Let me preface this by saying there's probably nothing that will get me to see a movie (or, lately, read a novel) faster than to tell me it's got zombies in it. A good friend of mine has said repeatedly that if he was given enough money he'd make "Zombies, Dinosaurs and a Bag of Cash", starring Christopher Walken as the mad scientist that starts the zombie plague. It always sounded like it'd be the perfect movie to me. And the original DoTD is one of my favorite (real) movies of all time.
And I'm not the only one. There has been a steady surge in popularity in this sub-genre since George Romero's "Dead" movies attained their cult and popular success. My brother doesn't read much, but he's started on a zombie book kick lately, and loaned me a slew of books ("World War Z", "The Rising", "Autumn", "Monster Island", for starters), and has a whole slew on his "to read" list that he's gonna pass off when he's done. Little else could get him reading anything, but zombies did the trick. The number of books on this subject is pretty impressive (shocklines.com has an entire "breakout category" for it, there's that many).
And of course, there's tons of movies, of widely varying quality, about zombies. The aforementioned Romero classics and their remakes, "Zombie", the "Return of the Living Dead" franchise, "Shaun of the Dead", "28 Days Later" (arguably), and so on. Many of these films have been hugely successful. And the zombies were probably the only thing good about those dreadful "Resident Evil" and "House of the Dead" movies.
Obviously, something about zombies resonates with not just us hard core horror fans, but with the moviegoing (and maybe the reading) public as well. I'm curious as to your thoughts as to what it is about the flesh eating undead that we love so much.
I can't quite put my finger on it; I mean, these (typically) shambling, mindless, slow moving creatures are hardly the sort of villain that inspires dread as representatives of pure evil like, say, Hannibal Lecter does. And they're relatively easily dispatched as individuals; you don't need a wooden stake, silver bullet or crucifix (although they'll all work, used correctly). Just cause enough damage to their heads, and that usually does the trick. So they don't have indestructibility or toughness going for them. They look basically human (unless they were seriously injured or decomposed before they died), so a horrific appearance usually isn't it, either.
Is it the sheer numbers? Most of the zombie films and books mentioned above posit a world taken over by the undead, with small pockets of human survivors fighting back from the brink, w/ varying degrees of sucess. Is it the inevitability of their getting the protoganists that their vast numbers imply that creeps us out? Is it the horror of being eaten alive (the zombie's preferred method of execution)? Or the fact that the disease is typically spread by the zombie's bite? One bite and you're done for is a pretty horrifying concept.
After thinking bout it, I think for many (surely not all) of us, probably for me, it's the promise of gore & violence in the book or film. I went to bar in NYC w/ a gothic horror theme to the decor (Some of you may know it and its sister pubs; it's called Jekyll and Hyde), that had a TV w/ a DVD player hooked up to it behind the bar, and they played gory horror movies w/ the sound off all night long. DoTD was one of them, and I thought this was a pefect film for that application because of the almost constant visual gore effects in that film. That's probably, I confess, one of the main reasons I love the film so much myself (I am an avowed gorehound). I think zombies, being no longer human, give the filmmaker license to do violence to them; it's OK to kill these things. And since head trauma is the only way to accomplish this goal, and zombies eat those they kill (often whilw they're still alive - for awhile at least) you're gonna see some good gore. So that's probably why I like 'em so much.
But I figure there's gotta be more to it that I'm not seeing. What do you guys think?
And I'm not the only one. There has been a steady surge in popularity in this sub-genre since George Romero's "Dead" movies attained their cult and popular success. My brother doesn't read much, but he's started on a zombie book kick lately, and loaned me a slew of books ("World War Z", "The Rising", "Autumn", "Monster Island", for starters), and has a whole slew on his "to read" list that he's gonna pass off when he's done. Little else could get him reading anything, but zombies did the trick. The number of books on this subject is pretty impressive (shocklines.com has an entire "breakout category" for it, there's that many).
And of course, there's tons of movies, of widely varying quality, about zombies. The aforementioned Romero classics and their remakes, "Zombie", the "Return of the Living Dead" franchise, "Shaun of the Dead", "28 Days Later" (arguably), and so on. Many of these films have been hugely successful. And the zombies were probably the only thing good about those dreadful "Resident Evil" and "House of the Dead" movies.
Obviously, something about zombies resonates with not just us hard core horror fans, but with the moviegoing (and maybe the reading) public as well. I'm curious as to your thoughts as to what it is about the flesh eating undead that we love so much.
I can't quite put my finger on it; I mean, these (typically) shambling, mindless, slow moving creatures are hardly the sort of villain that inspires dread as representatives of pure evil like, say, Hannibal Lecter does. And they're relatively easily dispatched as individuals; you don't need a wooden stake, silver bullet or crucifix (although they'll all work, used correctly). Just cause enough damage to their heads, and that usually does the trick. So they don't have indestructibility or toughness going for them. They look basically human (unless they were seriously injured or decomposed before they died), so a horrific appearance usually isn't it, either.
Is it the sheer numbers? Most of the zombie films and books mentioned above posit a world taken over by the undead, with small pockets of human survivors fighting back from the brink, w/ varying degrees of sucess. Is it the inevitability of their getting the protoganists that their vast numbers imply that creeps us out? Is it the horror of being eaten alive (the zombie's preferred method of execution)? Or the fact that the disease is typically spread by the zombie's bite? One bite and you're done for is a pretty horrifying concept.
After thinking bout it, I think for many (surely not all) of us, probably for me, it's the promise of gore & violence in the book or film. I went to bar in NYC w/ a gothic horror theme to the decor (Some of you may know it and its sister pubs; it's called Jekyll and Hyde), that had a TV w/ a DVD player hooked up to it behind the bar, and they played gory horror movies w/ the sound off all night long. DoTD was one of them, and I thought this was a pefect film for that application because of the almost constant visual gore effects in that film. That's probably, I confess, one of the main reasons I love the film so much myself (I am an avowed gorehound). I think zombies, being no longer human, give the filmmaker license to do violence to them; it's OK to kill these things. And since head trauma is the only way to accomplish this goal, and zombies eat those they kill (often whilw they're still alive - for awhile at least) you're gonna see some good gore. So that's probably why I like 'em so much.
But I figure there's gotta be more to it that I'm not seeing. What do you guys think?
