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Slow

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Death approaches, not with a bang but with a shuffling of feet and a low moan that echoes in the night and chills you right to the bone. Furtively ducking into the shadows of a darkened alley, illuminated by one flickering light at the end, you try to escape the methodical and endless plodding of the undead as they reach out. Right now you have a head start of a good fifty feet and you can walk faster than they can. They've never been seen to run, use a ladder, or use tools, but there are a lot of them, and they don't have to stop to rest.

Halfway down the alley you look up and see that in the flickering illumination of that faulty light more have appeared to block your exit. When you turn back to escape out the end of the alley you entered, the ones that were a good fifty feet behind have caught up and are just now crowding and jostling with rotting arms to fill the space between two brick walls. You're trapped, no way out, as from both ends of the alley your doom approaches one plodding, shuffling, agonizingly slow step at a time.

The slow zombie has been a staple of the genre for years and many, many films because of situations precisely like those described above. This zombie is not the result of some horrible scientific experiment that went awry and left them with super speed and agility, but rather the rotting and lifeless shell of what once was. It is, at the end of the day, the zombie that appears in our nightmares or remains in the back of our heads during the late night walk. What gives us pause turning onto a darkened street in the cold months of winter isn't the thought that something will jump at us from the shadows, but the image of a shambling silhouette in the middle of the road.

The fast zombie has its moments certainly. In action movies where the director has the desire to go for the "jump scare" that frightens for a moment and leaves the audience chuckling afterwards at their own actions, the zombie that could outrun Jesse Owens is a useful tool. It leaves an audience member with a pounding heart for but a second then releases them to enjoy the rest of their day. For the low-grade horror that is lacking in overall "creep factor" or lingering psychological distress, the fast zombie has its place.

Still, "jump" movies can never truly be considered cinema, or even truly horror. True horror can be derived only from the slow zombie. It is, as spoken of above, this zombie that leaves us alone in the middle of the night, wondering. The thought of relentless pursuit that never tires, that comes not at the speed of a bullet but the speed of a nursing home resident, that sends shivers up our spines. Whereas man may tire with time, it is the slow zombie that never sleeps and is free to roam in pursuit long after a normal human has been pushed past their means.

It is not the thought that something is lingering in the trash can to leap at us that truly frightens. It is the thought that there are a lot of somethings just around the corner waiting, things we can not outrun because they are like drops of water carving stone, that makes shiver even after the feature has ended.

Learn more about this author, John Tabler.
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