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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1619 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What's a good HORROR movie?

I've gotten into some pretty deep, pretty intellectual discussions about zombie movies. As a screenwriter, there's a point where you feel like shitting out a zombie movie. Probably because zombies are so fun - they play right into our anxiety in crowds, our road rage while commuting, and our general displeasure with "humanity" as a gestalt, regardless of how we feel about humans.

The thing is? "zombies" are basically Alzheimer's patients. They're slow, they're shambling, and they pose a physical threat only if there are a lot of them. So all of a sudden we have "running" zombies at which point it's basically just "fear of crowds". except they always have to be idiots, too. You can't write a zombie anything without it turning into "the zombies are handled, what shall we fight about for the other 2/3rds of the movie" because as movie antagonists go the only adversary worse than zombies is trees (lookin' at you, M Night).

Best zombie movie ever made is Aliens. Because the zombies are an actual threat. George Romero (who wrote "ghouls", not zombies) had ghouls as stand-ins for our hatred of humanity and our tendency to fuck each other over from the get-go. Since not enough people got it the first time, he set Dayn of the Dead in a goddamn mall. That dead horse was beaten in '78. Even that is a bad reading of a 1954 Matheson novel.

If I had any input I would put Orfanato at the top of your list, followed by The Devil's Backbone. The stuff I worked on is terrible in every possible sense and you will grow stupider by watcing it. And I say that as the only person paid to work on Birdemic 2 (who was also smart enough to leave his name off it).