Silver Lake: And you know who she finds at home, don’t you, humming amid the threads of simmer that rise from the kettle? Who else but Madame Laveaux or Strega Nonna or the very avatar of the botanist and chemist and doctorate of the undead? She might be long in the tooth but she’s still easy on the eyes.
Venice: Mother knows best. Before long, the Old Wise One gets her visitor to admit she has feelings for her first case, her whaddycall’m, the first conversion. You know, Undead Worker #1. We’ll have an establishing shot. The girl lowering her eyes. Blushing…
Silver Lake: Insofar as she can blush.
Venice: Anyway we keep it slow, a sequence for character. Closeup face, then closeup hands, and in her hands, a little bag of herbs.
Silver Lake: A bag, a word of advice, we’ll take our time. But then, you understand, we’re right back in the lab. Back up to speed, straight to the lab, now we’re cooking. Montage. Leaf-clippers, eyedropper, Petri dishes. And don’t we need one of those machines that whirl the test tubes around?
Venice: Always a great visual, whirling those test tubes around. It’s hypnosis, think about it, and in this case it’s our girl, she falls into a trance. She goes after her guy with the first dose out of the lab. Hits him right between the eyes.
Silver Lake: And you want a name director? You want someone whose very name says ambience? Then this is the sequence where you’ll hook him, maybe you’ll get Méliès himself back from the dead—because this is where you tell your director he’ll have to show us a zombie in love.
Venice: Not that we don’t have an idea or two ourselves. We see our Worker #1 for instance pausing over the laundry. There’s a job for the zombie in your house, the laundry. But our guy, after his new dose, when he gets to some of the girl’s things, brassieres, panties, we see him lingering.
Silver Lake: A zombie in love, honestly, doesn’t that allow us a wild serendipity? Wild—and yet at the same time well within limits, PG-13? Well within conventions of a date flick.
Venice: We’ve got all that under control. All solidly this side of the R.
Silver Lake: You’ll see how we handle it later on, but for now, think about this, what it looks like if our boy takes a special interest in her underwear, if he puts it to his mouth, if he takes a little gnaw…
Venice: A little kiss, a little gnaw. In this context it has a different significance.
Silver Lake: In this context, you point out any signifier, it’ll have a different significance. Yet whatever your director works with, nibbling, nuzzling, whatever—by this point, can’t we expect the audience to follow the dots? Our pretty lab magician has made her confession to the old Kitchen Magician. Our #1 Convert has put his face in his savior’s panties. By this point, honestly, I have to ask. Doesn’t everyone get it?
Venice: The girl saves the guy. Rudiments of language. Everybody gets it, and in five minutes’ screen time we’re back to the zombie wedding. Boom.
Silver Lake: We’re back to a happy ending, our happy beginning, how’s that sound? And out in the audience everyone’s on board, though some of them, I’m sure you saw this coming, some of them out there must be wondering—wait, what? Happy ending already?
Venice: Some of them must be thinking, maybe I did wander into an art film.
Silver Lake: And they’re wondering about a couple-three moments during those last five minutes. Weren’t there a couple-three shots out of sync? A couple times there, didn’t our lover boy bare his teeth? We were watching love bloom, the latest dose had made it bloom, somehow, some-who-knows-how, and so what was that, the lover boy baring his teeth? Even licking his chops?
Venice: The girl’s showing more skin, too. I mean, a June wedding. And the way her undead crush is staring, uh, uh, that could be taken two ways. Could be romance, the way he’s staring, uh, could be…. Then we come to the wedding, and on the groom’s side of the aisle there’s a lot of touching. The groom’s side of the aisle, his crowd, they’re clumsy, in need of a hand.
Silver Lake: And remember the altar steps? The Best Man, and the one with half a leg, and the one who left his finger in his tie? Those guys are all pressing the flesh, passing the ring, straightening up each other’s monkey suits.
Venice: We could go more FX here. A director who knows his CGI, he could show us microbes leaping.
Silver Lake: You see how the new paradigm keeps unfolding? How even now there’s another petal unfolding? This is the danger petal, a serious scare just in the way the groom smiles, as the preacher says You may kiss…
Venice: Wedding apocalypse. Boom.
Silver Lake: What about the side effects? Didn’t anyone think about the who-knows-how side effects? But no one did, it appears, and certainly not our girl.
Venice: Whipping up the new prescription had her hypnotized.
Silver Lake: Her happy ending does a cartwheel straight into the end of the world!
Venice: The groom’s people fall on the bride’s. At least for some of the good guys, there’s the aisle. There’s the pews. Some of ’em have a little breathing room and a bit of protection.
Silver Lake: Except, protection—who’s got none at all? Who’s got no breathing room at all? You see where we’re going with this?
Venice: The bride. The bride, she’s up there right next to the groom. Arm in arm. The bastard’s got his teeth in her as soon as she lifts the veil.
Silver Lake: Have you ever seen anything like it, cartwheel, apocalypse? The best person in the whole concept has gone whack! And doesn’t that mean everything has to pick up fresh speed? A courageous few wrestle the girl away, by an eyelash, by a cat’s whisker…
Venice: They get her back to the lab, but zombified.
Silver Lake: She’s snarling, she’s snapping, but they throw some church raiment over her. They wrap her in triple-ply swaddling. Can you picture it, blood and altar and miracle—chiaroscuro?
Venice: Anyway we’ve got to go darker here. We’ve got born-again zombies. I mean, there’s no way to round them all up. No way the few wedding survivors can stop them, all the carriers of the flesh-eating side effect. A bunch of them, too many, wander off, they head scot-free down the church boulevard. We’ll have an establishing shot.
Silver Lake: Every one of these newly reinfected and not-quite-dead is another horseman of the apocalypse.
Venice: Though the groom himself, he’s in isolation. Carrier #1, the courageous few grabbed him too.
Silver Lake: And isn’t this where we can look, briefly, like all the other zombie films? This, it’s back to holocaust, and can’t we borrow that look—famished, ravaged, perverse? Think about Night of the Living Dead, what it owed to the concentration camps, the photos from spring ’45.
Venice: We’re back to the bunker, the greenhouse lab. The prowling hordes outside, beyond the barbed wire, and the bride and groom inside, in separate cages. Of course the good guys have the spray, the original formula. But we’ve got that covered, a quick experiment with reinoculation. Another terrific visual.