New vs. Old movies

[zombiebabies]

Having watched a number of classic and contemporary zombie films i have found that the more modern films are much better than the older ones on multiple levels. From a technical viewpoint, the more recent films (such as the Dawn of the Dead remake and other films such as 28 days/weeks later) are far superior in terms of special effects, acting, storyline and general production value. The films are concurrently more convincing and thus more enjoyable to watch than the originals. I have however seen the inclination towards the original films across this website and the message boards and was wondering why it was that the preference is towards the classic Romero films rather than the contemporary counterparts? Is it the low budget aesthetic quality of the films that you enjoy? Do you find it a more enjoyable experience to watch zombie movies when they are low budget, unrealistic and dated as that is how the films were originally? Constructive criticism please, i am not trying to attack the originals, just trying to find the reasoning behind the attraction to the classic zombie films.

[Danny]

to put it simply different stroke for different folks applies here, but personally ill use dawn as an example. the 1978 version is still to my mind the best zombie movie there is, the characters can be likable at one point, but disliked at others, they arent just prepackaged as "the one to root for" or vice versa, the story ,set pieces and overall mise-en-scene give a temperament to the film that gets across to its prospective audience that your only seeing part of some great big catastrophe of global proportions. the effects are unusual for todays standards but there not all aged, take the zombie literally losing its head over the helicopters rotor blades, thats a great effect. the swallows egg blue make up does leave it a little more non-threatening, but there's always been a slight humourous interlude every now and then in Romeros zombie movies, from dawn to diary.The story is entertaining form start to finish, thought provoking and still stands the test of time quite well. Then you have the 2004 remake, which fails in my opinion completely. Its a shame because the opening 15 minutes are absolutely superb, but the moment ving rhames appears it just goes down the tube. It introduces far to many characters to keep track of, all of which are taken from the big book of horror movie stereotypes ,and as such you never care about wether any of them live or die by the end, though its fairly obvious who will, unlike in romeros movies were anyone is fair game for zombie chow. the whole mood is that of an mtv summer teen movie made to make a few million back over budget and be done with. it tries to appeal to fans with references and the like but it falls flat overall. The effects are fantastic, and nice to see actual effects and not cgi, which gives some filmmakers the opportunity to be lazy, i was happily surprised this wasn't the case here. it all really starts to go downhill in the end with a "fixin' stuff" montage straight out of the a team, in the original dawn they went to the mall as it could provide them with food and shelter and in the end they were the reason for there own problems, in this they find a modern up to date mall with everything they could need to regroup and come up with a solid idea on how to survive and they choose to leave in busses with hardly any supplies to find a boat that might not still be there, it just wasn't believable, i know i appreciate the irony of making remarks about believability in a zombie movie but overall the plot didn't make sense, the characters were dull and uninteresting and the film just had no sense of direction. they took the mall idea and instead of running with it, left in a corner and then basically asked a bunch of 12 year old boys "what would be bitchin'?" and ran with it.

[3pidemiC]

What the new films lack in character developement, dialouge, and logic, they make for with some big explosions. Most modern films lack any kind of depth. They are looking to appeal to the most people and make the most money. The major studios do not care about being original or being smart with any modern horror film that they make, they just want it to make money. As we saw when Mr. Romero got picked up my a major studio to make Land, the movie studios want it their way, not the directors. And unforuntely, most moviegoers are quite content with that. There are acceptions though, as I don't think all modern horror is bad. I actually enjoyed 28 Days/Weeks Later.

[zombiebabies]

Thanks for the response, some very good points about the remake. what about the original Night of the Living Dead? The film was made for such a low budget, which is very obvious throughout the film. Do you not find the grainy image and sound as well as the budget actors a bit overbearing when watching it? Or is that part of the films' charm? Also what do you think about other early zombie movies such as work by Lucio Fulci, which maintain the low budget feel of Romero's early work. Films such as Zombie Flesh Eaters were made and marketed on the back of the success of Dawn of the Dead. The film has secured itself as a zombie classic regardless of the fact it was made solely for a huge profit return. Basically do people just like it because it maintains the raw, low budget zombie aesthetic?

