I’ver seem a few Zombie flicks and by and large they were not all that. Why the love for this genre?
Because there is a whole group of people who think they are all that.
A key point in enjoying the genre is being picky about which titles from the zombie oeuvre you partake in. There’s some great stuff (World War Z, the Resident Evil games, Dawn of the Dead [original and remake], 28 Days Later), but there is also a LOT of shit.
Yes, I wonder that too. Especially if you consider that the zombies where once humans, like your friends and family.
“hey, my wife has turned into a zombie. Nice, now I can try this new shiny shotgun of mine”
“Ah, what do I see - little timmy is a zombie too. - Hey son come here, let daddy show you how to use a chainsaw”
On the other hand…
-:starts making list:-
It’s a great format to tell stories about humanity. The concept of a large-scale, mysterious affliction turning most of the population into a protagonist-killing horde, allows the good storyteller the opportunity to create intense character development with the surviving characters. See The Walking Dead (spoiler alert - Wikipedia article) for an excellent example.
FTR, I pretty much hated zombie movies/stories until I read The Walking Dead Series. It got me hooked.
One of the great things about the zombie genre is the idea of living in a world where you constantly do battle to stay alive. And zombies are the perfect thing to slaughter: disgusting, and dangerous en masse, yet individually slow and stupid enough that no great talent is needed by any reasonably prepared person to take out hundreds of them. Their attributes, such as not needing food or rest, and being susceptable to head shots yet otherwise almost invulnerable, mean that they have to be engaged and killed individually- impersonal measures such as bombing or cutting off supplies are either ineffective or inapplicable. Moreover, the zombie menace is huge but self-limiting: the only source of more zombies is freshly dead people, and once precautions are taken those can be limited. It’s possible to look forward to the day when almost all zombies have finally been destroyed and only vigilance against a diminishing number of stragglers will be needed. And almost incidental to your average zombie attack or plague is being at least temporarily on your own, where the mundane concerns of life are set aside and the only things you really need to do are find secure shelter, scavenge more or less plentiful food and equipment left behind, and kill zombies. It’s a videogame life played out for real!
Considerably less fun to have as a menace would be an enemy that was limitlessly self-renewing, could easily kill people but weren’t dependent on them for food, and dragged down civilization long enough that supplies of food and ammunition gave out.
I never thought I was much of a zombie fan… until I read World War Z.
A zombie movie has to have just the right mix of cheese and gravitas to make it fun. There are certain conventions it must pay homage to and perhaps turn on their head; see Shaun of the Dead, a zombie romantic comedy (zomromcom).
I loved World War Z.
Zombies in media, in my opinion, are popular because they allow drawing on a few popular tropes:
- One or few against a horde of aggressors.
- One or few “thinking” people against a mindless horde.
- The horror of a thing that looks human (to a degree) but isn’t.
- The pleasure of violence against a thing that isn’t human, without guilt.
There are some really bad [zombie] [movies]. “All the love” is only for the good [zombie] [movies].
Insert variables, repeat as necessary: [genre] [medium]
It’s the only genre where you can slaughter hundreds of “people” without any guilt.
It’s the ultimate survival genre. Like an enhanced version of surviving in a forest with lots of dangerous animals.
Another World War Z fan here. I will probably finish it tonight. I found out about it on the SDMB.
Not exactly. I’ve maintained for years that there are two perfect villains in gaming scenarios:
- Zombies
- Nazis
You can kill either without a shred of guilt. Zombie Nazis? That’s just too much of a good thing.
Folks can tell some pretty rich stories using the idea of zombies. Shaun of the Dead opens with a wonderful title sequence, showing people shuffling bleary-eyed and lifeless through the streets of a British town. Nobody’s a zombie, though: the movie is suggesting that a lot of us are already not that different from zombies. That’s an idea that’s played with throughout the movie.
28 Days Later has an intense third act in which it’s suggested that, horrible as the zombies are, humans are the worse monsters. It plays with this idea through a constant contrast between humans and zombies.
World War Z doesn’t, IIRC, have a theme in which zombies are contrasted against or compared with humans. It does have a pretty good exploration of the depths to which humanity MUST sink in order to save itself.
Braaaaaains.
Well, somebody had to say it!
This movie is made of awesome.
Call of Duty: World at War has a bonus mission at the end called “Zombie Nazis”(Or was it “Nazi Zombies”?).
Return to Castle Wolfenstein had you fighting both nazis and zombies, who were also fighting each other. And Occasionally nazi-created cyborg zombies(for when normal zombies aren’t dangerous enough). Good times.
Aren’t all cyborgs that were made by reengineering a corpse (like Robocop) technically cyborg zombies? Were the reanimated/resurrected troops in Universal Soldier zombies? Or does that fall into a category of “sorta-kinda alive again”?
Zombies make great morality tales. They’re mindless, and (usually) quite slow - but there are a lot of them. As a result, people can easily survive if they cooperate, but are doomed if cooperation fails. The failure of human decency under stress, and the resulting carnage, makes a story that plays on a very old tradition of tragedy.
In addition to all the other solid reasons given already, zombie warfare forces a society to re-boot itself to an earlier and in some ways simpler or even more honest mindset. The past century-plus has seen warfare, as waged by developed nations, become increasingly technocratic, specialized, waged in increasingly remote locales with the actual killing conducted in increasingly remote ways via expensive, high-tech weaponry, and segregated from their societies as a whole (many armies are now staffed entirely by volunteer enlistment rather than by draft, with the result being that the children of the wealthier strata of society are spared the burden of army duty).
For the half-century following WWII, actual wars had been increasingly waged not for reasons of immanent threats to our survival (i.e., self-defense against an invading army) but rather to contain or test an ideological enemy empire through proxy developing nations and their leaders/dictators (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, etc.), sometimes using commando forces and intelligence assets rather than conventional armies per se. The necessity, validity, and even instigation of these conflicts were often cast into question by critics, often with good justification. And these latter wars have not been total wars (for the US and USSR, anyway), requiring the full mobilization of society and economic production, either. Civilian life proceeded pretty much as before, even when millions of people, many of them civilians (on our side and theirs), were perishing on the other side of the world.
Zombie outbreaks are a different story. The military/civilian commitment ratio is upended (these are wars waged mostly by ordinary civilians, with the armed forces playing a limited and sometimes even counterproductive role) and civilian society, once it weathers an initial and devastating period of confusion, panic, and decimation, must rally with total commitment and engagement if it is to survive. Everybody is accountable to society and everybody stands to get his or hands dirty in actual killing, albeit in self-defense. There is little or no moral ambiguity about the nature of the threat (at least after the turbulent initial period, during which people come to understand the nature of the zombie phenomenon and learn to curtail their emotions) and thus little guilt about killing the depersonalized and, literally, dehumanized enemy. And given the zombie hordes, there’s plenty of killing that needs to be done. The fact that the enemy advances inexorably and always takes the offensive (and does not peaceably coexist with innocent civilians) further clarifies the situation and minimizes the risk of collateral losses of innocent (human) lives in skirmishes.
Finally, the zombies’ limited physical vulnerability requires a unique degree of personalism and follow-through in battle tactics and strategy, as they cannot be dissuaded, demoralized, or degraded en masse by the usual means of encirclement, but must be killed – and that requires a head shot or rough equivalent. So the actual waging of war requires either a sniper’s skill (the high-accuracy or high-caliber headshot, although heavier military ordinance, such as a rocket-propelled grenade, often suffices), or for an equivalent blow delivered by rougher, less-skilled, lower-tech and downright medieval methods usually involving hand-to-hand combat and an element of expediency or improvisation with the ordinary detritus of our civilization (employing machetes, shovels, billiard cues, golf clubs, cricket or baseball bats, construction rebar, crowbars, microphone stands, helicopter rotor blades, blunt heavy objects dropped squarely on zombie heads from a great height, etc.) to get the job done.
And let’s not forget this bad boy: http://www.dvd.net.au/movies/h/11175-2.jpg
