Warm Bodies (2013)

**Spoilers below**

I’ve successfully watched my second zombie movie, 2013’s Warm Bodies based on a book of the same name by Isaac Marion. I’m still keeping things relatively lowkey as I ease myself into the genre and Warm Bodies definitely fits that bill. The movie follows R, a zombie who spends his days wandering around an airport with his fellow undead. When R and a group of zombies head into the city for food they encounter Julie and her friends, some of the few remaining humans living behind a defensive wall in the city, who have ventured out for medical supplies. Chaos ensues and people get eaten, including Julie’s boyfriend who satisfies R’s hunger. That’s when R locks eyes with Julie and decides he can’t eat her because she’s too hot. [I’m being facetious but he is attracted to her and decides to save her by smearing some of his own very gross bodily fluids on her face so the other zombies think she’s one of them.] R brings Julie back to the airport where he’s outfitted an airplane as his home. Over the course of the movie, he and Julie fall in love and that brings his cold, dead heart back to life. Their love and the hope that it brings spreads to the other zombies until they too begin to slowly recover. By the end of the movie, the humans and zombies are living together in harmony and the wall that previously separated them is brought down.

The scare factor of this movie is relatively low. It’s first and foremost a rom com set against the backdrop of a zombie apocalypse. It is a smidge more gory than Night of the Living Dead, but that’s much more a product of access to better special effects than deliberate inclusion of blood and guts. The zombies themselves are closer to what we’re used to seeing now but they’re also relatively tame, relying heavily on pale makeup, black lipstick, and milky contact lenses. That said, this movie did introduce me to some new concepts to conventional zombie lore that I wasn’t familiar with. Because I’m not a connoisseur of the genre (yet), I’m not sure if Warm Bodies originated these ideas or if they’ve been used in other media prior to this movie’s conception. I’m going to focus on just one of these features that’s key to the plot.

The zombies in Warm Bodies have no memories and very limited cognitive function. Much of the movie is made up of R’s internal monologue where he laments about his inability to remember his previous life or even his name. They do have some ability to speak, but it requires a lot of effort and is usually a single moaned word. That’s not new. Maybe the speaking thing is, but the idea that zombies are mindless flesh eaters trapped in human bodies is hardly novel. However, we also learn from R that the reason zombies eat brains is because it confers the victim’s memories to them and allows the zombie to temporarily “live” vicariously through their victim. R eats Julie’s boyfriend’s brain and that increases his attraction to her as he sees memories of them together. It’s an interesting compulsion and suggests that though they have been physiologically altered, the zombies of this movie maintain the ability to exercise some amount of choice.

The movie never specifies how the zombie outbreak started so I’m limited in speculating on the pathology and epidemiology of this form of zombie-ism. The book may include that context, but since I haven’t read it, I’m going to assume that it’s caused by an infectious disease. I think this is a relatively safe assumption since it’s a very common trope of the zombie subgenre. It’s also apparent from the movie that zombie-ism spreads through biting, so it stands to reason that victims become infected when the pathogen passes from the mouth of a zombie into their body. The main goal of infectious organisms is to reproduce. To do so effectively, they must find the right balance of disease severity and transmission. If the pathogen is too virulent it may not be able to replicate efficiently because the infected cells, and ultimately the host, will die or be too incapacitated to spread the disease to others. On the other hand, if the disease is too mild it may not sufficiently infect the host and result in a short-lived, asymptomatic infection that’s quickly suppressed by the immune system. Considering my proposed route of infection for this movie, it’s a disadvantage for the disease that the zombies preferentially choose to eat their victims’ brains. If the brain is gone then the victims can’t reanimate and continue to spread the disease to new hosts. [Thinking about it that way, zombie-ism is wildly inefficient, like a grisly MLM; eventually, everyone will either be dead or infected and there won’t be any food sources left.] If I were to design a better zombie pathogen, I would balance brain deterioration with motor function so the undead could still move around but wouldn’t specifically crave brains as a delicacy. Better yet, it would act like cordyceps and take over the victim’s motor functions for complete control over the reproductive cycle.

Eating the brain to experience others’ memories serves as a vehicle for the major theme of this movie – learning to live again. Throughout the movie Julie reminds R of what it’s like to be alive and the importance of shared experiences. Their relationship sparks hope in the rest of the zombies as they too begin to regain their humanity. Ultimately, the zombies are cured by love and human connection. If you interpret this movie literally, no, you can’t overcome death with love. However, I read this movie as a metaphor for depression. The zombies spend their days wandering around aimlessly, not living but just existing. R is profoundly lonely and feels his new existence is inherently meaningless. As he grows closer to Julie, he remembers what it is to have something to live for. As these feelings grow, his body physically recovers and hope spreads to the zombies around him. The movie ends with the zombies having reclaimed their humanity and fully integrated into the human society.

I’m a fairly passive movie viewer, very content to sit back and just enjoy what’s playing out on screen without thinking about it too much. So I felt particularly vindicated when I found an interview with Isaac Marion in which he agreed with me, stating, “It’s about what it feels like to be dead inside and the struggle to find life again.” As I watch these movies – at the time of writing I just watched the original 1978 Dawn of the Dead – I’ve been trying to understand what about the zombie subgenre is so appealing that these monsters have become ubiquitous across pop culture. Zombies often serve as a metaphor for society’s greatest fears: war, plague, nuclear destruction…each other. I think the inversion of these messages is what makes Warm Bodies so unique; the zombies aren’t irredeemable cannibals, they’re people who have forgotten what it is to be human. In the end, it is only through empathy for each other that the apocalypse can be reversed.