Creature Comforts: Zombies

The species jumping is why I loved Dead Sea. It meant there was no hope. When you have to face off against zombie tigers and whales, you are screwed.

Just a side note, I think the first running zombies were actually in Return of the Living Dead, not 28 Days Later.

Zombies scare me. I saw "Night of the Living Dead" as a child when it first came out and it terrified me so much I never watched another zombie movie until a few years ago. That's what? 40+ years?

But yeah, Brian Keene is writing some fun stuff.

THe zombies on film originally worked because to audiences, they just looked so disturbing and inevitable. THe may shamble, but they don't stop to rest or sleep. Once that effect lost it's impact, they switched to the special effects gross out with ripping apart bodies and eating guts.

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I agree--the effectiveness of zombies in horror movies has a great deal to do with the visual impact.

I've struggled to build and sustain this sort of inevitability in my own writing when dealing with zombies. My device for my latest WIP was to make them ambush predators. It seemed like a departure, so I stopped calling them zombies.

The scariest aspect of a zombie story to me has little to do with the zombie itself. The rapid descent of humanity frighten me. Society crumbles and many times so do moral codes and ethics.

Don't get me wrong, getting eaten alive is very scary, but completely losing your safety with no where do run, terrifies me.

I prefer slow moving zombies because they so often cause the characters to not recognize the danger and this causes them to be careless. To me, a good zombie story revolves around the characters in the situation and how they deal with it (hopefully not in sterotypical ways-barf). Also, using Romero's zombie rules, every person around you is a potential threat. All they have to do is die. There is not need for transmission of the disease. You die, you become a zombie. Imagine living in a hostile world where the only truely safe place you can be is alone and yet surviving alone is near impossible. Yikes.

I liked Cell overall, but did find the last bit somewhat contrived. The actual ending was pretty good though I thought.

Keane's The Rising and Dead Sea are pretty good, but The Rising also uses a supernatural force as the operating principle behind the plague (The Conqueror Worms, while not a zombie novel, also started pretty good, but seemed contrived in the end).

I've got a start on a WIP that uses nanotechnology as the impetus for the plague and most of the book is supposed to take place at a national laboratory where the outbreak first occurs and focusing on security team and survivors battling to fend off the hordes at the gates and clustering against the fences to give the surviving scientists time to find the cure.

I do agree that fast zombies are a bit of a turn off. The slow shambling ones that a person can underestimate and thus fall victim to are more interesting (in my WIP the zombies are slow, shambling, but capable of planning and springing ambushes on the survivors (I'll be giving them a predatory mentality - not capable of much logical thought, but still driven by the reptile part of the brain in a manner like current theory has the predaceous dinosaurs).

comradebunny said:

The species jumping is why I loved Dead Sea. It meant there was no hope. When you have to face off against zombie tigers and whales, you are screwed.

Just a side note, I think the first running zombies were actually in Return of the Living Dead, not 28 Days Later.

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Ahhh.. Forgot about that movie, for some reason it didn't impact me like 28 days. Probably the comedic overtone. Every stinking one of the "infected" ran in 28 days and it freaked me out. I was alone in a hotel room and didn't know anything about it except it was zombie.

The first zombie movie to freak me out (I don't even know the title), had nazi zombies wearing black goggle. THe people escaping destroyed a bridge and this thing walked into the river. The camera just stayed focused on the river and about 15 seconds later, the white hair broke the surface.

They showed this on regular TV in the middle of a saturday afternoon!! I was scared for years.

The first zombie "movie" to scare me was the video for Thriller. It scared the hell out of me and gave me nightmares about that final zombie chasing me. It also had Vincent Price's voice, so how could you go wrong.

I watched the original Night of the Living Dead shortly after that and I was hooked on zombies. I was still in elementary school.

rsmccoy said:

The first zombie movie to freak me out (I don't even know the title), had nazi zombies wearing black goggle. THe people escaping destroyed a bridge and this thing walked into the river. The camera just stayed focused on the river and about 15 seconds later, the white hair broke the surface.

They showed this on regular TV in the middle of a saturday afternoon!! I was scared for years.

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Shock Waves, 1977. It has Peter Cushing. Good stuff, even if it has some serious moments of "wtf just happened? That made no sense!"

Now that is a creepy image.

beezle said:

Shock Waves, 1977. It has Peter Cushing. Good stuff, even if it has some serious moments of "wtf just happened? That made no sense!"

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I haven't seen it since I was a teenager, thank you for KEEPING ME UP ALL NIGHT!!

beezle said:

King did write a zombie short story in the 80s titled Home Delivery, with proper end of the world climbing-out-of-the-grave-to-eat-you zombies.

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King actually wrote that for a book that was made to pay homage to George Romero's dead series. Hence the 'zombie rules'. But speaking of that and Cell, I must say I also consider Pet Sematary to be a 'zombie story'.

I have a zombie novel in the works, though I expect next to no one would consider them zombies as I don't follow any of the 'rules'.

I agree that Pet Cemetary can be looked on as a zombie novel. They were dead and then came back to life. They didn't eat anyone, granted, they were just insane killers.

I consider myself a Romero zombie type of person. I do, however, enjoy it when I encounter a new interpretation that is interesting without being annoying. For example, Dead Sea was interesting, House of the Dead was annoying (and all copies of the movie should be burned).

I'm halfway through Book of the Dead, which is a collection of short zombie stories. Including

beezle said:

King did write a zombie short story in the 80s titled Home Delivery, with proper end of the world climbing-out-of-the-grave-to-eat-you zombies.

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Exactly.

Some of them are downright unsettling. Some of them rather meh.
But definitely worth a look if you see a copy.

comradebunny said:

The scariest aspect of a zombie story to me has little to do with the zombie itself. The rapid descent of humanity frighten me. Society crumbles and many times so do moral codes and ethics.

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That's why I like zombie fiction.
"Well, society's collapsed. Let's get looting"

Bmwhtly said:

"Well, society's collapsed. Let's get looting"

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Yep, I think that would be the reaction of many, although I think there can be a totally different reaction for men and women. It adds another layer of terror for me. I've read way too many scenes in novels, short stories, and in films where women are instantly reduced to property. *shudder*

Society crumbles and I gotta watch out for religious nuts, crazy people, egomaniacs, rapists, psychos, racists, sexists, and all other concoctions of human stupidity. On top of all that, there flesh eating zombies. How screwed up is that?

When I was ten years old, an anthology called BOOK OF THE DEAD edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector came out and rocked my world. It had a foreword by George Romero and stories by a ton of greats like Stephen King, Robert McCammon, Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Laymon, etc, etc. I loved that book. And yet, for some reason, I've never written a zombie story, even though I enjoy them a lot.