Born to Run

For those of you who have been around for my anti-zombie essays, I’ve got a concession to make.

I saw the Dawn of the Dead remake over the weekend and as much as I’ve not liked zombies in the past, this was a good, scary movie.

Sure, the movie has perhaps an overlarge cast and limited emotional resonance, but this was not only a good movie, but had the first scary zombies I’ve ever seen.

Traditional zombies, as I’ve said before, just don’t seem like real threats to me – too slow, too boring. But zombies that run at you, and just never stop, are very scary things.

Imagining myself standing there with a zombie running at me, I can forsee feeling completely frozen – not necessarily with fear, or with a fear so primal and deep that it hardly registers as fear at all – and overhwhelmed by the very fact of this thing running at me. Having so many impulses firing at once (is that thing dead? why is it running? is it bleeding? I should RUN! what’s going on? etc. etc.) might just overwhelm me, paralyze me, kill me.

Now that’s scary.

So, chalk one up for the zombies – but only if they’re running.

And now that we’ve got this revised (and, if I’m not mistaken, revolutionary) take on zombies, I’ll be excited to see what filmmakers do with these new zombies.