It takes a zombie to speak out

HOLLYWOOD has always been portrayed as a hotbed of liberal activism, so who would’ve imagined that its first full-blown anti-Iraq war movie would come not from a famous political loudmouth like Oliver Stone but from Joe Dante and Sam Hamm, a pair of horror-thriller aficionados?

Their hourlong film “Homecoming” premiered Friday as part of Showtime’s “Masters of Horror” series. Adapted by Hamm (who wrote “Batman”) and directed by Dante, who made “Gremlins,” the film is a barbed political satire and zombie thriller: It has the creepy resonance of a version of “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” in which everyone with a pod under his bed is made out to be a Bush supporter. (The film airs again at 11 p.m. Friday on Showtime.)

Set during the final weeks of a fictional presidential reelection campaign, the story kicks into gear on a TV talk show when the president’s political consultant fends off the distraught mother of a dead soldier by saying he only wished her son could come back to life to remind the country of the war’s importance. Voila! Blood-encrusted soldiers killed in Iraq rise from their graves and head for the polls, voting against the president before they crumble back into dust.

Dante has made sci-fi fantasies and thrillers for years, going back to his early horror films, “Piranha” and “The Howling.” But with “Homecoming” he emerges as an indignant satirist, as caustic as Dennis Miller or Aaron McGruder. At a campaign strategy meeting after the dead soldiers begin lurching around the country, one consultant jokes, “Why don’t we just ignore them, like regular vets.”

Although the film is ostensibly set in the future, the campaign slogans -- “Four more years” and “Mission accomplished” -- make the satire’s target clear. The film’s key characters include an Ann Coulter-type leggy blond pundit (who has a torrid affair with the political consultant) and a ruthless Karl Rove-type presidential advisor. Both die the kind of grisly deaths that occur in sci-fi films when an arrogant scientist defies all warnings not to tinker with frozen aliens or unstable atomic isotopes.

When I asked Dante if he was worried that he’d crossed the line into poor taste with the film’s more gruesome moments, he was about as apologetic as Bill O’Reilly was after he practically invited Al Qaeda to attack San Francisco when the city banned on-campus military recruiting. “Of course this movie is in awful taste,” Dante says. “However, when our actors are killed, they get to go home at the end of the day’s shooting. In real life, when our soldiers in Iraq get shot, they’re dead forever.”

If you look back in film history, it’s hardly surprising that the first bona fide anti-Iraq-war film arrives dressed up as a zombie thriller. “Horror movies are naturally subversive,” says Dante. “If you want to know what’s going on in any country at any specific period of time, look at their horror films. Everything you see in horror films after World War II, starting with ‘Godzilla,’ is a metaphor for fears about the bomb and radiation. Science fiction has always been about social issues. Watch ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still.’ Its message is very clear -- it’s a ban-the-bomb movie.”

Horror movies are perfect vehicles for messages because, unlike the prestige films of any era, they fly under the radar, attracting little attention from squeamish studio chieftains. They also are given a wide berth because of their minuscule budgets. As innumerable filmmakers have discovered, the less money you spend, the less studio interference you get.

“The genre is the beard,” says Hamm. “The fact that we’re working in a low, disreputable genre like horror allows us to say what we want between the margins. There’s a long tradition of films using coding to provide a radical political critique.” In fact, horror is such a disreputable genre that “Homecoming,” which would have been prime op-ed page material if it had been made by a more fashionable filmmaker, has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media.

In the years after World War I, German horror melodramas like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” and “Dr. Mabuse the Gambler” offered hypnotic portents of the Nazi traumas to come. Fritz Lang, who made “Dr. Mabuse,” fled Germany only after Joseph Goebbels, impressed by his films’ subliminal power, tried to hire him to make Nazi propaganda. During the 1950s, at the height of the fears of a communist takeover, America’s low-budget sci-fi films were crammed with flying saucer invasions, the bug-eyed aliens serving as stand-ins for grim Soviet commissars.

When Rod Serling -- a polemicist at heart -- wanted to escape the oppressive censorship of TV sponsors in the late 1950s (he once had to cut a shot of the Chrysler Building because his show was financed by Ford), he turned from straight dramas like “Requiem for a Heavyweight” to “The Twilight Zone,” which allowed him to shield his messages with the cozy blanket of the eerie supernatural. He once explained that by cloaking controversial subjects in a veil of fantasy, “I found that it was all right to have Martians say things Democrats and Republicans could never say.”

Two of the most influential horror films of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” and Tobe Hooper’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” are now viewed by horror faithful as being Vietnam War allegories.

The danger of disguising your message is that sometimes the audience doesn’t react the way the artist expects it to, as when Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” was embraced as an endorsement, not a critique, of Reagan-era patriotism. Steven Spielberg’s recent remake of “War of the Worlds,” which came adorned with dialogue such as “all occupations are doomed to fail,” was viewed by some as a sly commentary on our invasion of Iraq, but it has also been praised by conservatives for its portrayal of American fortitude and ingenuity.

As Hamm says of the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “It’s metaphorically acceptable as an indictment of the horrors of communism or the horrors of ‘50s conformity.”

There’s no mistaking the message of “Homecoming.” Both Dante and Hamm were upset over the way the Iraq war was sold to the American public with little criticism from Democrats or the news media. “Only now have we gotten to the point where the media is finally fact-checking the president’s speeches,” says Hamm. When they were searching for a story for “Masters of Horror,” Hamm discovered a Dale Bailey short story in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. Its plot involved a Democratic political operative who, after hearing of the shooting death of a young girl, promises to melt down every handgun, prompting the victims to rise from the dead and vote for his candidate.

Hamm transformed the zombies from handgun victims to dead soldiers. Dante shot the film earlier this year in Vancouver, in 10 days. The story was so in sync with current events that Cindy Sheehan began her vigil outside President Bush’s ranch while Dante was filming the scenes with a grieving mother. As the director put it: “You can never exaggerate too much with satire. Have you seen ‘Network’ lately? It’s all happened.”

Like the other directors involved with “Masters of Horror,” who include Hooper, John Landis and John Carpenter, Dante was afforded total creative freedom by the show’s producers. The irony is not lost on Dante that his last movie, “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” which cost $100 million to make, was butchered by constant meddling, but when he made a $1.8-million TV horror movie -- even one with a prickly antiwar message -- he was left to work without interference.

While its critics will no doubt dismiss the film as a product of Hollywood anti-Bush bias, Dante begs to differ. “I know from experience -- Hollywood is a bastion of making money, not liberalism. When the first movie to show the anger people have about the war is a grade Z zombie movie, that tells you all you need to know about how afraid of ruffling anyone’s feathers people in the movie business are today.”

For me, this little film proves that the politics of Hollywood is far more complicated than its critics are willing to admit. Conservatives always point out that no one in Hollywood would release Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” which went on to be a huge hit. But the first studio to pass was Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox, where Gibson had his deal. It’s hard to make the case that studios are hotbeds of left-wing activism when they’ve been so conspicuously silent on a huge issue like the war in Iraq, aside from documentaries and the FX series “Over There.” The two films in theaters now that deal directly with today’s political issues, “Syriana” and “Paradise Now,” were made only after the filmmakers found independent financing.

Whether you see “Homecoming” as an irritant or an inspiration, it packs a punch. At a time when the Pentagon has banned photographs of dead soldiers’ coffins, it’s quite a jolt to finally see the haunting scene in a horror film, with this war’s scarred warriors stumbling out of their flag-draped resting places. It makes you think that whoever coined the phrase “horror movie” knew what he was talking about.