Zombiethon (1986): When Finding a Zombie Movie Was Half the Fun

Halloween Countdown to Two Million — Day 1

By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Sometime around 1993, when I was attending Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, there was a video rental store near campus that I remember as Cinema Centre Video. I believe it was on or near Morsay Drive, although thirty-three years later I'm not going to swear to the precise location. What I remember considerably better is the experience of going there, looking through the horror section, and occasionally finding something I had never seen before.

One of those discoveries was a movie called Zombiethon.

Zombiethon 1986

To appreciate why this mattered, you have to understand that being a zombie movie enthusiast in 1993 was considerably different from being one today. There was no The Walking Dead on AMC. No enormous zombie merchandising industry. No endless streaming catalogues full of films about the living dead. The zombie apocalypse had not yet become a familiar setting for television dramas, video games, comic books, and practically every other form of entertainment.

In fact, people thought it was a little strange that I liked zombie movies so much. They were genuinely curious about what I saw in them. I would try to explain the social commentary in George Romero's films, the consumerism in Dawn of the Dead, the collapse of institutions, the way the living dead represented something uncomfortably familiar about human behavior. Usually, somewhere during this explanation, I could see their eyes beginning to glaze over.

The essential observation about zombies was simple enough: They are us, that's all.

Human appetite stripped of reflection. Creatures moving through the world consuming things without much understanding of why they want them. They have desires but little comprehension of those desires. They are endlessly hungry and never satisfied.

People didn't particularly enjoy hearing that interpretation. In fact, most of them didn't really hear it. They tuned it out.

But Romero understood something important. The zombies weren't necessarily the most frightening things in his movies. The surviving humans, with their territorial disputes, greed, violence, and inability to cooperate, were often considerably worse. The living dead simply made the underlying problem impossible to ignore.

By 1993, I had already been fascinated with the genre for years. But finding new zombie movies wasn't easy.

Every reasonably well-stocked video store had the classics. Night of the Living Dead. Dawn of the Dead. Lucio Fulci's Zombie. Maybe Day of the Dead and a few other familiar titles. But each store might have one or two oddities that nobody else carried. Some obscure Italian production. A cheaply dubbed European horror film. Something with a lurid cover promising unspeakable atrocities that the movie itself could barely afford to deliver.

And occasionally you found something like Zombiethon.

Before the internet, you couldn't simply type the title of a movie into a search engine and locate seventeen places to watch it. If the local video store didn't have it, there wasn't always a practical way to see it. You might encounter a title in a horror magazine, hear someone mention it, or stare at a photograph in a book for years before actually finding a copy.

So the video store became a kind of treasure hunt.

Friday night was the expedition. Get some snacks, pick up some beverages, wander through the aisles, and bring home five or six movies hoping that at least a couple of them would be entertaining. This was a perfectly respectable weekend for a college student. That and coursework, naturally.

There was something wonderful about the uncertainty. You didn't know what you were going to find, and sometimes you didn't even know what you were looking for until you saw the box.

Zombiethon was exactly the sort of movie that rewarded this peculiar method of exploration.

Released in 1986 and directed by Ken Dixon, Zombiethon wasn't really a conventional zombie movie at all. It was a compilation of scenes from other horror films, packaged as a feature-length celebration of the living dead. The project came from the world of Charles Band's Wizard Video, a company that understood the importance of an outrageous title and an even more outrageous VHS box.

The concept was wonderfully economical. Take footage from a collection of existing horror movies, film some new connecting sequences, and sell the resulting compilation as another movie. It was simultaneously entertainment, advertising, and a way to get additional mileage out of films already in the distributor's catalogue.

And somehow, for someone like me, that made perfect sense.

The framing story involves women fleeing assorted monsters and finding themselves inside Los Angeles's El Rey Theatre, where the audience is composed largely of zombies. The undead have apparently decided that the best way to spend an evening is to sit in a movie theater watching other undead creatures terrorize the living.

I have always appreciated this premise. Even after death, people still want to go to the movies.

