What are you still waiting to see in a zombie film?

[CooperWasRight]

Ok I was wrong. Sorry. No need for an apology... Just sharing counterpoints and different views. If you don't share my outlook thats cool... If I did share something that changed your mind thats cool too. That's the great thing about forums, people sharing differing insights and sometimes it makes us think of things we haven't thought of and sometimes nothing changes.

[Mike70]

eddie vedder saving the world with an acoustic guitar by hitting notes that literally cause zombies to implode. the idea of a language becoming infected like was explored in "pontypool." only done on a much larger scale.

[krakenslayer]

There's this great little Tales from the Crypt episode called "The Thing from the Grave" which is also somewhat gothic. It features a zombie rising from the tomb. Cool! I've never really watched much of the Tales from the Crypt TV show, and this sounds like a good place to start. I'll have a hunt for it.

[carpetbeggar]

Right now I'd love to see an epic style zombie film take place during the height of the Roman Empire. Maybe during the the 1rst century AD. Have the outbreak start in Africa somewhere and spreads to Egypt where the zombies lay siege to Alexandria, then the Empire trying to keep it contained there and keep from spreading across the Mediterranean into the heart of Rome. Also a movie set in current times, but not have it become a global problem. Have it based in some "far off" country like Afghanistan and just go into detail about how the outbreak is affecting the rest of the world with embargo's and travel restrictions. How it affects families in America when their sons and daughters are drafted into military service to go off and fight the zombies. Maybe have the POV of journalists who are embedded with the military who are fighting the outbreak. Basically it would be like Iraq and Afghanistan except the insurgents aren't living.

[Christopher Jon]

How it affects families in America when their sons and daughters are drafted into military service The US Military is a 100% volunteer force. There is no draft.

[CooperWasRight]

The US Military is a 100% volunteer force. There is no draft. There have been many times were a draft has been talked about being reinstated... So it's by no means out of the realm of possibility if the dead return the draft would come back... assuming it take more then a couple of weeks for the world to end.

[Rancid Carcass]

One thing I'd like to see is that moment (after they've realised there is nothing they can do to stop it), when the president or the prime minister sits down to address the nation... Something along the lines of Deep Impact would be pretty cool, but with a much worse outcome.

[Thorn]

The US Military is a 100% volunteer force. There is no draft. I can assure you as numbers of active military men dwindled the US would reinstate the draft and pull back into active service men and women who were no longer active. Now how many would report would be an interesting story to follow.

[paranoid101]

Battle of yonkers done right.

[Wyldwraith]

I'm not so sure a military draft would be the immediate outcome of a major undead infestation in a non-1st World-nation. Stop-Loss policies to suspend the discharges of soldiers whose tours are up, certainly. We've already seen that happen under G.W Bush's administration with Iraq, and to some extent under Obama as well as they struggle to maintain the status quo in Iraq & Afghanistan while drawing-down the number of boots on the ground over there. An event of not only military concern to the International Community, but also a potentially catastrophic and global pandemic-infestation with a Class 4 Bio-Hazard as the root cause would have the binding U.N resolutions flying and the World Health Organization (at the BARE MINIMUM) from the medical sector up in arms. If the situation persisted, and especially if it spread beyond the initial Military Cordon/Quarantine Zone, the next move in America would be the calling up of those Reserve units and National Guard yet to be deployed overseas, in tandem with reactivating the still service-fit members of the various Special Forces organizations on their Inactive Reserve lists to have them retrain "Regulars" from the rank-and-file units of the various Armed Forces branches due to their expertise in unorthodox operations. You'd be talking about the same sort of Military-wide retraining depicted happening in WWZ when the U.S and its allies began preparing to retake the "White Zones" (Ie: Those regions completely overrun by the undead). It would be a major undertaking in and of itself to train huge numbers of soldiers, many career military with many years of extensive experience to unlearn conventional military doctrine and retrain them in such a way as to render them combat-effective against an entirely new yet unnervingly familiar-SEEMING enemy whose strengths and weaknesses are completely counter-intuitive to most of your servicepeople. Everything from erasing the muscle-memory of things as basic as the conventional Failure to Stop drill. Two rounds to the center mass, pause, then one round if necessary to the head will get huge numbers of fighters killed or infected = dead men/women walking, waste 2/3 of ammunition expended when engaging the Undead and also serve to demoralize your combatants even after they begin to adapt to the enemy's nature through hard-won experience (those lucky enough to last long enough to acquire said experience, that is). One of the tidbits I absolutely loved about the Battle of Yonkers was the soldiers panicking and screaming about "HEADSHOTS DONT KILL THEM!!!"....when in reality what was happening was they were wrongly assuming that a shot to the head would do the job, when in actuality you needed a much more dialed-in shot to penetrate the brain. The sight of zombies with a crater where their nose and upper lip used to be that are still coming would demoralize many if not trained extensively to combat exactly that sort of thinking. Only when things began to spiral out of control and all hope of confining the Undead Infestation to the geographical region in which it originated was gone, and after a major expenditure of ordinance in extensive bombing campaigns failed to stop the hordes (if insufficient force is deployed against them. I'm a firm believer that the militaries of the 1st World have the weapons to fry any Undead Infestation. Its just a matter of the politicians untying their hands and accepting that sacrifices like major metropolitan areas of major cities being leveled must be made. If the politicians either never come to that determination (as happened during Vietnam with limiting U.S forces from pursuing the enemy north of the 38th Parallel and into Cambodia where their staging areas and much of their infrastructure was located), or come to the realization too late, thats when a zombie apocalypse truly begins. Not because the military lacked the means to effectively combat it, but because the civilian oversight responsible for making policy prevent the military from doing what needs to be done, on the scale it needs to be done. If events get that out of hand, a draft would be immaterial. Not even forming militia units en masse from armed civilians would provide the manpower to fight back effectively if the politicians were to allow the undead ranks to swell with the populations of major cities like NYC, Chicago, Miami, L.A etc. Just my .02