[DubiousComforts]

The films are concurrently more convincing and thus more enjoyable to watch than the originals. It's hard to reason with this viewpoint since it's the extreme polar opposite of what the history of motion pictures clearly demonstrates. It would be like trying to explain why The Seven Samurai is an important and effective cinematic experience on multiple levels even though it's over three hours long, grainy black and white, in Japanese and contains almost no special effects. All that I can suggest is to watch a film like Let's Scare Jessica To Death and try to claim with a straight face that any one of M. Night Shyamalan's suspense-thrillers is more effective given their over-inflated budgets and stars.

[zombiebabies]

I see your point, i didn't intend to use that statement to represent a broader view on cinema. I was trying to say that within horror, particularly the zombie sub-genre, where the spectacle of gore and the use of suspense and threat of danger are all essential to the film itself, surely a more visually convincing threat would result in a better cinematic experience. the older films tend to break in verisimilitude with dated effects, which in turn breaks the tension and suspense. This is purely looking at the films form todays point of view.

[Yojimbo]

Hellsing is very much on target with his outline of where DAWN 04 falls short in the fans eyes when compared to the original DAWN 78. While DAWN 04 is a glitzy, high-budget, glossy music video meant to appeal to the youth culture of 2004, it relied too much on effects and it's story and characters were predictable, cookie-cutter stamp-outs of very tired Horror Film Character Cliches. While I did enjoy DAWN 04, I think I would have liked it much better if it had not called itself DAWN OF THE DEAD. I think it is an inferior film which is only tangentially related to the original, and I feel that by considering itself a reimagining of the original, it raised the bar too high for itself. Zack Snyder simply does not have the vision or the directorial chops to compete with a director of Romero's level, and the movie attempted to appeal to the MTV generation at the cost of good cinema and storytelling. (Montage sequence of the truck fortifications? What absolute crap!)

[3pidemiC]

While I did enjoy DAWN 04, I think I would have liked it much better if it had not called itself DAWN OF THE DEAD. I think it is an inferior film which is only tangentially related to the original, and I feel that by considering itself a reimagining of the original, it raised the bar too high for itself. I agree completely.

[Danny]

I see your point, i didn't intend to use that statement to represent a broader view on cinema. I was trying to say that within horror, particularly the zombie sub-genre, where the spectacle of gore and the use of suspense and threat of danger are all essential to the film itself, surely a more visually convincing threat would result in a better cinematic experience. the older films tend to break in verisimilitude with dated effects, which in turn breaks the tension and suspense. This is purely looking at the films form todays point of view. see, right theres your problem. ask anyone whos written a horror film, no matter how low budget about gore and they will all give you the same answer:, i believe im quoting john carpenter here "never show the audience the scares, only hint at it, becasue the audiences minds can create visions far more terrifying than puppetry of cgi effects ever could. in film less is allways more impact wise, in video or sound, sometimes in excellent combination. look at funny games, not this ****e remake, but the original from the 70's or 80's , a woman is told by the crooks holding her hostage that she has to choose that they either kill her husband or there child. The next shot is a continuous 10 min shot fof the wife and husband holding each other, tears rolling down there faces in utter silence. thats more powerful than any of those boondoggle torture porn gore fests you get nowadays. an abundance of gore and heavy metal is usually the sign of a bad movie, look at romeros work, you only see corpses for a second, think of land when riley and the spanish guy find the zombie soldiers. its what you dont see thats scary, because no matter how advanced our species becomes our limited night vision means well always be afraid of what lurks in the darkness and the unknown. and props for use of the word tangentially, eloquent like a beeyatch.

[sandrock74]

"Do you find it a more enjoyable experience to watch zombie movies when they are low budget, unrealistic and dated as that is how the films were originally?" Wait...the remakes aren't UNREALISTIC?? I always figured slow moving zombies would be far more "real" than zomibies who run like the Flash. Not to mention the weird barking noise remake zombies all seem to make. By the way, after 10 - 15 years, ALL movies look dated. Even Star Wars.

