Who Owns the Zombie?

How much does it cost to manufacture a zombie? Well, if you want to get technical: one corpse and a rabbit’s heart (or a child’s bones) if you follow the lore of the television show Supernatural. Oh, and the ultimate price: The Earth. Because we all know zombies will be the end of life on this planet as we know it. Someday this price may need to be paid but, until then, it is a little easier to put a monetary value on the walking dead.

Gray makeup was a poor choice made by the makeup
 and special Fx teams. While it seemed effective in the
flesh (pardon the pun), it appeared blue on film.

The zombie genre has been an extremely popular one since George A. Romero’s first film, Night of the Living Dead (1968).  Costing approximately $114,000 (about one million dollars by today’s standards), the black and white low budget film produced a niche for films featuring reanimated corpses harassing the living. 10 years later, his second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead,  cost about $650,000. In this instance extras, usually friends and family of the production crew, were reported to have been paid in the form of $20 cash, a box lunch, and a t-shirt. And aside from $7,000 worth of drunken zombie fun involving a golf cart and a marble pillar, it did not appear too expensive to create mobs of zombies (albeit extremely corny, blue skinned mobs of zombies) even 10 years after Romero’s debut zombie production. 

Amazingly, in comparison to two recent zombie movies, Zombieland (2009) which cost about $23 000 000 to produce and Resident Evil Afterlife (2010) which cost around $60 000 000 (a considerable amount more due to the added 3D effects), Romero is still able to maintain a minuscule budget of just around four million dollars for his most recent zombie epic, Survival of the Dead (2009). 

In contrast to the millions of dollars spent on these productions, the zombie can be seen more as a phenomenon than an actual commodity. While Hollywood may seem to have a monopoly over the genre it appears as though the true monopoly belongs to the fans themselves. With events such as Zombie Walks or Humans vs. Zombies the idea of the apocalypse is still very much intellectual property of the people. While the zombie genre can be related to modern North American consumerism in that the undead will not stop until they have ‘consumed’ everything (and the fact that a great deal of zombie related media tends to occur in shopping malls) it is also counteracted by these free events organized by the people, for the people.

So, how much does it really cost to produce a zombie? Well, if we are going by Romero’s standards then about as much as the cost of a tube of gray face paint. Everyone having the ability and rights to make their own zombies? Priceless. For everything else, there’s Mastercard.