ABCs of Horror 3: "Z" Is for Zeder (1983)

Paste’s ABCs of Horror 3 is a 26-day project that highlights some of our favorite horror films from each letter of the alphabet. The only criteria: The films chosen can’t have been used in our previous Century of Terror, a 100-day project to choose the best horror film of every year from 1920-2019, nor previous ABCs of Horror entries. With many heavy hitters out of the way, which movies will we choose?

The horror cinema industry in the U.S. saw quite a surge of interest in the undead at the end of the 1970s and dawn of the 1980s, thanks to the release of George Romero’s second iconic zombie film Dawn of the Dead in 1978. At the same time, however, a parallel revolution was happening in Italy, where Dawn of the Dead co-producer Dario Argento distributed his own version of Romero’s film abroad … set to a progressive rock soundtrack from Goblin, naturally. Romero’s classic thus ended up having a two-pronged effect, kicking off separate zombie revivals in both the English-speaking and Italian-speaking film worlds, starting with influential flicks like Lucio Fulci’s influential 1979 Zombi 2, itself marketed (rather misleadingly) as a Dawn of the Dead sequel. Subsequent films like Burial Ground or Nightmare City would drive the booming Italian zombie genre in ever stranger and more lurid directions, but few of these films can claim to be quite so distinctive as Pupi Avati’s Zeder from 1983. Not because it’s more outrageous or transgressive than its contemporaries, mind you–but because it’s actually very much the opposite. At the height of a subgenre that was being defined by elements such as gore and shock factor, Avati decided to instead use the idea of undeath as a launching pad into a symbolic horror mystery story unlike anything else that was in cinemas at the time.

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Avati was one of the horror/giallo genre’s lesser luminaries of an era dominated by some big, major names such as Argento, Fulci and Bava. But Zeder does have some elements that make it feel familiar to the better-known films of the era, such as the presence of actor Gabriele Lavia as protagonist Stefano, a struggling novelist who stumbles on a series of mysterious letters that hint at the existence of a process that can create life after death. Lavia was almost something of a “scream king” in the 1970s-1980s Italian horror scene, having appeared notably in Exorcist rip-off Beyond the Door and both Argento’s Deep Red and Inferno. The Patrick Wilson of his day, perhaps?

Zeder begins with sequences that certainly set the mood, making the audience expect they’re in line for a classic Italian supernatural freak-out. The opening sequences have heavy haunted house vibes, depicting an incident with a young psychic girl in the 1950s, complete with zombies growling beneath the floorboards. You’re fully expecting the proceedings to descend from here into a Fulci-style gorefest as the dead emerge and start popping eyeballs, or at least something in the mold of the Spanish Tombs of the Blind Dead, but instead the story then jumps ahead 30 years to our protagonist Stefano, who finds himself drawn into what can only be described as an undead conspiracy. And everybody is in on it!

This does feel like something of a bait and switch, to be certain, as Zeder pulls the rug out from under its audience when you think it’s about to be a conventional horror film, instead adopting the guise of a mystery/conspiracy thriller. Stefano finds letters with his new typewriter about the life of one Paolo Zeder, a researcher who volunteered to be buried in an area suspected to be a “K-Zone”– a place where the energies and harmonics of the Earth can resurrect the dead. A K-Zone is delightfully and kookily described as being somewhere that is “suspended in a time lock,” even though the term “K-Zone” sounds more like a place where one might score drugs or high-energy dance beats than an area infested by the living dead.

This makes for an interesting metaphysical point in what is technically a zombie film: The natural existence of the K-Zones effectively renders the zombie as a natural creature, rather than a supernatural or paranormal one. After all, if coming back from the dead is simply a chemical process that can be caused by being buried in a certain place, then there’s really no spiritual aspect (or “evil”) involved in the process. Zombification is typically portrayed as an unnatural curse or a plague, but most of the people who have been turned into zombies in Zeder are those who were earnestly attempting to create a scientific breakthrough, which makes the whole thing feel rather more cosmologically neutral than you’ll typically see in a zombie movie.

With that said, perhaps predictably, the dead don’t seem to come back quite the same–it’s either that, or they were already murderers before they went into the ground. You might say the K-Zones are akin to Ra’s al Ghul’s DC Comics Lazarus Pits in the sense that someone buried there will certainly “come back,” but you might not quite like the results that you get. This does lend some poignance to Stefano’s ultimate choice–we watch as he waits for the results with a definite air of tragedy. You might even say that Zeder’s more mature consideration of reanimation puts it in the same kind of philosophical space as this year’s Handling the Undead, a film that considered the real-world emotional and psychological impact of loved ones returning from the grave.

Zeder is not the film that one almost certainly expects it will be be when hitting play, and I expect this has something to do with why it’s not quite so well remembered as even some of the more cheesy and tawdry Italian zombie or cannibal films of the era. At the same time, its soulful themes of imprisonment, control and claustrophobia make Zeder a compelling watch, the rare zombie film that is primarily driven by mystery and suspense rather than blood and guts. For the undead cinema completist, it’s a memorably individualistic outlier.

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.

ABCs of Horror 3: “Z” Is for Zeder (1983)