PLANET TERROR
THE PREMISE OF JIM JARMUSCH’S ZOMBIE movie The Dead Don’t Die is that fracking at the polar ice caps has destabilized the Earth’s magnetic field so that time is out of joint and bad things happen—such as the dead arising from their graves. The setting is Centerville, a very small town in upstate New York with a three-person police force (Bill Murray, Adam Driver, and Chloë Sevigny); a bunch of oddball residents (Tom Waits, Danny Glover, Steve Buscemi, Larry Fessenden, RZA, Caleb Landry Jones, and Eszter Balint among them); some visitors, including hipsters played by Selena Gomez, Luka Sabbat, and Austin Butler; a Scottish samurai swordswoman moonlighting as the town’s mortician (Tilda Swinton); and a few very hungry zombies (Iggy Pop, Sara Driver, Carol Kane), who get the party started. One of the pleasures of the film (which opened Cannes this year) is the cast, but above all, it is Jarmusch’s vision of an apocalypse we have collectively brought upon ourselves—nice people though we may be—that makes the film wryly amusing until it becomes overwhelmingly tragic.
Did you play zombies when you were a kid?
Not very often, and I’m not a zombie aficionado. I like the classic things, but [George] Romero is my postmodern zombie hero. Pre-Romero, zombies were outside the social, he had the zombies come from inside of a social order that was malignant. It’s from the inside that everything is falling apart, and he’s the first to do that. So I love , and also and . And I like extreme zombification. The Korean movie has thousands of zombies, and they move really fast. That was some pretty badass zombification. But I don’t care about . I’m a vampire guy, I like vampires. They’re sophisticated, they’re shapeshifters, they’re survivalists, and they’re not really undead, they’re not reanimated, they’re just immortal by their situation.
