When it comes to horror films, if I must watch one, I will usually choose a zombie flick.  Nonetheless, they do present a certain moral quandary for a pro-life Catholic such as myself.  The characters in these movies are fighting for their survival against . . . people?  One word that is often used to describe these shambling corpses out to eat the living is the “undead.”  If such things were real, how would they be categorized in a Catholic context?  I mean, how can something be “undead” if they are clearly up and about and looking for a meal?  I have no wish to kill anyone, but is the workaround simply that they are not alive?  It is a philosophical question asked a couple times in The Dead Don’t Die (2019), made all the more interesting because it is a comedy.

It takes a little while to realize that The Dead Don’t Die is a comedy because it is played in a deadpan fashion from beginning to end.  The first people we meet are cops, Officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) and Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray).  They are two of the three members of law enforcement for the tiny village of Centerville, “A Real Nice Place” as the sign on the way into town proclaims.  With a population of 738, it is no surprise that Chief Robertson personally knows Hermit Bob (Tom Waits), the strange old man that lives in the woods.  The police had been called on Hermit Bob for stealing a chicken from Frank Miller (Steve Buscemi), a farmer on the outskirts of town.  Hermit Bob is mostly harmless, so they let him off with a warning.  However, on the way back, they begin noticing strange things.  When they radio into headquarters, the signal with their other partner, Officer Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny), crackles before dying.  Additionally, their phones and watches stop working, the sun is out for later than it should be, and the radio broadcast is discussing odd fluctuations with the Earth’s axis caused by “polar fracking.”  To give you a sense of the comedic value, Officer Peterson calmly proclaims that this is all going to end badly, which he knows because he later tells Chief Robertson they he read the script.  Everyone is experiencing out-of-the-ordinary occurrences, but eventually they all go to sleep.  Overnight, we get the first instance of a zombie attack as two bodies from the cemetery reanimate, push their way out of their graves, and kill the women working in the local diner.  The scene is too gruesome for the local constabulary, and they are unsure of what they should do.  It is Officer Peterson who suggests that it is zombies, though this is before he tells Chief Robertson about his knowledge of events.  As such, Chief Robertson is slow to accept that the dead are rising from their graves despite the eponymous theme song to which they have been listening to throughout the film to this point.  It is later that night when things begin to get out of control.  With Hermit Bob watching from the woods under a moon surrounded by a purple aura, the deceased all over town start to rise.  Of note, aside from their desire to consume living flesh, these zombies also resort to whatever activity seemingly brought them joy when they were alive.  The two that attacked the diner are coffee aficionados, kid corpses are attracted to candy, and there are even undead athletes.  Meanwhile, the only one who appears at home in this craziness is Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton), the Scottish, samurai sword wielding, local undertaker.  As she is preparing two cadavers, their eyes open.  Unfazed, she immediately draws her blade and begins removing heads from bodies because that is the accepted method for dispatching zombies in this version of the troupe.  Her next move is to move deliberately towards the police headquarters where all three officers have barricaded themselves and are pondering what they should do.  With some coaxing, they decide they should go out to patrol the streets, leaving Zelda to operate the radio with any updates.  They agree to meet in the cemetery near dawn.  As the three cops drive around, we see the deaths of most of the secondary characters the movie spends any time on, which need not be enumerated since they are simply there to flesh out the plot, pun intended.  Eventually, their car gets stuck as it nears the graveyard, and soon zombies are surrounding the vehicle and banging on the windows.  Throughout the ordeal, Officer Morrison has been getting progressively more frantic, unable to cope with all the terrible dying.  She is sent into hysterics when she sees her long-deceased grandmother outside the car, opening the door to go to her and providing a zombie meal in the process.  Before Officer Peterson and Chief Robertson can react, they see Zelda approaching the car.  However, she never reaches them, and is instead beamed up into an alien ship that rockets away as quickly as it arrived.  That part was not in the script according to Officer Peterson.  What is written is his and Chief Robertson’s last stand, which is accomplished as Hermit Bob views them through his binoculars.

As Officer Peterson and Chief Robertson meet their ends in the closing moments of The Dead Don’t Die, Hermit Bob pontificates on the end of the world.  His point is that we are all zombies, made so by being slaves to the material things we seem to love.  There is a Biblical parallel to this in Luke 12:34 where Jesus says, “For where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”  It should not be surprising that Hermit Bob would have such a soliloquy since he is played by Tom Waits.  As an actor and musician, much of his material has Christian undertones to it.  Hermit Bob does not quote the Scripture I just did, which I use to explain why the zombies gravitate towards whatever they were into when they were among the living.  He does look at the death Frank, for example, in Biblical terms.  As already mentioned, Frank, who wears a hat that says, “Keep America White Again,” accuses Hermit Bob of stealing one of his chickens.  However, Frank’s possessiveness goes beyond this one incident.  He is extremely suspicious of anyone coming onto his property.  When he is eventually swarmed, Hermit Bob gives the classic line, “You reap what you sow.”  There are many places in Scripture that can connect to this famous saying, but the one I prefer is Galatians 6:6-8, “One who is being instructed in the word should share all good things with his instructor.  Make no mistake: God is not mocked, for a person will reap only what he sows, because the one who sows for his flesh will reap corruption from the flesh, but the one who sows for the spirit will reap eternal life from the spirit.”  Put more simply, if you do good, you will have good come back onto you.  The broader society tends to think of this as karma, which says that selflessness will be rewarded in this life, and evil acts will be punished more immediately.  Christian thought is a bit different.  No matter what happens to us, Faith will be rewarded in this life or the next.  Faith is the starting point, too, not just some vague notion of nobility.  I give you this information in order to elucidate some theology.  Sadly, it does not explain why so many people die in the movie.

The deaths of nearly every character in The Dead Don’t Die is commented on by Hermit Bob, who gives the final reminder of our mortality when he says “ashes to ashes.”  This, too, is Scripturally based, which is rendered in Genesis 3:19 as “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  Ironically, instead of blood, it is dust that flies from the zombies when they are struck.  It lessens, in a good way, some of the gore.  That might appear a strange way of going about such a film, but it fits it well.  Hence, make of this review what you like.