Original title “Non Profanar el Sueño de los Muertos” (Spanish) aka. “Non si Deve Profanare il Sonno dei Morti” (Italian) roughly translated as “Let Sleeping Corpses Lie” (alternative English title); Don’t Open the Window (United States)

Directed by Jorge Grau, 1974, 93 minutes

George Meaning (Ray Lovelock) leaves Manchester for a holiday in the English Lake District. Along the way he meets Edna Simmonds (Cristina Galbó) who is on her way to visit her sister in the village of Southgate. George discovers that an experimental pest control device is bringing the dead back to life to prey on the living, but local a police inspector (Arthur Kennedy) becomes convinced that George is responsible for the deaths.  

It’s the summer of 1983. In a smoky Manchester basement twelve tall blokes sprawl in little plastic chairs. The younger ones are awkward, lads who shot up too quickly, too tall for school; the older men are faded and worn, like their uniform shirts. So far, it’s been a bit of a laugh, a change from the squad room. The sarge rummages in one of two black bin liners full of videotapes seized from street corner newsagents, high-street video libraries and distributor warehouses. The tape that he slots into the huge, noisy video recorder starts off a bit arty, the names on the credits are foreign but they all recognise these streets after so many years spent pounding the beat. Later, as zombies gnaw the entrails of a hapless village bobby the banter dries up. Derek sniggers (he’s the baby in the room) but quickly shuts up as the lights go on. For some of these men memories of Moss Side and Toxteth are still raw. Suddenly the show is over, and the sour faced constables head for the pub.

Ten years earlier, as British tourists flocked to Spain to soak up the sun and sangria Spaniard Jorge Grau came to northern England to make a zombie film. He left behind Franco’s ailing dictatorship, a shambling, hollow-eyed reminder of thirties fascism kept alive by a steady diet of foreign tourists. Grau’s Italian producers had clearly been impressed by ‘Night of the Living Dead’ (George Romero, 1968) and saw an opportunity to cash in, but this time with the blood and guts in vivid colour.  Grau’s previous work included a little magic realism (‘Actaeón’ 1967) and ‘Ceremony of Blood’ (1973), a somewhat sober reworking of the Erzebet Bathory story. Like Romero’s film, Grau’s ‘Living Dead’ is served straight up with a twist of social criticism. Released theatrically in 1974, this particularly well-crafted film was a modest hit.  By the 1980s demand for home video content had become insatiable. British distributors found a ready supply of older material in Europe and America that could be repackaged to feed the growing market. Some of these titles, uncertified by the British Board of Film Censors, slipped through a legal loophole and onto the shelves of video rental outlets. Following a storm of moral panic whipped up by the British press, video censorship was tightened up and some titles were prosecuted and some prohibited. These “video nasties” achieved instant cult status. In retrospect, some of these films were vilified because they subverted accepted rules of cinematic style as well as transgressing moral convention: in recent years titles like ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ (Ruggero Deodato, 1980) with its clever metafictional narrative and ‘I Spit on Your Grave’ (Meir Zarchi, 1978) with its radical (and violent) discourse on gender have received some measure of critical rehabilitation. Many of the films that were scapegoated now seem risibly inept but Grau’s film is ripe for reappraisal.

 

The film’s arresting opening montage serves as a manifesto for what follows. George shuts up his city centre gallery and drives away for a holiday in the country. We linger for a moment in his deserted shop and the camera settles on a reproduction of Australian artist Sidney Nolan’s ‘Landscape – Miner/Yellow Helmet’ (1973) then slowly zooms in as the opening credits roll. Nolan’s unsettling image remains with us throughout the journey that follows.  As George drives through the streets of Manchester Grau and cinematographer Francisco Sempere document the polluted squalor of one of Britain’s oldest and largest industrial cities as it slid towards economic recession. They capture a prevailing sense of social alienation; when a fearless hippy runs naked amongst the traffic Grau cuts to the stultified faces of commuters, inured to their spoiled environment and utterly impervious to her act of protest. Tory Britain may have seemed a liberal paradise when compared to Franco’s Spain, but Grau understands that fascism thrives under the lethargic blind-eye of the silent majority. Once George escapes the city, the bucolic setting offers little relief. These green fields must have seemed far removed from the arid rural landscape of Spain; depopulated by Civil War and migration to the cities. Franco’s government struggled to feed its population with one of the lowest agricultural yields in Europe. In the early seventies the farmsteads of northern England stood on the cusp of radical change that accompanied the rise of industrial agriculture. The misguided attempt at pest control that triggers the zombie outbreak in ‘Living Dead’ chimes not only with Spain’s desperate attempts to revive its barren fields but also with twenty-first century anxieties about ecological catastrophe.

