The Walking (Not Running!) Dead

[Benji]

I know it's probably a tl;dr for some people, but those who enjoy the genre should read it, it makes for an interesting read and really makes me miss stuff like the original Resident Evil for its shuffling and cramped feel rather than the open area and faster infected, whilst they're both fun, there's something far more enjoyable about the creeping fear than the easy 'jump', but Simon Pegg explains better...

As an avid horror fan, I found the prospect of last week's five-night TV zombie spectacular rather exciting. Admittedly, the trailer for E4's Dead Set made me somewhat uneasy. The sight of newsreader Krishnan Guru-Murthy warning the populace of an impending zombie apocalypse induced a sickening sense of indignation. Only five years previously, Edgar Wright and I had hired Krishnan to do the very same thing in our own zombie opus, Shaun of the Dead. It was a bit like seeing an ex-lover walking down the street pushing a pram. Of course, this was a knee-jerk reaction. It's not as if Edgar and I hadn't already pushed someone else's baby up the cultural high street - but that, to some extent, was the point. In Shaun of the Dead, we lifted the mythology established by George A Romero in his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead and offset it against the conventions of a romantic comedy.

Still, I had to acknowledge Dead Set's impressive credentials. The concept was clever in its simplicity: a full-scale zombie outbreak coincides with a Big Brother eviction night, leaving the Big Brother house as the last refuge for the survivors. Scripted by Charlie Brooker, a writer whose scalpel-sharp incisiveness I have long been a fan of, and featuring talented actors such as Jaime Winstone and the outstanding Kevin Eldon, the show heralded the arrival of genuine homegrown horror, scratching at the fringes of network television. My expectations were high, and I sat down to watch a show that proved smart, inventive and enjoyable, but for one key detail: ZOMBIES DON'T RUN!

I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist, but this genuinely irks me. You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can't fly; zombies do not run. It's a misconception, a bastardisation that diminishes a classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I'll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It's hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.

More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.

However (and herein lies the sublime artfulness of the slow zombie), their ineptitude actually makes them avoidable, at least for a while. If you're careful, if you keep your wits about you, you can stave them off, even outstrip them - much as we strive to outstrip death. Drink less, cut out red meat, exercise, practice safe sex; these are our shotguns, our cricket bats, our farmhouses, our shopping malls. However, none of these things fully insulates us from the creeping dread that something so witless, so elemental may yet catch us unawares - the drunk driver, the cancer sleeping in the double helix, the legless ghoul dragging itself through the darkness towards our ankles.

Another thing: speed simplifies the zombie, clarifying the threat and reducing any response to an emotional reflex. It's the difference between someone shouting "Boo!" and hearing the sound of the floorboards creaking in an upstairs room: a quick thrill at the expense of a more profound sense of dread. The absence of rage or aggression in slow zombies makes them oddly sympathetic, a detail that enabled Romero to project depth on to their blankness, to create tragic anti-heroes; his were figures to be pitied, empathised with, even rooted for. The moment they appear angry or petulant, the second they emit furious velociraptor screeches (as opposed to the correct mournful moans of longing), they cease to possess any ambiguity. They are simply mean.

So how did this break with convention come about? The process has unfolded with all the infuriating dramatic irony of an episode of Fawlty Towers. To begin at the beginning, Haitian folklore tells of voodoo shamans, or bokors, who would use digitalis, derived from the foxglove plant, to induce somnambulant trances in individuals who would subsequently appear dead. Weeks later, relatives of the supposedly deceased would witness their lost loved ones in a soporific malaise, working in the fields of wealthy landowners, and assume them to be nzambi (a west African word for "spirit of the dead"). From the combination of nzambi and somnambulist ("sleepwalker") we get the word zombie.

The legend was appropriated by the film industry, and for 20 or 30 years a steady flow of voodoo-based cinema emerged from the Hollywood horror factory. Then a young filmmaker from Pittsburgh by the name of George A Romero changed everything. Romero's fascination with Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, the story of a lone survivor struggling in a world overrun by vampires, led him to fixate on an aspect of the story leapfrogged by the author: namely, the process by which humanity is subjugated by the aggressive new species. Romero adopted the Haitian zombie and combined it with notions of cannibalism, as well as the viral communicability characterised by the vampire and werewolf myths, and so created the modern zombie.

