JOHNNY: Jamie, welcome to www.allthingshorror.co.uk You are here to talk about your invaluable guide to zombie cinema, Book of the Dead. How did the project first come about?

JAMIE: Thanks for inviting me, it's good to be here! Basically, I wrote it because it was a book I wanted to read myself. Back in 2000 I just happened to watch Romero's Dawn of the Dead again. It's one of my favourite horror movies and I must have seen it fifty times or so over the years. Its claustrophobic zombie apocalypse always scares the hell out of me: there's something very terrifying about the sense that there's nowhere to run to, no way of getting away from the catastrophe that's changing the world. After watching it for the umpteenth time I started thinking about zombies and zombie movies and decided that I wanted to learn a little more about the genre… Problem was, there were no books about zombies and zombie cinema. This was back before the current zombie renaissance started. So I decided to write the book myself. FAB press, my publishers, were quite keen on the idea too but we both thought it was a pretty niche genre and we'd only sell a handful of copies. Then, while I was writing it, everything changed. Zombies suddenly became chic!

JOHNNY: The book is amazingly well researched and is worth double the price for the photos alone. Researching it must have been a huge undertaking. How long did you have from genesis to actually handing the finished manuscript over?

JAMIE: I started researching it officially in 2000, though I guess you could say I'd started from the moment I saw and fell in love with my first zombie movie (which must have been sometime in the 1980s). The book came out in 2005 so that was about five years of work, though obviously I was juggling writing BoD with my day job as a film critic. I can't take credit for all the photos though. Harvey Fenton at FAB Press did a wonderful job collecting together the illustrations using a handful of material I had discovered with contributions from dozens of other horror fans and other writers. When I first saw the proofs for the book I was blown away. The colour sections are particularly amazing with some really, really rare poster art. And of course, the book's cover design is great (it's based on a poster for Fulci's City of the Living Dead and uses the Dawn of the Dead font for the book's title). People who don't know me very well always ask "Isn't it weird seeing your name on a tombstone?" Duh! I'm a zombie fan… of course it isn't! It's just the kind of tongue-in-cheek morbidity I love!

JOHNNY: As a fan of zombie films myself, tracking down some of the more obscure titles can be very hard work. How did you go about sourcing the films and then presumably you had to watch them all. Any painful moments?

JAMIE: There were lots of painful moments! One of the defining traits of the genre is that it's a low-rent, low-budget genre lacking quality control. Zombie movies have traditionally always been trashy, bargain basement cinema. Like the ghouls themselves, they're the ragged down and outs of cinema. Finding a lot of the titles was a real headache. I developed this huge web of contacts - people who'd make video copies of obscure titles in their collections and mail them off to me. Parcels arrived from all over the world. Some titles were things I'd seen years before and had to try and remember enough to write a few words about because I couldn't find another copy. For the filmography I had the help of several colleagues including an American zombie fan called David A. Oakes who has probably seen more zombie movies than anyone else on the planet!

JOHNNY: Why do you think zombies hold such a fascination to us?

JAMIE: One of the things I like about zombies is that they're almost a metaphor for something else. Generally speaking, zombies play with our fears about death and the afterlife. But they've also been used for so much more. At the beginning of the twentieth century - when zombies first entered the white, western imagination - they were bound up with American propaganda about Haiti as a savage island full of superstition and nefarious practices (the US occupied Haiti from 1915-1934); then in the films of the 1940's they get mixed up with racial anxieties over African-Americans. In the 1950's they become a metaphor for Communist brainwashing; in the 60's the race issue returns with Night of the Living Dead as a kind of comment on the civil rights movement; in the 70's they become a satire of blank-faced consumerism, in the 80's it's a gory kind of body horror, in the 90's and 00's it's bioterrorism and pandemics like SARS. Obviously, that's a series of huge generalisations (!) but I think zombies are a wonderfully fluid metaphor for so many different concerns and fears.

JOHNNY: Putting Romero’s films to one side for the time being – which country has produced the best zombie films? And which one has produced the worst?

JAMIE: I'm a big fan of the Italian zombie movies of the 1980s. Then there's the Asian zombie connection… films like Versus, Wild Zero and Bio Zombie. All good fun. I guess America has made the lion's share of zombie movies and has probably produced both the best and the worst in that respect. After all it's the country that gave the world George Romero the don of the dead and also Todd Sheets, a zombie filmmaker who possesses more enthusiasm than ability but who has made dozens of crappy Z-grade movies. One of the worst movies I've seen was actually a Nigerian film called Witchdoctor of the Living Dead. Don’t expect to find that in Blockbuster!

JOHNNY: As I am a huge fan of Hammer Horror, I couldn’t let this interview go by without asking you about what you think of the extremely complex The Plague of the Zombies.