[Ragnarr]

I wrote a story module for a science fiction role-playing game sometime back. The main characters travel to an asteroid mining colony to investigate the disappearance of a corporate officer only to discover that the mining base has been attacked by a virus that... yes you guessed it... turns its victims into flesh eating undead. There's little gravity within the structures and tunnels of the base, so the characters are floating about with their advanced weaponry shooting a hordes of also floating ghouls. Can see how it plays out in my head, but not sure how kool it would be on the big screen.

[Arco]

I remember when I first played Resident Evil 2. There was a part in the game when you had to play Sherry Birkin, the little girl. It was stressful because she had no weapons and you had to run past zombies or avoid zombie dogs. I became so immersed in that game, that when I was playing Claire or Leon, I would kind of feel like I was looking into a real universe where these things were happening. I wondered what that kid was doing while I was plugging zombies or solving puzzles. It creeped me out. Several years later, I saw some Left for Dead fan art that showed a group of kids fighting off child zombies, making their stand on top of a playground jungle gym. I always thought a zombie movie from a kid's point of view would be compelling, not to mention nerve-rattling. Like a Goonies meets NOTLD.

[rongravy]

I wrote a story module for a science fiction role-playing game sometime back. The main characters travel to an asteroid mining colony to investigate the disappearance of a corporate officer only to discover that the mining base has been attacked by a virus that... yes you guessed it... turns its victims into flesh eating undead. There's little gravity within the structures and tunnels of the base, so the characters are floating about with their advanced weaponry shooting a hordes of also floating ghouls. Can see how it plays out in my head, but not sure how kool it would be on the big screen. So are they smart enough to push off to get at the people, or do they just float around in hopes someone comes within reach?

[parky86]

Hi everyone i'm new to the site, I'm part of the British army and get a bit pissed when i constantly see soldiers in zombie films portrayed as the bad guys or are really incompetent. Any way id really like to see a film about a platoon sized group of soldiers defending an under equipped outpost on the outskirts of a major city for survivors to fall back to. Id like the first half of the film to be quite slow and focus on the day to day struggles of the soldiers, like disposing of zombie bodies, looking after survivors, random attacks etc. Towards the mid point id like it to turn into something like Zulu dawn where swarms of zombies try to overrun the outpost soldiers start running out of ammo are forced to used melee weapons and slowly being pushed back. By the end it should be like the american embassy siege in Saigon where helicopters come to save the day. As the last helicopter fly's off, a radio in the outpost is sending out a pre recorded message telling survivors to head to the outpost if they want to survive. I did think that instead of helicopters coming, everyone gets killed and the radio message is played at the end, but i do get sick of films with endings where everyone dies. probably sounds rubbish to everyone else, but what do you think?

[Mike70]

Hi everyone i'm new to the site, I'm part of the British army and get a bit pissed when i constantly see soldiers in zombie films portrayed as the bad guys or are really incompetent. Any way id really like to see a film about a platoon sized group of soldiers defending an under equipped outpost on the outskirts of a major city for survivors to fall back to. Id like the first half of the film to be quite slow and focus on the day to day struggles of the soldiers, like disposing of zombie bodies, looking after survivors, random attacks etc. Towards the mid point id like it to turn into something like Zulu dawn where swarms of zombies try to overrun the outpost soldiers start running out of ammo are forced to used melee weapons and slowly being pushed back. By the end it should be like the american embassy siege in Saigon where helicopters come to save the day. As the last helicopter fly's off, a radio in the outpost is sending out a pre recorded message telling survivors to head to the outpost if they want to survive. I did think that instead of helicopters coming, everyone gets killed and the radio message is played at the end, but i do get sick of films with endings where everyone dies. probably sounds rubbish to everyone else, but what do you think? first off - welcome to HPOTD. there are a lot of good folks and interesting discussions/arguments. i hope you decide to stick around. your idea of a zulu dawn type flick is what i've always wanted to see. sort of a rorke's drift with zombies involved. a huge, grand, epic, last stand of a movie with michael ironside playing a dude so bad that his very scowl incinerates zombies in their tracks. by the way: if i read your introduction right, you are on active duty in the British Army. thank you for your service and sacrifice. i am a vet of the US Army - i got out in 1994 though. anyhoo, welcome to this madhouse. it is always nice to have new blood.