After three films spanning three decades, and much imitation from film-makers such as Lucio Fulci and Dan O'Bannon, the credibility of the zombie was dealt a cruel blow by the king of pop. Michael Jackson's Thriller video, directed by John Landis, was entertaining but made it rather difficult for us to take zombies seriously, having witnessed them body-popping. The blushing dead went quiet for a while, until the Japanese video game company Capcom developed the game Resident Evil, which brilliantly captured the spirit of Romero's shambling antagonists (Romero even directed a trailer for the second installment). Slow and steady, the zombie commenced its stumble back into our collective subconscious.

Inspired by the game and a shared love of Romero, Edgar Wright and I decided to create our own black comedy. Meanwhile, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland were developing their own end-of-the-world fable, 28 Days Later, an excellent film misconstrued by the media as a zombie flick. Boyle and Garland never set out to make a zombie film per se. They drew instead on John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids, as well as Matheson and Romero's work, to fashion a new strain of survival horror, featuring a London beset by rabid propagators of a virus known as "rage".

The success of the movie, particularly in the US, was undoubtedly a factor in the loose remake of Romero's Dawn of the Dead in 2004. Zack Snyder's effective but pointless reboot parlayed Boyle's "infected" into the upgraded zombie 2.0, likely at the behest of some cigar-chomping, focus-group-happy movie exec desperate to satisfy the MTV generation's demand for quicker everything - quicker food, quicker downloads, quicker dead people. The zombie was ushered on to the mainstream stage, on the proviso that it sprinted up to the mic. The genre was diminished, and I think it's a shame.

Despite my purist griping, I liked Dead Set a lot. It had solid performances, imaginative direction, good gore and the kind of inventive writing and verbal playfulness we've come to expect from the always brilliant Brooker. As a satire, it took pleasing chunks out of media bumptiousness and, more significantly, the aggressive collectivism demonstrated by the lost souls who waste their Friday nights standing outside the Big Brother house, baying for the blood of those inside. Like Romero, Brooker simply nudges the metaphor to its literal conclusion, and spatters his point across our screens in blood and brains and bits of skull. If he had only eschewed the zeitgeist and embraced the docile, creeping weirdness that has served to embed the zombie so deeply in our grey matter, Dead Set might have been my favourite piece of television ever. As it was, I had to settle for it merely being bloody good.

[TKz]

Simon Pegg gives me hope that nerds like myself can make it as a Hollywood movie star.

I can't say I totally agree with peg, while what he says with his comparisons between the 'someone jumping out and shouting BOO! and hearing the squeaking floordboards' is totally true, I've always prefered to think of the zombie that can run storyline as sort off a differant type of horror film. In a way. Obviously the core idea is still the same, but with the fast moving ghouls the film is about running away and tend to be the more action based zombie flicks, where as the slow moving zombies tend to be the more dramatic, usually because being trapped up inside somewhere or being able to take breaks from running and shooting gives the characters the oppertunity to develop some and make connections.

Obviously not saying that all zombie films only fall under those two catagories, though.

Not sure if that came out right, but I'm too lazy to try and word it differantly.

[Essa]

I mostly agree with everything he said in there. Being an American and all, I wasn't able to watch Dead Set, but I agree with a lot of the points he was making. It's always been my belief that the best zombie movies have been the ones that have some sort of grounding in reality. Obviously we're talking about corpses rising from the dead and attacking the living, so you can't put too much stock in reality. But I think it's the sense of realism that occurs after the zombie uprising that is important (if that makes any sense). In shit like this, the most fantastical shit that's happening should be that there ARE zombies. It shouldn't be that zombies are chasing after you (DotD 04). It shouldn't be that they're cutting through walls with meat cleavers, or firing guns at you (LotD) and it definitely shouldn't be anything having to with the entire Michonne character (The Walking Dead).

