Zombies are Dead :/

[JBC]

Just the word zombie makes me roll my eyes these days and I know I'm not the only one. 

I think one of the reasons zombies lost their appeal to me is because the majority of zombie related media since the late 90's has strove for a level of realism that, while making the stories more believable also cause them to lose their horror.

Explaining the cause of the zombie outbreak as a virus introduces too much of a weakness and fallibility into the creatures. I can't see walking corpses being so terrifying to deal with when I know that they can be easily stopped or avoided.

I prefer the truly evil, intelligent and outright maniacal zombies of Return of the Living Dead to the boring, one dimensional ones of most recent films. When they can't be put down and are out to get you just for the fuck of it it makes ten times as harrowing. 

Nearly unstoppable, smiling rotted corpses with malicious and hateful intent who will leave you alive just so you can watch them play with your guts while they laugh about it. That's way scarier, even if less believable.

This is one of the reasons why I'm a fan of the cheesy House of the Dead zombies. They can use weapons and attack with the intent to kill, not out of a blind compulsion to feed. It's also one of the reasons I'm somewhat disappointed about the return of T-Virus zombies in the upcoming Resident Evil 6. I'm much more threatened by the prospect of thinking and planning, physically capable antagonists.

I really think if zombie media wants to keep an audience it needs to once again reinvent itself (ala Boyle's 28 Days Later) and one of the easiest ways to do this would be to bring back Voodoo zombies in a big way.

Just my 2 cents. I know The Walking Dead is making a pretty big splash and I enjoyed the comics but I'm just not interested in the soap opera aspects of watching the TV series. It may be okay (I haven't kept up with it) but I'll only become interested in anything new if it looks like the zombies will actually scare me again.

[Friendly]

The realism is not new. Night of the Living Dead/Dawn of the Dead did it decades ago. The problem is inflation. We got a zombie inflation in recent years.
After seeing something in dozens and dozens of video games, it simply isn't scary anymore. It all started after the first Resident Evil game and got progressively worse.
Now every other first person shooter has a zombie add-on.

The zombie inflation hasn't just killed them for games, but other media as well. When I recently started watching the second season of The Walking Dead, I found it very boring.

[neorichieb1971]

When I watch the Walking dead (I like it quite a bit) I can't help but think the simple solution to the problem of killing 10,000 zombies in the streets is to put blades on a car or bus. You simply weld them like wings and drive around cutting their legs off. At which point you stroll around at leisure with a pick axe taking them out one by one. Zombies weapons are its legs and teeth, if you take one of those away they are helpless lumps of flesh.

Its not the realism that kills the movies/shows, its the 1 dimensional angle they all seem to adopt. Dusk till Dawn and True Blood are 2 that glorify vampires so I can imagine there is a better angle for zombies than the conventional one.

Resident evil has hardly any zombies in it at all. Its gone kung fu mutants style now with matrix slow motion bullet dodging. Which really spoils it for me. So sometimes a change can make things worse rather than better.

I recently watched a 6 part series in the UK called the Fades. I think I liked that quite a bit, even though it had a rather weird tone to it. But it kept on being interesting throughout.

[neorichieb1971]

The zombie inflation hasn't just killed them for games, but other media as well. When I recently started watching the second season of The Walking Dead, I found it very boring.

Thats more to do with budget I think. When I watch a TV series I generally put slow pace, lack of locales and storyline to be a budget thing.

[TrevHead (TVR)]

I still like Zombies in games but yeah a striaght game with zombies doesnt cut it. Looking forward to Suda's Lollypop Chainsaw

edit: I've never really found zombies (in film) to be scary, to me they'll always be badly acted B movies. That's probably why I never got into "serious" zombie flicks like Walking Dead. 28 Day Later didn't break the 4th wall for me but that's because they're not true zombies and they run, not shuffle around.

[njiska]

The zombie inflation hasn't just killed them for games, but other media as well. When I recently started watching the second season of The Walking Dead, I found it very boring.

Thats more to do with budget I think. When I watch a TV series I generally put slow pace, lack of locales and storyline to be a budget thing.

Budget thing or not, it was a god damn awful experience. The first season was tight and kept things moving, but the second just drew the plot out and as stated above, pushed the soap opera limits. The whole Shane arc should have been over in less than six episodes. I am not filled with a great deal of confidence for the third season.

As for the issue of Zombies in general, the problem is also as stated above, over saturation. Just like Twilight has killed interesting vampires for the foreseeable future, the glut of zombie movies and games has killed their appeal. We need a break from them for another decade or so.

[BryanM]

Oversaturated, yes. The fad will wane eventually and we can go back to... I dunno. Reality based game shows. Or non-anthropomorphic aliens...

When I recently started watching the second season of The Walking Dead, I found it very boring.

The problem here is that The Walking Dead is a book, and you have to read it, instead of glaring at the pages.

Unless you meant Prison Break 2.

Prison Break 2 isn't very good.

[Zerst]

The problem as I see it is that zombie media almost completely abandoned the psychological aspect of "oh god these are humans I'm killing" and "my best friend is being turned into one of them" in favor of movies about escaping from bad hiding spots with cheap bloodbaths thrown everywhere.

[Age of Kings]

I've just gotten tired of it because they've become overused.

[blackoak]

Just the word zombie makes me roll my eyes these days and I know I'm not the only one. 

I feel that way too. 70s Dawn of the Dead is still the seminal zombie film for me, though there's been a few other good ones. For me its the typical pattern of kitsch-i-fication that has encumbered many other genre tropes (thanks internet) to the point where namedropping these things is like some club membership, and the actual interesting substance behind the idea gets way, way lost. My enthusiasm for the HP Lovecraft film fest got lost awhile ago in this way...

[Dragoforce]

Zombies are not only dead, they're embarrassing. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1588173/

[JBC]

Zombies are not only dead, they're embarrassing. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1588173/

It was only a matter of time before they got to zombies