The featured attractions include substantial excerpts from Fulci's Zombie (1979), Jean Rollin's Zombie Lake (1981), and Jess Franco's Oasis of the Zombies (1982). There are also selections from The Invisible Dead, A Virgin Among the Living Dead, Fear, and Ted V. Mikels's The Astro-Zombies.

If that sounds like a wildly uneven program, it is.

Fulci's Zombie is a genuinely memorable horror film, full of decaying tropical atmosphere, gruesome special effects, and some of the most notorious sequences in Italian horror cinema. Zombiethon includes the famous underwater encounter between a zombie and a shark, as well as the unforgettable scene involving a wooden splinter and a human eyeball.

These are not scenes anyone who has watched them is likely to forget.

Zombie Lake, on the other hand, concerns Nazi zombies emerging from a lake, frequently painted an alarming shade of green. The movie is notorious for its threadbare production and liberal use of nudity. It isn't exactly Citizen Kane, although I suppose Citizen Kane would have been improved considerably by the sudden appearance of several green Nazi zombies.

Oasis of the Zombies offers another variation on the Nazi undead, this time in a desert setting. Its combination of wartime treasure, shambling corpses, and bargain-basement production values is representative of the sort of European exploitation cinema that circulated through American video stores during the 1980s.

And then there's The Astro-Zombies, a 1968 Ted V. Mikels production involving artificial killers and mad science, which stretches the definition of a zombie movie considerably. Other selections are similarly loose in their interpretation of the genre. Evidently, the producers were less interested in establishing a rigorous taxonomy of the living dead than in assembling as much blood, nudity, and general weirdness as possible.

Which, under the circumstances, was probably the correct commercial decision.

The new material connecting the excerpts is just as peculiar as the films themselves. Women wander through strange locations, encounter monsters, and eventually make their way to the theater. At one point, a zombie projectionist has trouble operating the equipment. The undead audience becomes impatient. There is an almost dreamlike quality to the whole production, as though someone had assembled a late-night television horror program after being deprived of sleep for several days.

It isn't particularly coherent. It doesn't need to be.

Modern viewers approaching Zombiethon as a standalone feature might reasonably wonder what the point is. Why watch disconnected excerpts from several movies when you could simply watch the movies themselves?

But that question overlooks the historical circumstances in which something like Zombiethon was useful.

In 1993, I couldn't necessarily watch those movies themselves. Not unless somebody in Rockford happened to have a copy.

A compilation like Zombiethon was a sampler, a catalogue, and a glimpse into a larger world of obscure horror cinema. It introduced viewers to films they might otherwise never encounter. You could see a few minutes of something completely ridiculous and spend the next several years hoping to find the whole movie.

The clips weren't merely substitutes for the original films. They were invitations to go looking for them.

And that was one of the great pleasures of the video store era. The limitations of availability created an entirely different relationship with movies. You couldn't have everything immediately, so finding something felt like an accomplishment. A movie could exist for years as a rumor, a photograph, or a tantalizing title before you finally got to watch it.

Sometimes the movie turned out to be terrible.

That was part of the adventure, too.

I don't want to romanticize every aspect of the old video rental experience. There were plenty of disappointing Friday nights, plenty of movies that couldn't possibly live up to their cover art, and plenty of rental fees spent on productions that probably shouldn't have been made in the first place.

But I miss the treasure hunt.

I miss wandering through an unfamiliar video store and discovering that it had three horror movies I'd never heard of. I miss taking chances on strange titles because there wasn't a website containing thousands of reviews telling me exactly what to expect. I miss the possibility of being genuinely surprised.

Zombiethon was a minor, opportunistic, frequently ridiculous piece of 1980s horror entertainment. It was also precisely the sort of thing that made those Friday nights memorable.

The living dead were never particularly good at explaining their motivations. They just kept wandering around, looking for something that might satisfy them.

Come to think of it, that wasn't so different from me wandering the aisles of Cinema Centre Video on a Friday night in 1993.

Except I usually came home with six movies and a bag of snacks.

And I had to return the movies by Monday.

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