Silver Lake: And another unfolding petal, namely, the zombie omnivore.
Venice: Reinoculate, they turn ravenous. All of sudden a pizza isn’t nearly enough.
Silver Lake: Big Daddy Double Cheese and Triple Meat, it’s not nearly enough, not even with a pitcher of beer and a bucket of ice cream.
Venice: Reinoculate and the zombie’s a buzz saw. Cuts right through the kitchen.
Silver Lake: And where does that leave you? If you don’t spray the undead they’ll eat you. If you do they’ll eat you out of house and home!
Venice: The spray won’t save you, not after the side effects, and that’s when someone realizes, they’ve got to go out to the swamp. To the cabin in the swamp or the hut with the beanie.
Silver Lake: Isn’t the old woman the Ur figure? Happy ending or holocaust, our movie-going destiny, isn’t it also her destiny? And she doesn’t want it.
Venice: She wants no part of it. Maybe we’ll have the witch brandish a poker, when the courageous few come knocking. Definitely she’ll have a dog, an ugly mutt, toothy, a hound of hell. Looking a lot like a zombie, come to think.
Silver Lake: The Ancient, her roots deep in the earth, how will they budge her?
Venice: With an iPhone, is how. Product placement, Droid or iPhone, whichever cuts us the best deal and comes up with the best photos, the highest pixel count.
Silver Lake: Can’t we move from face to photo again, a companion sequence, a parallel segue? A segue, this time, between Demeter and Persephone? The elder’s a deep brown, firelit, while the girl, her girl, her acolyte, languishes in chains, glaring, a zombie, pale to the point of white.
Venice: A change sweeps over the old-timer. She quiets the hound and puts away her poker. We end in closeup, and for this shot, whoever we get, for this she’s got to be the scariest thing in the movie. I fix her, she says, you understand she talks like a throwback, but you not gon like it.
Silver Lake: Now, let’s take a minute, you and the two of us. Let’s ask, when it comes to zombie fear, what’s the base matter? The very bottom sediment?
Venice: You not gon like it, she says, and next scene, the Queen of the Underground has come to the lab. She’s under the bright lights, and what she’s set up, it’s something else no one’s ever seen.
Silver Lake: Isn’t it, I mean the core and keel of it—isn’t it incompatibility? Isn’t it? Think about the very word “undead.”
Venice: Ha-ha, ha-ha. The arc we’ve got, it undoes the undead.
Silver Lake: We’ve got a Black Magic Woman, but what she’s set up, it’s an OB/GYN clinic. In the middle of a zombie apocalypse! Who’s the scientist now?
Venice: The story we’ve got, the science works both ways.
Silver Lake: And can’t you just see our Weird Sister? She delivers the big Reveal as she ministers to her strapped-down Honeychile. And Honeychile, isn’t that just the word, the nickname, for this low, sweet singing? Though our heroine, strapped to the table in what’s left of her wedding dress, she’s nothing like honey. They had to lash her feet to the stirrups. Old Isis croons in her ear, she springs the Reveal, but all her young votive can offer in response is a wailing and a gnashing of teeth.
Venice: The sequence won’t be half over before the audience starts to connect the dots. This woman who saved the world, she always had a rare gift. The only grad student in a highly specialized field. The only person who’d ever for a minute look at a zombie and think, He’s kinda cute…
Silver Lake: Our narrative, you see how it crests and dives and muscles on, so powerfully that we can trust the audience? Trust them to grasp that our Golden Girl is zombie spawn? Oh, and “spawn”—that’s as far as we’ll go.
Venice: We’ll keep everything solidly this side of the R.
Silver Lake: A word like “spawn,” like “insemination,” that’ll do. Why would we ever get out of the lab? What sort of a movie would get into all the greasy mechanics?
Venice: We’ll keep it within limits. We know what you’re buying, with that ticket.
Silver Lake: Why would we ever leave the lab? Isn’t a euphemism or two in everyone’s interest? Another word we’ll probably use is “miscegenation.”
Venice: If we wind up down in New Orleans, we want “miscegenation.” In that context, it has a significance. Otherwise we’ll keep things antiseptic, and we’ll have our Voodoo Nurse whispering reassurances. Saying something like, Honeychile, dis a lot easier for you den it was for me.
Silver Lake: See how we can just hint at the mechanics? Aren’t they just a matter of semantics? Then once our girl goes through the insemination, once she’s a carrier of another kind, she’s back to normal.
Venice: Any of the undead that come near her, after a minute they’re normal too. Or abnormal, depending on your point of view. Either way it gives us another great sequence. All she has to do is stand out by the barbed wire and let the wind pick up her scent.
Silver Lake: The invisible majesty of pheromones, an Immaculate Conception, or in this case a Disinfection—isn’t that the best way to handle the greasy, shivery, febrile particulars? To be sure, our girl’s got something in her belly now. But isn’t the outreach what matters, the power that emanates from the belly, the changes in every slavering creature caught in its ambience?
Venice: Every zombie, anyway. Think of the dance of the bees, how one guy comes back with claws full of pollen and the whole colony goes into a dance.
Silver Lake: Have you ever seen the dance of the bees? Could you ever have imagined that a few minutes watching Animal Planet would alter the base matter of the zombie dynamic? We’ve sailed the seas and come to bees.
Venice: It’s a colony, the dead among us. It’s life everlasting, except dead. It’s the drones, hauling and picking and swabbing and pulling the levers. Only, sometimes they need a new queen. Sometimes they have to walk off the job with jaws snapping. It’s not about feeding, it’s about breeding.
Silver Lake: Have you ever seen a movie like it? Implanting the Royal Jelly of the undead? Our heroine, with what the Ancient whispers in her ear—it’s like the movie of her own parents falling in love!
Venice: We could wrap up with another of those slow pans. High saturation, panning over the worker bees we never think twice about.
Silver Lake: Have you ever so enjoyed the end of the world? End of the world, in our case, comes to world without end. Can you picture it, the laborers placid in their labor, the Queen smiling down from the deck of her greenhouse?
Venice: We could put her in something like stadium seating, a touch of meta.
Silver Lake: Certainly it’s been meta for our main girl, hasn’t it, stumbling upon her very fate? Certainly she must be wondering—earlier, what was all that striving? The long nights over chemistry and botany and life and death. The trial and error in the lab, every experiment in six iterations, if not a dozen. What’s the point in striving, when ultimately, all that you’re about is this girlchild at your feet? An ordinary enough child.