Heh. Where did you think I was going with that last post of mine, anyway? No, zombies don’t have to be scary, but they should be, shouldn’t they? Otherwise, where is the fun?

Take a look at this video:

Now . . . I know it’s a music vid, but look at those guys! At a time before CG effects and all sorts of special posh crap was out there to make things look real that aren’t. Scary as, right? And imagine the time this mini film was made. People weren’t quite so jaded and ‘oh, I’ve seen it’ as they are now. The Exorcist is a good example of a film that just doesn’t have the same punch it did as when it was made.

My absolute favourite zombie films have to be the Resident Evil franchise. And not just because of Milla Jovovitch (though she does help). No, it’s the way these zombies are created and presented that gives me the chills. I don’t care about the gore or the splatter or the blood. That’s not what bothers me. But the idea of something that just keeps coming no matter what you hit it with is something scary beyond all belief. I mean, what do you do against something like that? When punching/kicking/biting/shooting has no effect?

*sidenote!*

In fact . . . that happened to DSB at the last LARP she attended. Another faction (The Legion) had hold of a member of the Summer Stars and surrounded her, pulling bits of her body for ‘samples’ to ‘study’ because the Stars as a faction had been ‘rude’ and ‘uncooperative.’ Pfft! 😉 Anyway, the Legion had clustered around this drow and no matter what the Stars hit them with (swords, clubs, axes, arrows) none of it had any effect until they were done.

Scary. As.

So zombies . . . unless you hit them juuuuuust right, no amount of pain will stop them. And they want to eat you. Every bit of you. Because that’s all they know.

Scary.

In Resident Evil, you see how characters you once identified with (even on a small scale) have been mindless, soulless eating machines, ready to tear your guts out through your nose if you stumble while running from them. It’s a sucker-punch to the brain let me tell you that.

28 Days Later . . . another excellent film, not only because of the zombie menace, but because what that situation does to the human beings who are unaffected. It turns them into monsters almost as bad as the creatures they’re hiding from.

Oooh yes. Zombies are great because, whether writers/film makers intend to or not, including them in a movie/book forces the consumer to consider the basest part of their own human nature, often in terrible, nearly impossible conditions.

Eeeuuughhh!*shudder*