn’t new to see zombies as reflective of human beings in 1985 — that’s always been their MO — yet Return’s interpretation of how they represent us was.
Look at the cast of characters doomed to face off against Return’s zombies, for instance. On one side, we have an eclectic group of teens who represent the very ideals of “punk.” Some might glance at them and wonder what a preppy-looking Tina (Beverly Randolph) could possibly have in common with leather-bound nudist, Trash (Linnea Quigley), but that’s missing the point of what punk is. It isn’t a “costume,” as Suicide (Mark Venturini) reminds us. It’s a lifestyle. A rebellion against authority. Against societal demands. To be punk is to truly live life and allow others to live how they see fit. These kids all come from different backgrounds, have their own unique style, but what they have in common is that they are openly and unashamedly themselves. They are truly alive.
On the other side of that is friend of the teen group, Freddy (Thom Mathews), working his first day at the warehouse with older man Frank (James Karen) and owner of the place, Burt (Clu Gulager). Joining the working class because it’s damn near impossible to get through life without a job, Freddy has become a dreaded working stiff. A fear emphasized by the fact that Freddy and Frank are exposed to the Trioxin gas, courtesy of a shoddy cannister built in — where else? — the good ole U S of A, propelling each into a slow, agonizing transformation into the undead. Rigor mortis takes hold, and the pair quite literally become stiffs. “Technically, you’re not alive,” observes one of the paramedics called to their aid. To take on a grunt job, to be forced into manual labor for the benefit of the wealthy while you make just enough money to scrape by…O’Bannon posits that this is the same as death. You become part of the corporate meat grinder, a system stacked against you in such a way that most never quite make it out. “Everybody that comes in gets swallowed up,” says Ernie (Don Calfa) the mortician, referring to the zombies devouring first responders but, in another sense, commenting on what happens to anyone that enters this industrial complex of hard, thankless work. Freddy’s first day on the job might as well be his funeral.
The zombies of Return are mere ghoulish representations of what it means to exist in a capitalist society. Reagan’s “trickle-down economics” put a bullet in the brain of the so-called “American Dream” right before our eyes. A good portion hadn’t recognized it yet — and still don’t — but we had become no more than a horde of zombies working to benefit the wealthy while ensuring we never climbed out of our graves of poverty. Even then, O’Bannon had become aware of how little our government and the one percent thought of us, hence the character of Colonel Glover (Jonathan Terry) having zero qualms about ordering a nuke be fired on the quaint town of Louisville, Kentucky, resulting in one hell of a Fourth of July bang. Home of the brave, my ass. Early on, you’ll notice someone graffitied the words “no future” on Return’s cemetery gates. A quick look around the world today, and you can certainly understand why.
As bleak as Return’s ending may be — one that is shocking in its grim stature when you consider how entertaining the rest of the film is — there’s another way to look at this living dead life we’re a part of. Yes, working for “the man” stinks, and sure, some ignorant official with a head full of brain worms is probably going to end us all someday. Okay. Fine. Until then, we might as well be punk as fuck. Break some rules. Stand up to those in charge. Dance naked in a graveyard just because.
We’re all going to end up on the other side of those cemetery gates someday. Might as well live life to the fullest while we’re here.
Might as well party! 🩸
About
Matt is a writer and wannabe werewolf who began his love of horror at the ripe old age of 3 with John Carpenter’s Christine. He has previously been published on Dread Central, Certified Forgotten, Daily Grindhouse and others. He has also contributed essays for releases from labels such as Arrow Video. He lives in Los Angeles, CA, with his wonderful wife and their fur baby, Storm.
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