World War Z: Do We Need Another Schlock Zombie Flick?

 

Even though the film has not been released yet and we’ve only viewed 2 minutes 27 seconds of footage, the trailer for World War Z – the highly anticipated adaptation of Max Brooks’ popular zombie novel – has a weight of disappointment.

The first thing that becomes majorly obvious when watching the trailer is the emphasis on special effects – whilst movies always need to look great, the many CGI zombie-crowd shots, explosions and helicopter sequences reek of Resident Evil style shlock-horror filmmaking. We’ve seen this so many times before, and it’s instantly forgettable. Bad zombie films are churned out all the time. Do we need really just another zombie movie?

There’s no doubt that zombie media has had a massive influence in our popular culture of the last 40 years since George A. Romero’s iconic Night of the Living Dead. Something about zombies that has really shaken us up, and delved right under our skin. As horror movie villains, they’re particularly intriguing. Unlike the sinister Dracula, psychotic Leatherface, vengeful Sadako Yamamura, or vicious Freddy Krueger, zombies have no malice, nor mercy. They know nothing except their need to feed on human flesh (or brains). They don’t make evil plots or leave threaten people. They are relentless, mindless and cannot be reasoned with. Perhaps our collective kinemortophobia – fear of the undead – comes from fear of disease, which particularly hit us in the 1980s (whilst zombie movies were on the rise) with the increasing awareness of HIV and other fatal diseases. Maybe it stems from a particularly universal phobia, the fear of death. Whatever it is they do to make our nerves rattle, the most memorable zombie flicks always tie in some kind of other conflict as a metaphor.

The original novel of World War Z has been praised for its balance between zombie entertainment and inspiration from history that allowed the book to become a platform of social commentary, and it would be in the movie’s best interest to follow suit. Some of the best zombie movies, books and games have done the same. Although his recent works show he has succumbed to no-brainer (excuse the pun) zombie flicks, George A. Romero’s earlier works – Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead all tied in with themes of racism, consumerism and war, respectively. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and the popular media franchise The Walking Dead also explore themes of social hierarchy and how humans are fighting each other more than the zombies, demonstrating an interesting understanding of the human condition and psyche as different personalities struggle to work together to survive as one unit. The video game series Resident Evil originally explored themes of genetic experimentation, stemming from the same era as cloning and modern genetic research really kicked off in real life (the game came out around the same time of the cloning of Dolly the sheep) and perhaps expressed some of our concerns about the ethics of this kind of work. Since then, Resident Evil deviated into themes of government conspiracy and more recently terrorism, which are constant worries of society today. These ties to social concerns add an extra dimension to the already terrifying zombie infestations, making them feel all the more real to us as an audience.

The same aforementioned franchises minimise crowds of zombies. When so many horror flicks focus on giant overhead shots of the undead, we struggle to fear them when we can’t even feel the full impact of meeting just one zombie. And one zombie is all it takes to kill you. Isn’t that terrifying enough? Once one relentless zombie is after you, more follow. Like a virus, working as one unit. Whilst crowd shots of zombies can emphasis this, they should be used minimally. There are some iconic zombies that have made an impact on us as viewers. Hannah (‘Bicycle Girl’) from The Walking Dead. That first hungry zombie munching on Kenneth in Resident Evil, turning around and growling at you. The zombie girl in Night of the Living Dead who killed her parents. These images of their monstrous, feral faces are what stick with us, not CGI overhead shots of tiny specks running around a devastated city. And especially not CGI overheard shots of tiny dots piling up on top of each other in some kind of ridiculous termite-like mass, as the World War Z trailer showed again and again.

Then comes the big debate – fast or slow zombies? Whilst zombie purists such as George A. Romero and Simon Pegg will always tell you that the undead are best when slow, Spanish indie horror [REC] – arguably the most terrifying and effective found-footage horror film ever made – and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later both met with considerable critical success and demonstrate the punch that fast zombies can have. Although in both those cases, the creatures are alive and heavily infected rather than undead, but work in a similar manner to undead zombies – relentless, and after your flesh. Fast moving undead zombies, as in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead reimagining or in Resident Evil 6, are always subject to mixed reception from audiences. Some can’t fathom how a rotting corpse has the capacity to move quickly. With World War Z seemingly heading in the fast undead direction, can they really scare us this time or will they simply be fodder for expensive effects shots?

And perhaps most importantly in zombie movies, you need a great cast of characters – something many filmmakers have forgotten, expecting gored-up undead to entertain us enough. We need a group to empathise with, to care about, who we cheer for as they struggle through life in the apocalypse. We will never forget characters like The Walking Dead’s Rick Grimes, who has to make some of the most difficult decisions a parents – or indeed, a human being – will ever make, and makes the necessary yet unpleasant sacrifices required to help the group survive; [REC]’s terrified and naïve reporter Angela or the original Dawn of the Dead’s Peter who does what he needs to to protect others in his unit (and kicks a considerable amount of butt along the way). We don’t need to remember characters like Resident Evil’s Alice, who exists as a bridge between all the games’ stories but also as pure gratuitous eye candy – there to give the audience a fix, but not to make a real impact on the story or characters (resulting in five pretty poor movies). Nor do we remember the forgettable casts of many other generic zombie flicks like Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead.

From the trailer, it looks like World War Z will become just another effects movie with non-existent frights replaced by the increasingly frustrating ‘jump scare’ – which is now entirely predictable and formulaic – and mindless, gratuitous gore that in attempting to shock the audience fails to have any real impact now that modern horror viewers are completely used to bloody horror movies, thanks to the likes of franchises such as Saw, Hostel and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Unless there’s a really original or well-executed zombie kill, the violence can only really make an impression when it’s against a character we really care about, so the emotional attachment makes the act shocking and upsetting. But let’s hope World War Z will do something different, and won’t waste the talent of Brad Pitt… or the zombies.

World War Z will release in the UK on 21st June, 2013.