On a Fatal Flaw of Zombie Movies
by Erik Bates on November 15, 2010

Scott Hardie | November 15, 2010
I'm with you all the way. I would love to write a Scream-style screenplay for a zombie movie in which the characters are aware of the conventions, which makes surviving easier in some ways and harder in others.

For me, the breaking point was Land of the Dead, a Romero flick in which the entire planet had been taken over by the walking dead, and a few communities of humans lived in places like fortified high-rise towers. (spoiler alert for a five-year-old movie) There's a scene where a gang rides out into the surrounding wasteland for supplies, and their member John Leguizamo is bitten by an attacking zombie. They drive off with him, assuming the bite is nothing. Then a few scenes later, they're shocked when his festering bite wound turns him into a zombie and they have to battle their own friend.

There's just no way. People living in a society completely transformed by the walking dead and the dangers they present would recognize the significance of the bite mark and kill him right there, before he changed, or at best leave him to walk the streets with the other undead. They wouldn't be cruel about it; they'd say their goodbyes first and make the death as merciful as possible. The victim himself would want this, knowing what change is coming. If I recall correctly, 28 Days Later sidestepped this by having the change into a raging zombie happen within seconds of being infected, but it's a cliché in plenty of other films.

That's where the zombie-wise screenplay comes in. The characters living in a world of zombies have created certain rules that they survive by. One of the rules is, if you get bitten, your friends must mercifully execute you before you change. Period. From there, you can begin to play with the rule - for instance, a character who hides his bite wound from his friends because he can't bear for them to kill him, or perhaps a lover who chooses to infect himself/herself too because the thought of mercy-killing his/her mate is too hard to bear. Zombie movies keep aspiring to these kinds of advances, as Romero's films keep building on the ones that came before, but so far they just haven't seemed to break free of the standard conventions.

Lori Lancaster | November 16, 2010
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