What makes a good zombie movie? The short answer is ‘zombies’, which might seem obvious, but somehow passes a few so-called zombie filmmakers by. Here are some of the elements you’ll need if you want your zombie film to be a success. This article contains spoilers.
An overwhelming zombie horde
The first thing you need is a lot of zombies – enough to realistically overrun the world. Think of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ or either version of ‘Dawn of the Dead’ – there are hundreds of visible zombies in those films. Compare them to cheaper zombie movies like ‘Let Sleeping Corpses Lie’ and ‘Burial Ground’. These films do not contain nearly enough zombies to credibly end human civilization. Part of the horror of a zombie film has to be that it is irreversible – that the world we knew is gone for good. You need a generous helping of zombies for that to be the case.
Apocalyptic and bleak
The future for humanity should not look rosy at the end of a zombie film. Whether it ends like the original ’Day of the Dead’, with the last three humans flying off into an uncertain future, or like ‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’, with the undead horde streaming into New York, one has to be left with the feeling that things really aren’t going to get better.
Real zombies, not living people with a disease.
Zombies should be undead. They should not be living people with a zombie-related disease. Films like ’28 Days Later’ try to pass off diseased people as zombies. This will not do. These films – and video game franchises like ‘Left 4 Dead’ – belong to a different tradition. Films in which disease turns people into deranged maniacs originated in the early 1970s, in films like ‘The Crazies’ and ‘Shivers’. They are similar to zombie films, but they are not zombie films.
Zombies should not run
The pacing of a good zombie film is important. It should be slow, so as to build up maximum dread. Zombies are re-animated cadavers; their motor skills should be limited. And they are scary because, however inept individual zombies might be, they’ll get you in the end through sheer weight of numbers. A zombie overtaking you in a sprint and jumping on you is scary, sure. But it’s a lot scarier, more grueling and crueler if you’ve spent hours out-running shambling zombies only to eventually collapse with exhaustion and then get overwhelmed and eaten.
Zombies should want to eat the victims
Obviously zombies need a motive for killing, but it can’t be a complicated motive. What could be simpler than wanting to eat you, or perhaps just your brains? There is perhaps a case for lone zombies to rise from the grave to take revenge for some specific wrongdoing, like Peter Cushing in ‘Tales From the Crypt’, but this isn’t what most people want in a zombie film.
Zombies should be a metaphor for something
They’re a huge, seething mass of mindless, decomposing cannibals. Want them to personify empty consumer culture? Communism? Religion? Atheism? The young? The old? Go for it! Zombies are versatile enough to stand for pretty much anything.
Zombies should be physically unpleasant
It would be all too easy to make zombies scary purely because they want to eat you. That is not good enough. They must also look horrible. From the rotting corpses in ‘Day of the Dead’ to the sewn-shut revenants of ‘The Beyond’, the best zombies should induce a shudder of visceral revulsion in the viewer. Get that right and your audience will forgive you a lot. Also, if possible, show them rising from their graves. The scene in ‘The Plague of the Zombies’ where hands start to claw their way through the earth is nightmarishly unpleasant.
Conflict among the survivors
Most of the best zombie films expose the fracture lines in the threatened humans. The survivors in ‘Night of the Living Dead’ can’t stop bickering long enough to save themselves, and by ‘Dawn of the Dead’ society has turned on itself and ceased to function effectively. A good zombie apocalypse accelerates character development, letting you whizz through hours of emoting in about five minutes flat. Characters are then free to shout at one another. A lot.
Gore
Zombies must be seen to tear out guts and brains and eat them. All the best zombie films pull out the latex skin and pig innards at some point, and if you’re not going to do that, you might as well not bother at all. Sure, ‘I Walked With a Zombie’ (1943) didn’t have any blood in it, but they had more censorship in those days. If they’d made it now, it would feature a scene where someone’s eyeballs get clawed out of their head and eaten. Guaranteed.
And here are a few things that you think would be cool but usually aren’t:
Naked female zombies, Nazi zombies, zombies that can talk, zombies using weapons.
Oh, and you don’t have to bother explaining why the dead are rising. That just wastes valuable gut-munching time. Zombie movies are surprisingly difficult to get right, but stick to the elements listed above and your zombie movie will be sure to succeed where others have failed.