long before the bloody encounters between Rick, Michonne and Daryl with The Walking Dead in the woods of Georgia, the fascination with zombies already filled pages and screens. We would have to travel to Haiti, during the American occupation at the beginning of the 19th century, when topics spread around their cultural and religious traditions.
The publication of the book The Magic Island by William Seabrook in 1929 cemented the figure of the zombie, a being reanimated by a voodoo sorcerer and forced to remain in a state between life and death.
Living with The Walking Dead, New York.
His contagion to cinema it was just a matter of time. In 1932, the movie The Legion of Soulless Men (or White Zombie, in its original title) introduced zombies to viewers and planted the seed for a genre that spread like a virus in the field of series B. More than thirty years later, the cult director George A. Romero redefined the character in the horror classic night of the living dead.
Romero was a great influence for Robert Kirkman, creator of the comic The Walking Dead. Throughout its 193 issues he described a zombie apocalypse in which a handful of characters was pushed to survive in a world plagued by walkers hungry for human flesh. The publication of it, in 2003, caused a new wave of interest with new films, such as 28 days laterby Danny Boyle and, finally, the adaptation of the saga for television by Frank Darabont.
The first episode of The Walking Dead aired on Halloween night 2010 and beat all the records of cable television. A saga was born that would expand its universe with multiple sequels and generate a true legion of fans that you cannot miss the new exhibition of the Museum of Moving Image called Living with The Walking Dead.
“This is not just an exhibition about zombies. It is an exhibition about community, about how people come together, create new families and adjusts to a new and terrifying world. It is what we try to present here”, he explains to Condé Nast Traveler Spain Danae Colomer, Director of Exhibitions at the New York Film Museum. Cleverly, elements from behind and in front of the screen are displayed.
After contextualize gender, the exhibition launches itself into the series with a mural of the comics that served as a guide and original scripts for the series. The fans will recognize, immediately, some of the iconic objects from the first episode as the chained door of the hospital where Rick Grimes wakes up from his coma, painted with the chilling words: Don't Open, Dead Inside. Or the slippers he wore the zombie girl in one of the first meetings of the protagonist. The exhibition adds more than 500 objects that you will want to examine one by one.
The central space is dedicated to the costumes of main characters such as Rick, Carol, Daryl, Maggie, Michonne, Morgan, Negan, Gabriel and Jadis and their most used weapons. But aside from humans (or, at least, those who are still alive), the series would be nothing without the dead. The museum dedicates a well-deserved section for makeup effects and the dolls that are the source of our greatest nightmares. there are no missing whisperers and their macabre meat ponchos.
Living with The Walking Dead, New York.
How could it be otherwise, the exhibition has some moment spoiler alert total. If you don't know what unites the sadistic Negan, the baseball bat nicknamed Lucille and one of the most beloved characters in the series, perhaps it would be a good idea to catch up before going through its rooms. We make it easy for you: first episode of season 7.
This exhibition is a great opportunity, also, for lovers of cinema and television to revisit or discover one of the most original museums in New York . Located in the neighborhood of Astoria, in the borough of Queens, and just 20 minutes by subway from midtown Manhattan, the Museum of Moving Image discovers the world of the dream factory with interactive rooms and a permanent gallery dedicated to Jim Henson and the Muppets of him.
Living with the Walking Dead can be visited until January 1, 2023.