The Running of the Dead, Part 1
Christian Thorne, closing Part 1 in quite a wonderful way:
…The late ‘80s and ‘90s were a fallow period for zombie movies, so the few fleet corpses of the Reagan era hadn’t really led anywhere, and this allowed the press to feel, when 28 Days Later was released, that its creatures were next-generation zombies. We remembered zombies as slow, and these weren’t. But then does that change really make a difference? I mean in some sense, it’s obviously an improvement. Boyle and Snyder ditched that staggering, shambolic gait, which was always the easiest thing to parody about zombies. The new zombies were limber and belligerent, and to that extent just scarier. To get caught by a Romero-style zombie always required a signal lapse of attention. One could reasonably conclude, then, that fast zombies were an improvement in horror-movie technique, a kind of engineering advance. But other than that, I mostly walked away from Dawn of the Dead thinking that the change from slow to fast was neutral, that it didn’t actually change any of the meanings that a zombie could carry. It’s was like putting a new engine in a chassis you really like: Romero with more oomph, Romero all souped up. And the Dead shall book.
[evidently later]
I was completely wrong. It turns out that up-shifting the zombies from slow to fast changes everything; it entirely re-frames the zombie movie as a genre. I find this utterly fascinating. It seems like a small change, little more than a tweak, like defragmenting your hard drive. And it leaves nothing untouched.
I shared this before, a while ago. I saw somewhere there was a parts 2-4 added, so I revisited part 1 to refresh the arguments. And then spent a vacation finding the phrase, “And the Dead shall book” surfacing in my thoughts and creeping me out in humid, background-noise-filled Mexico nights.
