A Fancy French Zombie film with no gore but with thrills and chills aplenty. Who needs zombies to eat the brains of the living? Just let them meet secretly and you'll get plenty nervous.
They Came Back is a fancy French zombie movie that begins with the mass exodus from the graves of the recently dead. Men, women and children do the zombie shuffle out of the cemetery and into town, where officials are naturally overwhelmed. These Zombees are not the bloodthirsty brain- eaters of a Romero or an Argento, they are your friends and relatives come back to resume their normal lives. They exhibit signs of traumatic aphasia, we are told, which translates into a kind of waking state mentality. They aren't all the way back, but are normal enough to demand compassionate treatment. The mayor is reunited with his dead wife and brings her home immediately. A young couple is given back a six-year-old boy, and a pretty young widow is reunited with her husband (Matthias, the hottest zombie these 24 eyes have ever seen.) Things seem alright at first, but get rather disconcerting when it's discovered that a) the returnees don't sleep, and b) they meet together secretly when they are not sleeping. This brings on a good amount of paranoia, and balloons affixed with thermal sensing cameras are employed to track the slightly cooler zombies' movements. There's some wonderful camerawork displayed here, as the zombies turn up gray as opposed to the orangish hue given off by the never dead.
This is where the paranoia of the living creates a sense of dread so palpable that you start to squirm in your seat. They may not be the scariest bunch of zombies ever, but they are the creepiest. Sylvain, the little boy zombie, just wants to walk away from his parents. His grieving father is loathe to let him go, but mom watches disconnectedly as he jumps off the balcony. Dad freaks out as he sees the broken body of his son on the pavement below, but as he turns away for a moment to look into the unfeeling eyes of his shell- shocked wife, we see the tyke scamper away to join the living dead. Even though one could see this coming (might as well have been telegraphed) the nuance of this scene was enough to give us both the willies AND a severe case of the heebie-jeebies.
Paranoia turns swiftly to action, as a drug that returns the dead to a comatose state is administered and the zombies drop like flies. They are hauled back to the cemetery, put atop their graves and very slowly disappear. This is a cool scene that had us bobbing and weaving on the edges of our seats.
This is not so much a horror film as it is an exploration of survivors' inability to let go. No explanations are given, and a jagged sense of fear is created wholly within the mind of the viewer. Don't expect either easy answers or cheap thrills from this frog masterpiece. The answers are complicated and the thrills come at a heavy emotional price for anyone who has ever lost someone they loved. We do not expect teenagers or the "Starsky and Hutch" crowd to even get this but fuck them anyway. They lower the bar for the rest of us.
Even though there's not a drop of blood in the entire enterprise, this film gave us glorious nightmares. For that reason alone we are thankful, and stand together to give it our highest rating. Anyone of you living suckers should definitely check this one out.
