¡Qué horror! 2013
Candidate #11
LES REVENANTS
(THE RETURNED)
(November 2012)
(November 2012)
I mentioned
Robin Campillo’s Les Revenants (They Came Back) ‘round these parts
before in passing.
Allow me now to
expound on that film further…
Unleashed in
2004--about a year and a half after Danny Boyle and Alex Garland gave us 28 Days Later, and just two months after
A) Zack Snyder managed to get the brilliant Sarah Polley in a zombie movie and inadvertently ignited the slow vs.
fast zombie debate with his impressive debut, the Dawn of the Dead remake, and B) Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick
Frost kicked off their Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy with Shaun of the Dead--Campillo’s Les Revenants emerged in the very early
days of what would eventually develop into an unlikely revival of zombie
cinema.
Even back then, Les Revenants felt, at least to me, like
a breath of fresh air, a radically different approach to the idea of the dead
returning to walk the earth.
Here, in a narrative
co-written by Campillo with Brigitte Tijou, there were no rotting, shambling
corpses intent on ripping into warm human flesh. Instead, there were the
recently deceased (within the past decade), who suddenly appear, whole and
seemingly unharmed, wanting only to return to the lives they’d been rudely
evicted from by their deaths.
Here, Campillo
focused on the living as well, those left behind, who now have to suddenly
adjust to the reality that what they might have prayed for--the return of their
departed loved ones--had, quite unbelievably, come to pass.
Flash forward to
November of last year, and in the eight and a half years since Les Revenants, zombies had moved into
the mainstream and become the monster du
jour of horror, with an American zombie cable television show perennially breaking
ratings records with seeming impunity.
Zombie, you’ve
come a long way, baby…
It’s into this
strange new world that Canal+’s television adaptation of Les Revenants emerges, and once again, we’re given an atypical
depiction of the zombie phenomenon, one needed now more than ever, with so many
bland and derivative entries in zombie cinema littering the sidewalks and the cineplexes.
Expanded into an
eight-episode first season (with a second season that’s expected to debut early
next year), the TV version of Les
Revenants employs the same subtle creep and dread of Campillo’s original,
eschewing a portion of the art house ambiguity of the film for some more
traditional drama of the serialized sort, as well as some more overtly
supernatural goings-on (though the exact nature of those aren’t really
explained either).
And though the
TV show’s narrative does not really follow the film’s (save for the central
conceit of the dead returning and how that event impacts on the living), there
is one major cast member carry-over: Frédéric Pierrot, playing different
characters in either iteration, of course.
The last time I
put a TV series into the ¡Qué horror! milieu was Dead Set. But just as that show rightly deserved its ¡Qué horror! spot,
so does this one. (Just imagine you’re watching an 8-hour long movie, with a
sequel waiting in the wings…)
Plus, Mogwai
scored the damned thing, so hey, one more reason to check it out!
Parting Shot 1:
It should be noted that AbbottVision and FremantleMedia Enterprises have purchased the English-language remake rights,
and intend to produce a show under the title, They Came Back, so I’d advise you to hunt down the French original
before then.
This show should
not be confused with ABC’s mid-season title, Resurrection, which is based on the novel, The Returned, by Jason Mott. (Though honestly, Mott’s novel, to be
released in August, has a central conceit that’s pretty much the one in Campillo’s
original. As Publisher’s Weekly puts
it, “A family gets caught up in a worldwide event in which loved ones return
from the dead exactly as they last were in life.” Hurm.)
Parting Shot 2: Also,
if the atypical zombie’s your thing, then you should check out the 3 episode
BBC show In The Flesh, which might
have gotten this ¡Qué horror! slot, but it’s particularly
less “horror” than Les Revenants, so…
Still, it’s
worth your while, if you want more from your zombies than AMC’s The Walking Dead can give you…
(Les Revenants OS' courtesy of impawards.com; They Came Back DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com; Les Revenants OST sleeve art courtesy of amazon.co.uk.)
(Les Revenants OS' courtesy of impawards.com; They Came Back DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com; Les Revenants OST sleeve art courtesy of amazon.co.uk.)
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