Fido – The Heartwarming Story of a Boy and His Zombie

My wife knows that I like horror movies and she, for the most part, continues to tolerate me.  She won't watch them with me, but she allows that I watch them.  She rolls her eyes at me.  And I think she laments the fact that our children are developing a taste for the weird and strange and scary. 

Nevertheless, I convinced her to watch the movie Fido (2006) with me the other night. It’s a zombie movie but I was able to persuade her to watch it with me because it’s also a comedy. And, believe it or not (she denies it now…) but she laughed several times during the film.  I think she liked it more than she’s willing to admit.

Fido is set in an alternate 1950’s – after a radioactive "space dust" led the the reanimation of the dead and  the nearly catastrophic “zombie wars.”  Conditions in the town of Willard (a nod to George Romero's film) and across the country are relatively safe and, thanks to the Zomcon Corporation and the invention of zombie control collars. In fact, it is so safe inside Zomcon protected communities that many families keep collared zombies as house-servants and pets.

The movie is infused with brilliant, crisp colors and sharp patterns, providing a strange contrast to the rotting corpses that inhabit the town.  The dialogue is well written and filled with witty 1950's cliches turned upside down and inside out, and the actors all perform admirably.  It is, simply, a great zombie movie.

And it is, indeed, a zombie movie –  it does have the requisite gore and blood (it wouldn't be much of zombie movie without it…) but, like the best zombie movies, it is less about the staggering, reanimated corpses and more about the living.  Fido is social commentary and satire.  It is a dark, biting humor.  While it never sinks to the point of being mere diatribe, the movie explores American culture and values and laughs at them.  It laughs at American fears that lead to racism, totalitarianism, and consumerism.  It laughs at the fear of death behind what passes as religion.  At a funeral, the priest intones “From dust have you come and to dust shall you return, but from dust shall you not be resurrected.”

If we can't laugh at our fears, they're sure to consume us.