[AnxietyDilemma]

what about the original Night of the Living Dead? The film was made for such a low budget, which is very obvious throughout the film. Do you not find the grainy image and sound as well as the budget actors a bit overbearing when watching it? Or is that part of the films' charm? I've been a casual lurker since around 1998 and decided to finally register in order to reply to this post, which is something I feel strongly on. Many of my feelings have already been conveyed, but regarding Night of the Living Dead in particular, you ask "Do you not find the grainy image and sound as well as the budget actors a bit overbearing when watching it?" I feel quite the contrary, many of these modern films rely so heavily on special effects and CGI, that I feel that the atmosphere of the film is compromised and thus the cinematic perspective becomes ruined for viewers like me who then become removed from the elements of the environment. The atmosphere of Night of the Living Dead is comparable to none. When I first viewed this movie as an 11 year old which was sometime in 1993, I was immediately sucked into the realm of the film. Beyond that and back onto the point, Night Of The Living Dead plays out like an old documentary so I feel that it is far more believable than any more of these remakes which look like.....well, a movie. These films are so glossy and lustrous that they look too pristine for reality, and thus they don't necessarily seem believable. Furthermore, Night Of The Living Dead is brilliant in that you feel confined to the house with the rest of the characters, as many have said, the movie has a "claustrophobic" element to it. While these people are bickering and argueing, there is a sizeable army of the undead lurking in the shadows just outside of the house, only for the majority of the movie, you're left to imagine just where they might be, and the suspense builds. If I may bore you for a moment, I once wrote something along the lines of that John Carpenter quote which was posted: "Rather than experiencing psychological distress, the only frightening detail featured in these newer movies is the "BOOO" factor in which I am merely startled by a character or object leaping out into the screen unexpectedly. This is simply a cheap scare tactic which is often accompanied by a barrage of flashy special effects to which compensate for the depth which the film is devoid of! I treasure the classics which made me huddle up into the fetal position while my skin crawled as the movie took complete control of my very own imagination and used it as a tool to expose my greatest fears in order to terrify me." Lastly, Romero's zombie movies are about far more than zombies. The zombies at times are a diversion or an excuse to bring a diverse group of people together in the face of a dilemma in order to create conflict of some sort and comment on society in the process. Many of these remakes have missed that point.

[zombiebabies]

Thanks for the responses guys. Hellsing, do you not find though that a majority of zombie films tend to be overtly gory? Dawn of the Dead especially (the original) was considered obscenely gory when it was released and if i remember correctly most of the violence was onscreen. The same goes for Day of the Dead and other non-Romero films such as The Dead Next Door and Fulci's Italian/American collaborations. Nice reference to Haneke's Funny Games by the way, which uses off screen violence very effectively. Forgetting the Dawn remake for a second though, is there anything you find more visually pleasing about the original? This is ignoring plot, cast, etc and focusing on the feel and look of the film. Sandrock, i meant unrealistic in the sense that the effects are often unrealistic by todays standard, rather than the lack of realism in terms of narrative choices. Most films become dated over time but do you opt to ignore the poor effects and take the film for what it is, or still praise the effects as an essential part of the enjoyment of the film?

[EvilNed]

look at funny games, not this ****e remake, but the original from the 70's or 80's , a woman is told by the crooks holding her hostage that she has to choose that they either kill her husband or there child. The next shot is a continuous 10 min shot fof the wife and husband holding each other, tears rolling down there faces in utter silence. You do realize that the Funny Games remake is identical (infact, almost frame-by-frame) with the original, right? They're the same film, same director. Ten years apart.

[Danny]

You do realize that the Funny Games remake is identical (infact, almost frame-by-frame) with the original, right? They're the same film, same director. Ten years apart. it just doesnt sit well with me, what reason was it "remade" then?, cash mostly im thinking.

[bnjmnnt]

I think that the newer zombie films are more accessible and therefore can be argued more easily enjoyed by a contemporary audience as things that are new generally are. The whole notion of what is enjoyable is subjective, personally I enjoy the original dawn of the dead more so than the remake for many reasons, I saw it before the remake for a start and it also happened to be the first zombie film that I had seen so it holds a place in my heart for nostalgic reasons, not only that but in terms of realism I agree with sandrock that slow moving zombies ARE more realistic because they are rotting flesh. Also I would argue that modern day effects are not necessarily realistic, they are more visually pleasing and are what we imagine to be real but more often than not they are no more real than the effects that Romero used in the original.