WWZ had one new idea which was the zombies moving together as one large organism thing(think ants). Other than that the movie was standard zombie apocalypse. How many times can this same premise get remade with no new angles?!
And to make matter worse any attempt at shaking up the genre that involves making zombies anything other than the mindless threat they are ends up laughable. Zombie rom com, sure.
The greatest innovations I’ve seen just involve giving a humor or black comedy veneer to the ZA scenario.
I think the same thing about standard cabin-in-the-woods horror, where the formula is so entrenched that even one single minor variation is heralded as an unprecedented event. “Let’s make it a comedy! Let’s make the bad guys actually misunderstood good guys! Let’s make it secretly a reality show watched by millions! Let’s make the deaths sacrifices to elder gods! But otherwise be entirely formulaic.”
They could do a movie on Mark Rogers’ THE DEAD, in which the cannibal zombies are the demonic hords of Legion/AntiChrist sent to test those who are Left Behind after the Rapture (which, in the book, took all virtuous people of whatever faith, altho it turns out the Catholic faith is the truest one.)
Wasn’t the hive mind concept used in Will Smith’s I Am Legend?
Zombie movies aren’t about how interesting and fresh the actual zombies are. Like all movies, all stories really, zombie movies live entirely on the strength of how interesting and likeable the human characters are. Unfortunately, interesting and likeable characters are incredibly difficult to bring to life, so most zombie movies end up having two different groups of shamblers: the ones who wear a lot of make-up and the ones with a lot of nonsense dialogue. Any zombie movie that focuses more on the zombies than the humans is just dead on its feet. You need a good set of brains and a spark of inspiration to be able to produce something a bit more livelier than “Generic Zombie Gorefest XVII”, but most film makers (or rather, producers) have their finger on the pulse of what’s popular, not what’s good.
Very good post. Most stories have been around one way or another (granted, some seem more overused and beaten to death); it’s making a good movie despite that that’s a true gauge for talent.
One thing I’d like to see gone is the ‘zombies are just hyped up mad cows’-trope: in their most basic sense, zombies are simply the fear of death, present in all animals (while vampires, in their modern versions at least, represent its allure). Making them just sick people rather than genuinely dead ones has taken a lot of the appeal away, I think.
There have been some writers who have managed to come up with some interesting novels and short stories with zombies. Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy features an American society that survived the zombie apocalypse and lives with the constant threat of another large scale outbreak. I like some of the examples of how society has changed. i.e. Nurses stations in hospitals are heavily fortified and include gun racks. The zombies aren’t really anything unique save for the fact that the larger the group the smarter they become.
There are a few good anthologies out there. The Living Dead edited by John Joseph Adams has some pretty good short stories by Stephen King, George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman and others. Some of the stories are outstanding. I agree that the best in zombie fiction focuses on the people rather than the undead. The people are what makes the stories interesting.
Zombie movies are stale because they all generally follow the same story:
The main protagonist wake up one day and gradually realize something is “wrong”.
“Hey buddy, are you ok?”
All hell breaks loose.
The survivors meet in the chaos
“Road movie” where we get to see the post apocalyptic world as the survivors try to find someplace safe
“Siege” movie as the survivors now realize they are trapped in whatever sanctuary they’ve found (farmhouse, mall, bunker, reality show house, pub, wherever).
We find out how much of an a-hole most of the survivors are.
“Hey buddy…you don’t look so good…are you sure you’re ok?”
The a-hole who didn’t tell anyone he got bit turns and everything goes to shit again.
Everyone except a couple of survivors die. (The protagonist either lives to the end or sacrifices himself to save the others).
Denouement with military rescue ending, scorched earth ending, there is no hope ending or “where do we go from here” ending.
They might not follow the entire story or maybe tell parts of it in flashback. But they all sort of follow the same formula.
The fans help keep the genre from being fresh as well. So many of them are focused on what a “real” zombie is and gets pissed off if they’re too fast, too smart or otherwise different from what they expect. Never mind that the original walking corpses from Night of the Living Dead uses rocks to break windows and a hand spade to kill someone else.