For Grau the living dead are another symptom of mankind’s disruption of the natural world. As in Romero’s films they are portrayed with a lingering sense of melancholy. This is an unbearably intimate, personal apocalypse: residents of the tiny rural community of Southgate may recognise the creatures that are now trying to eat them as family or friends. The sequence where the zombies invade a rural churchyard recalls Stanley Spencer’s ‘The Resurrection, Cookham’ (1924-7) but repainted by Goya. Makeup maestro Gianetto de Rossi (who later worked with Lucio Fulci) created zombies that look so disconcertingly like real corpses that they inspire pity as well as fear. Although the Spanish/Italian title is often translated as ‘Let Sleeping Corpses Lie’ a more exact translation: ‘Don’t Profane the Sleep of the Dead’ reveals shades of meaning absent from the US and UK titles. In Catholic theology the dead hold a privileged position and intercede for the living; for believers their transformation into flesh-eating ghouls is a blasphemous travesty of the resurrection of the body that precedes divine judgement. As in Julio Llamazares’ ‘Yellow Rain’ where the dead return to a deserted Pyrenees farming village, a sense of loss pervades Grau’s film. The unquiet dead remain a prominent and poignant cultural motif in Spain where so many victims of political violence lie undiscovered in mass graves, denied the common decencies of funerary rites or memorial. Censors considered horror films frivolous, this made them a safer channel for social criticism in Franco’s Spain. Grau wears his political radicalism on his sleeve. His strident anti-authoritarian tone channels the fears and frustration of many Spanish liberals, restive under the long dictatorship of the Caudillo. Arthur Kennedy’s reactionary police inspector rants incessantly about the promiscuity and criminality of the younger generation. Wilfully oblivious to any evidence that contradicts his prejudice, he seems intent on pursuing his self-righteous vendetta against liberals and beatniks and turning it to political advantage. The inspector’s strident harangues against moral degeneracy uncannily predict the diatribes of tabloid moralists during the nasties campaign.   

 

Of all the staples of horror cinema the zombie has the most fascinating and eclectic history. Marina Warner has tracked the zombie’s shuffling progress from romantic poetry, through colonial nightmares to symbol of social disenchantment. If the vampire is an aristocrat, the zombie is relentlessly blue collar. When George Romero perceptively repurposed the zombie myth as socio- political critique he ensured that the dead would live on to shamble across the twenty-first century landscape as blank-eyed shoppers or phone-zombies. Despite their poor communication skills zombies remain the most political creatures in the horror canon. Created as a slave class, playing on fears of death and decay as well as fear of the mob, they have also become a perfect metaphor for the human condition in an age of economic and environmental crisis. In a society where citizens are valued only as workers or as consumers, we have all become zombies.

Zombie culture may be thriving but, in a marketplace overcrowded with mediocre product ‘The Living Dead’ stands out. Nostalgic gore hounds who remember the frisson of watching the video in the eighties can now savour the film’s artistry without the distractions of fuzzy picture or audio dropouts. Viewers seeing it for the first time will discover that Grau’s vicious little shocker still bites. Approach with caution.  

Quotes:

“Sergeant, this is Craig reporting at the cemetery. There are dead people trying to kill me!”                                                                                                               Craig (Giorgio Trestini)

Connections

Reading

Martin Barker, The Video Nasties, Pluto Press, 1984, ISBN 0861046676

John Martin, Seduction of the Gullible, Procrustes Press, 1997 (1993), ISBN 952251019

Julio Llamazares, Yellow Rain, Random House, 2003 (1955), ISBN 9781860469541

Marina Warner: Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds, Oxford University Press, 2004, ISBN 9780199266845

Duncan Wheeler, Following Franco, Manchester University Press, 2020, ISBN 9781526105189

Film

‘I Walked with a Zombie’ directed by Jacques Tourneur (1943)’I Walked with a Zombie directed by Jacques Tourneur (1943)

‘Night of the Living Dead’ directed by George Romero (1968)

‘Dawn of the Dead’ directed by George Romero (1978)

Television

The Walking Dead, Frank Darabont, 11 seasons, 2010-2022, AMC/Entertainment One

Radio

BBC Radio 4: ‘In Our Time’ 3rd April 2003 – The Spanish Civil War