Horror Fest V Day One: The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue

The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (also known as Don't Open the Window or Let Sleeping Corpses Lie) is a highly regarded zombie film from Spanish director Jorge Grau. The film has a strong ecological message and hints at fear of nuclear technology and radiation "polluting" the countryside. While I feel it drags its heels too long to establish a zombie threat, when the time comes to bring the gore, Grau delivers, and the film is atmospheric enough to merit a recommendation.

As zombie logic goes, you're going to have to dig to find something more nonsensical: apparently, a new form of pest control that emits radiation is also affecting babies in a nearby hospital, as well as re-animating the dead. That's fine, but the method by which the recently deceased "make" other zombies is a bit more complicated: a zombie "bite" won't actually infect somebody, so a zombie needs to anoint a corpse with the blood of the living to pass on the re-animation. Or something like that.

The zombies themselves are doled out slowly, to the point that large stretches of the 92 minute film don't have any undead activity at all. The disjointed nature of the film actually hurts The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue because audiences are allowed to focus on how little sense the story actually makes when held up to even the most basic scrutiny. It borrows loosely from Night of the Living Dead early on (even directly lifting a shot inside of the heroine's car), but fails to capitalize on its predecessors claustrophobic nature, or even its sense of impending doom.

The radiation threat is more of a boogeyman, in that it follows earlier shots of a nuclear power plant in London and is part of an ongoing debate between the protagonists and the scientists conducting the pesticide experiments. One can easily see how an ultra-simplified form of this plot point could be appropriated - along with similar shots of wind blowing through fields - into M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening (although I doubt many fans of The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue would want or leap to make such a comparison).

I will give the film this: I was totally on board that the film was set in rural England, somewhere outside of London. I bought it hook, line, and sinker, and was as surprised as anybody there that the credits listed filming in Madrid. Then I checked on IMDB, and it seems that most - if not all - exterior shooting took place in the UK, so I felt a little better about it. That, and I give the film credit for a thematically appropriate "twist" ending, even if the logic once again falters under inspection.