Zombie movies: Which are more effective, fast zombies or slow zombies?

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Slow

by John Devera

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Zombies must be and should always be slow. This is a cultural imperative. Revisionist films like Resident Evil or 28 Days are hurting our ability to cope with legions of slow moving eating machines. Okay, okay, let's just look at the issue from different perspectives.

Culturally, our notions of zombies come from Caribbean myths and magic, mixed with the Arab tales of flesh-eating ghouls. Hollywood mashed these two different ideas together and came up with movie zombies, who moved like Caribbean zombies, but ate like Arab ghouls. They scare us, not because they shamble and moan, nor even because they eat brains. No, they scare us because they are dead, and they walk. Dead don't walk. That's the rule. When zombies break this rule, we are scared.

So, which are scarier, fast zombies or slow zombies? Slow zombies are scarier, culturally, because they remind us that they are dead, but they walk. In Night of the Living Dead, the zombies retain some tiny bit of their humanity, even while they are dead. In Shaun of the Dead, we see a parody of this idea in that Shaun takes a long time to figure out that he is surrounded by zombies because there is so little difference between zombies and the uninfected humans. With fast zombies, we are reverting to the purely Arab notion of ghouls, albeit with an implausible scientific methodology for their creation. These zombies are not dead, they are changed. They are monsters, they eat flesh, but they are revanants, and not zombies. We fear them less because they are just like us, except for their unusual strength, their monstrous eating habits and their lack of emotional control. Sounds like professional wrestlers. Actually, their fictional pedigree owes more to H.P. Lovecraft (Read "Herbert West, Reanimator," then watch Reanimator) than Voodoo.

From a different perspective, one of purpose, the idea of slow zombies is far scarier because of the anticipation of death. And not just death, but a death that does not die. That's as close a definition of hell as one can get in a Hollywood movie. Horror depends on gore. Terror depends on fear. Slow moving zombies are scarier because they produce both. The terror of running away from an inescapable enemy is ravishing. The gore produced when fast moving zombie dogs tear into you is cathartic, but certainly not a good technique for developing terror.

So, slow zombies are far better than fast zombies. Slow, stupid zombies allow regular people, those of us not as gifted as Milla Jovovich, to climb stairs and burn them after us, climb on roofs and pull up the ladder, or simply live on a houseboat in the middle of a lake until the epidemic is over. Fast zombies mean that only the superhuman, or Bruce Campbell, might survive.

For our next topic, we shall take on the question of which is more effective in zombie-fighting, a chainsaw, a cricket bat, or an automatic weapon.

Learn more about this author, John Devera.

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