JAMIE: I love Plague of the Zombies! It's such a great Hammer movie and it has one of the studios typical, class conscious plots about a village squire abusing his position and turning the local peasants into zombie slaves to work in his tin mine. What a great idea! The original treatment for the project had this really interesting Haitian connection too. There was supposed to be an opening scene set in the Caribbean and some voodoo practitioners who came over to England with the squire but that was eventually cut because of the budgetary requirements involved in staging it… a real shame.

JOHNNY: What do you think of the new style of zombie – the ones that can run really fast, compared to the slow shambling, always gets their man ones?

JAMIE: Personally, I prefer the slow, plodding and completely brainless ones. I think they're much more scary. I love the line in Romero's Diary of the Dead where the director making the mummy movie tells his fast-moving monster to slow down: "You're dead! Your ankle would break if you moved that fast!" For me, Romero's ghouls will always be the scariest… especially in the early days of his zombie cycle before he started trying to make them more "human".

JOHNNY: Dawn of the Dead is seen as the definitive zombie film, and can be watched on many different levels. Why has the film remained so popular and is the benchmark on which every zombie film is rated against, including Romero’s latter films?

JAMIE: A lot of Dawn of the Dead's success I think was timing. It was the late-1970's, the world was going to hell in a hand-basket: Three Mile Island, rampant "Me decade" selfishness, rabid consumerism, a real sense that the optimism of the 60's had turned sour. Along came Romero and makeup whiz Tom Savini with this scary, darkly funny comic strip zombie movie that served up censor-baiting gore with lashings of heavy-handed social comment and one of horror cinema's most brilliant metaphors: a shopping mall full of stumbling zombies trying to shop till they drop. The film was a phenomenal success in a manner that few people today really give it credit for. It made huge sums of money and it pretty much launched an entire genre. Nobody was much interested in making zombie films after Night of the living Dead. But Dawn of the Dead's success kickstarted the whole zombie explosion of the 80s beginning with Lucio Fulci's rip-off prequel "Zombi 2". Dawn of the Dead became the blueprint, if you like, for the genre's success.

JOHNNY: What do you think of the remakes of Dawn of the Dead and now Day of the Dead, which will be coming around shortly?

JAMIE: I think it's a real shame that horror filmmakers are so willing to do remakes. I understand the financial pressures behind it and I know remakes are nothing new in the history of cinema. Yet, there's something so depressing about the way in which some of the horror genre's landmark movies are being so shoddily remade. Nobody's out there remaking The Godfather or Raging Bull (at least not yet; I'm sure it'll happen in my lifetime). Horror films are considered fair game, though and it's as if the studios think that horror fans are so stupid they'll watch any old remake of The Omen (which, sadly, we will since we're always looking for a new thrill). Whinging aside, though, I was surprised by the Dawn remake - it was unnecessary, not a patch on the original but very well done. The opening twenty minutes are ace - especially the guy getting taken out by the out of control ambulance… If you're going to remake a classic you should at least re-energise it - which Dawn '04 did. I haven't seen the new Day of the Dead but I can honestly say I don't hold out much hope for it…

JOHNNY: A question now about The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue. I just watched it again the other day and was truly spellbound by the film. I think its one of the best edited zombie films I’ve ever watched. Why do you think this film has become such a classic of the genre?

JAMIE: If it is a classic, it's a classic that very few people have heard of - which can only be a good thing! I think it's a really creepy movie - all the more so for being shot in the dank Lake District by a Spaniard with a dubbed cast. There's something terribly listless about it all; it's as if the whole world within the film has had the life sucked out of it. I think a lot of people stumble across it by accident and never quite recover from its depressed vision of apocalyptic entropy. For me it sums up the Britain of the '70s I (half-remember) growing up during: miserable, stunted and destroying itself from within.

JOHNNY: If you have a top five, what would they be?

JAMIE: Oh boy, that kind of changes depending on what day of the week it is. Today I'd say: Romero's zombie cycle (all five films); The Living Dead At Manchester Morgue; The Beyond; Dellamorte Dellamore and /Tombs of the Blind Dead/. On other days The Video Dead might be in there (a real guilty pleasure of mine) plus maybe also: Bio Zombie, The Grapes of Death, City of the Living Dead, Zombi 2 and 28 Days Later.

JOHNNY: Well, thank you for talking to me Jamie, last question: What future projects do you have lined up?

JAMIE: FAB Press have suggested doing a second edition of Book of the Dead covering all the new movies that have come out since the first edition was published back in 2005. If I do it, I'd like to try and get some exclusive interviews in there with filmmakers and look at things like zombie literature, comics and videogames in more depth. The current zombie renaissance is going from strength to strength and I think it would be really interesting to continue tracking its evolution and see where it ends.

Jamie Russell’s Book of the Dead is published by FAB Press.

ISBN 1-903254-33-7

Price £19.99 softcover