Dis­cov­er the grotesque silli­ness of this Super 8 splatterfest

Hor­ror may have hit the dol­drums in the ear­ly ​’90s, but its res­ur­rec­tion came in the post­mod­ern move­ment spear­head­ed by Wes Craven’s New Night­mare in 1994 and Scream in 1996, and then run into the ground by a whole series of oth­er band­wag­on-jump­ing films with their rapid­ly dimin­ish­ing returns. Yet going all the way back at least to James Whale’s arch­ly self-ref­er­en­tial sequel Bride of Franken­stein, hor­ror has long been chas­ing its own trop­i­cal tail. Take 1989’s The Dead Next Door, writer/​director/​producer/​actor JR Bookwalter’s fea­ture debut which is no less a labour of love than it is in love with its own gener­ic antecedents.

The first pub­lic man­i­fes­ta­tion of a zom­bie out­break is in, oh yes, a video store in a Akron, Ohio, as the shuf­fling, putres­cent man who sud­den­ly attacks the counter sales­man is first seen select­ing rental copies of Dawn of the Dead and The Evil Dead, as though look­ing for ideas. A few years lat­er, as one mem­ber of the ​‘Zom­bie Squad’, a police force tasked to search for sur­vivors and keep order, returns to HQ, a video-watch­ing col­league greets him with these words: ​“Hey Rai­mi, you’ve got to come watch this flick, man – it’ll help your zom­bie killing.” The video is (once again) The Evil Dead, the 1981 genre game-chang­er writ­ten and direct­ed by Sam Rai­mi. Not only does the pro­tag­o­nist of Bookwalter’s film share his sur­name with Rai­mi, but his dia­logue has all been redubbed by an uncred­it­ed Bruce Camp­bell, who played the hero of The Evil Dead.

The line of influ­ence here is clear: fol­low­ing Raimi’s exam­ple, Book­wal­ter stretch­es a very low bud­get (around $125,000, shoot­ing on Super 8) to include as much grotesque gory fun as pos­si­ble into a fea­ture frame, and ful­ly embraces the inher­ent silli­ness of his mate­r­i­al. Due homage is paid to oth­er heroes of genre, from either side of the cam­era, in homony­mous char­ac­ters like Com­man­der Car­pen­ter, Jason, Savi­ni, King and Romero, whose very names serve as a direc­to­ry of hor­ror muses.

As in The Evil Dead or 1985’s Return of the Liv­ing Dead, Bookwalter’s undead crea­tures are hard to kill, with even dis­mem­ber­ments and decap­i­ta­tions serv­ing mere­ly to impede their progress rather than to stop them dead in their tracks. As in 1985’s Day of the Dead, there have been attempts to man­age and domes­ti­cate the zom­bies, even result­ing in a Bub-like med­ical exper­i­ment named Vox who, with the help of an elec­tron­ic voice-box plugged into his opened throat, ver­balis­es his hunger and still sings the Star Span­gled Ban­ner. Per­haps, though, Bookwalter’s most satir­i­cal inno­va­tion is also his most reflexive.

For here a rag­tag col­lec­tion of lib­er­al social jus­tice war­riors and reli­gious zealots fight for the rights of zom­bies, whether to go on walk­ing, or to ush­er in a divine-sent apoc­a­lypse. ​“That’s a damn cult!”, declares Rai­mi, after he sees what the Rev­erend Jones (Robert Kokai) is get­ting up to with his brain­washed flock of Akron acolytes – but Rai­mi might as well be describ­ing the sta­tus of Bookwalter’s film. Occa­sion­al­ly ripe per­for­mances, and a plot that nev­er stops mov­ing with­out ever quite mak­ing sense either, only add to its cult appeal – while there is no fault­ing its cre­ative, and utter­ly unre­strained, use of blood and guts.

The Dead Next Door is released on DVD and Blu-ray 25 July cour­tesy of Fusion Media Sales.