You probably think that a zombie movie is a movie with zombies in it. But I want to create a new definition of a zombie movie. My definition is a movie where everyone listed in the credits you can see walking and talking on the screen, but they’re dead. This meshes well with the description of zombies as ‘the walking dead’.
For my first zombie movie I chose Casablanca released in 1943.
Casablanca
Name | Date of Birth | Date of Death | Age at death |
Claude Rains | 11/10/1889 | 05/30/1967 | 77 |
Conrad Veidt | 01/22/1893 | 04/03/1943 | 50 |
Curt Bois | 04/05/1901 | 12/25/1991 | 90 |
Dooley Wilson | 04/03/1886 | 05/30/1953 | 67 |
Humphrey Bogart | 12/25/1899 | 01/14/1957 | 57 |
Ingrid Bergman | 08/29/1915 | 08/29/1982 | 67 |
John Qualen | 12/08/1899 | 09/12/1987 | 87 |
Joy Page | 11/09/1924 | 04/18/2008 | 83 |
Leonid Kinskey | 04/18/1903 | 09/08/1998 | 95 |
Madeleine Lebeau | 06/10/1923 | 05/01/2016 | 92 |
Paul Henreid | 01/10/1908 | 03/29/1982 | 84 |
Peter Lorre | 06/26/1904 | 03/23/1964 | 59 |
S.Z. Sakall | 02/02/1883 | 02/12/1955 | 72 |
Sydney Greenstreet | 12/27/1879 | 01/18/1954 | 74 |
Now you might think that that is an old enough movie to be obvious that it is a zombie movie, but note that Madeleine Lebeau didn’t die until May 1, 2016 which means that Casablanca had been a zombie movie for less than a year at the time I wrote this post. Indeed, another very famous movie, Gone With the Wind, released four years earlier, featured a young actress by the name of Olivia de Havillind who is still alive and hopefully well at the age of 100. So Gone With the Wind is not yet a zombie movie. One other thing that can extend the time before a movie attains zombie status is whether the movie has any child actors listed in the credits.
One other thing you could do with this concept is to assign a level of zombieness to a movie. That would be the percentage of the people listed in the credits who have died. This could lead to some interesting situations. For example in the last movie of the Hunger Games series, The Mockingjay Part 2, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who played the character Plutarch Heavensbee, died before the movie was completed. So when the movie was released it already had a zombieness level greater than zero. But at the very end of the movie the character Katniss Everdeen, played by Jennifer Lawrence, is holding her baby, who is actually the nephew of Jennifer Lawrence and is listed in the credits. So the movie is released with a zombieness level greater than zero yet, because of a six-month old baby listed in the credits, may not achieve true zombie status until sometime in the next century.