[Skummy]

The main point with zombies is, like Pegg says, they're avoidable. A single zombie is barely a threat, it's the fact that there's hundreds of them that makes them scary - that they just keep coming. Look at Night Of The Living Dead; the real fear comes from the claustrophobia of being trapped in an enclosed space, as the zombies slowly close in on you in ever-increasing numbers - Day Of The Triffids used a similar arrangement, as have countless other horror films and all truly great zombie films - it's about being trapped, and putting off the inevitable - quite literally staving off death.

[Pepsi]

Yeah but I really liked the Dawn of the Dead remake though.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

Yup I agree with Pegg. Zombies should shamble forwards en masse, slowly breaking through defences through sheer lack of tiredness or thought process.

28 Days Later was amazing because it didn't try to use zombies. The Rage was utterly different and the infected reacted differently. Nice.

I prefer slow, plodding horror anyway. I don't get excited by eyes getting popped out and arms chopped off with reckless abandon, I'd rather a movie builds and builds and builds until I'm totally on edge before a well thought out scare or queasy moment (see Audition - mere hints throughout made the end more graphic and distressing).

I'm not excited by the recent Hollywood trend of cheap thrills and quick pops - build characters, let it simmer....That's the best way...Surely...

[apsham]

There's a market for that of course, but there's a much larger market for those people who can put down their beer bongs for two seconds to go see people cutting up zombies and rampantly fucking at the movie theatre, and really as long as there's more money in that...

[therockbox]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/20...zombies-running

Speaking of fantasy worlds, apologies for being:

a) indulgent and b) nerdy, but I have to defend myself here. Last week Simon Pegg wrote a piece for this paper complaining about the running zombies in my preposterous horror series Dead Set. Proper zombies don't run, they walk, he said. I was all ready to write a stinging riposte until I read his article all the way through and realised it was dauntingly well-argued. So I'll keep this short and combative and hope I get away with it.

Simon: your outright rejection of running zombies leaves you exposed, in a very real and damning sense, as a terrible racist. And if the recent election of Obama has taught us one thing, it's that the age of such knee-jerk prejudice is firmly behind us. Still, let's indulge your disgraceful bigotry for a moment by assuming speedy zombies need defending, and list the reasons why ours ran, shall we?

1) I like running zombies. I just do.

2) They HAD to run or the story wouldn't work. The outbreak had to knock the entire country out of action before the producers had time to evacuate the studios.

3) We had to clearly and immediately differentiate Dead Set from Shaun of the Dead, which had cornered the market on zombie-centric horror-comedy. Blame yourself, Simon: if you'd made that film badly, it wouldn't have been so popular, and drawing a distinction wouldn't have been an issue. Each time one of our zombies breaks into a sprint, it's your own stupid talented fault.

4) Even George Romero, the godfather of zombies, bent the rules from time to time. Witness the very first zombie in Night of the Living Dead, which moves at a fair old whack and even picks up a rock to try to smash a car window. Or the two kiddywink zombies in Dawn of the Dead, who burst out of a room and run - yes run - towards Ken Foree. I know you saw these scenes. You know you saw these scenes. And you also know that if this were a trial, this would be the moment where you splutter in the witness box and admit you're completely wrong.

5) Running zombies are, to be frank, cheaper than stumbling ones. You only need one or two to present a massive threat. I love a huge mass of shambling undead as much as the next guy, but we couldn't afford that many crowd scenes. The original plan was to set the final episode six months in the future, by which time the zombies were badly decayed and could only shuffle (although "freshies" would still run), but budget and time constraints ruled this out. Which would you rather see - running zombies or absolutely no zombies at all?

Hmm? HMM?

Face facts. It's time to embrace diversity, Simon. Make room in your heart for all breeds of zombie. Except ones that talk. They're just silly

[Summers]

Ahahaha.

[MDK]

Well said Mr Brooker.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

Point 5 was (Y)

[Colly]

I still feel the most important fact to come from Peggs article is that Kevin Eldon is outstanding.