Originally Posted by
Wyldwraith
Not wanting to war over/debate it again either, but..
I've genuinely tried of late to see this whole "Running Zombies = Ramped up tension/terror" theory from the perspective of its believers. While on a basic level I can see how, if separated from everything I've come to know and love about my favorite zombie flicks, running zombies can certainly be more individually dangerous....I think that's at the root of my problem with them. A, as in ONE zombie SHOULD be pathetically easy to elude in a wide open space, and SHOULD be simple for anyone with the nerve to crack their skull open to neutralize. It's part of what (IMO) creates the US Vs Them gulf so important to the survival aspect of survival-horror. Conventional death, and subsequent rudimentary and ultimately flawed reanimation of a dead person just doesn't lend itself to the notion of the dead person becoming substantially deadlier in undeath than they were in life. Unlike vampirism, which presumes to make over the temporarily deceased individual into an Undead PREDATOR so different in so many ways from humans as to seem as if they've become a different species, the zombie-like reanimation process has no such in-built platform for the now-reanimated corpse to do anything more than what instinct and a haphazard selection of a minority of mental processes would make it capable of.
More simply, the very act of making say, one zombie a substantial threat to three or four armed men well-acquainted with the logic-defying phenomena of the dead rising, who have armed and organized themselves accordingly, SEVERS the zombie's tie to logically needing to move in first groups, then herds, and finally hordes in order to "win." In a world where the audience understands within fifteen minutes of the movie beginning that a) Everyone who dies reanimates as a zombie unless penetrating cranial trauma occurs, and b) That said zombies retain their full speed, strength, agility PLUS gaining the endless stamina of the undead, the only question logically remaining is if the government has the means to stuff enough humans into a massive and completely, permanently self-sufficient bunker to maintain enough genetic diversity for the species to continue, and then saturation-bomb the entire globe with the most destructive weapons man possesses until literally NOTHING remains on the surface but scorched earth and spots where even the earth has been fused into glass and such...
Why? Because that audience knows that would be the only imaginable way frail, limited humanity could "win" against legions of the dead with all our physical capabilities and then some, who can only be stopped by head trauma or complete bodily destruction. Quite simply, those interested in watching zombie movies are by now quite familiar with the "realistic" results of running, agile zombies. Ie: The few remaining humans doing whatever possible to reach a geographically impenetrable sanctuary, only to have said group of survivors slowly whittled down by stupid errors, surprise attacks, heroic self-sacrifices and such, until only a small handful remain to board the helicopter, get on the boat, etc etc....and then watch the writers and directors in what's supposed to STILL be an "edgy" fashion despite having been done many times over, kill those few remaining survivors off so the dead triumph is complete.
Make no mistake, Running Zombies lead to binary-choice endings. All humans die, or some highly improbable deus ex machina reaches out across the entire globe as definitively as the zombie uprising did to begin with, and "saves" the minority % of humanity remaining. Why? Because there's no logical result of such running undead but the extinction of humanity or the approximate sanitation-by-firestorm globally to end the threat. Runners become a threat very similar to H.R Geiger's Xenomorphs from Alien, Aliens etc. As Ripley famously stated when confronted with a planet likely overrun by said creatures "Nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure."
Now, if that's what you want. Various end-the-world mechanisms to deny the zombies victory, or the excruciatingly hopeless slide of humanity into extinction, then Runners are probably for you. If, on the other hand, you're interested in the exploration of a still-horrifying, but rationally more "beatable" undead threat, you recognize that in order to escape the binary-ending repetition that the individual zombie by definition cannot be allowed to be simultaneously an infectious AND a physical force-multiplier. Once it's physical capabilities are on par with the horrific capacity to convert the living by superficial contamination into still more zombies there simply isn't any reasonable way to present the scenario as anything but a siege-movie or an outright T.E.O.T.W.A.K.I (The End of The World As We Know It).
Honestly, I think this conundrum right here, as outlined, defines the (ironically) greater limitations of plot-variation when the zombies aren't individually weak and relatively easily overcome individually.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks