In George Romero’s 1985 film ‘Day of the Dead,’a group of soldiers and scientists is holed up in a vast underground bunker while, overhead in the ‘real world’ the zombies roam in their millions. One of the scientists is obsessed with the idea of ‘training’ those zombies, of finding a way to control them. And to this end he’s been working with a living corpse he’s called ‘Bub’.
Deep in Bub's cortex lie the memories of a previous life - hazy and barely remembered, but there all the same. He remembers shaving when he’s handed a razor, but his zombie reflexes mean that he rips chunks of flesh away as he moves the blade across his cheeks. He knows that you pick up a book and turn the pages, even if the words flickering in front of him are meaningless. Place a gun in front of him and he has enough vestigial memory to realise that the reason it doesn’t go bang is because there aren’t any bullets in the clip. And when the scientist places headphones over his ears and plays him some Beethoven, his eyes light up with a strange madness that something so wonderful could exist.
But Bub is dead. his skin is grey and flabby and wrinkled. His jaw protrudes, revealing rotten teeth. His bloodshot eyes bulge. When he moves, he moves like a drugged animal and when he ‘speaks’ he can only produce grunts and muffled howls. He looks and acts, in other words, like a village idiot as played by Monty Python. And this, I think, is why his performance has been ignored: he’s too good.
Instead of the lumbering, hands-outstretched-in-front-of-them zombies that we’re accustomed to in horror movies – and even the original Night of the Living Dead indulged in that one, even if only to wrong-foot the audience – Howard Sherman gives us one that still, however dimly, remembers fragments of his previous life. He lets you share every moment of his vague comprehension, right down to the flicker of baffled sorrow when he stumbles across the body of the scientist who protected him, murdered by a solider he then tracks down and shoots to death - with the same gun he was given in the experiments, and which he’s now worked out how to load. It’s a striking, truly original performance.
