No matter how menacing, influential or popular a creature
is, there will always come a time when they will officially stop being scary.
We’ve seen it happen with vampires and werewolves and now, with how obnoxiously
prevalent they are, zombies have joined them. Of course, this doesn’t mean that
they can’t be used in stories anymore; just that the method has to be tweaked
ever so slightly. Where vampires and werewolves used to be monstrous creatures
of the night, they have now become more humanised and treated with the
character in mind more than previously. Zombies, on the other hand, are pretty
much reduced to being scenery. They are nameless, faceless cannon fodder that
the audience can feel guiltless for seeing killed off in bloody fashion, all
the while mainly contributing the setting for a story. Hell, the most popular
zombie-related media right now, The Walking Dead, is far less about the zombies
themselves and more about their presence and prevalence affects the few human
survivors and how they interact and conflict with each other. What I’m
getting at with all this is, even with my own still-lingering affinity for the
genre, I’m not expecting too much from today’s film.
