Conventions: Iconography of Zombie Horror

Conventions: Iconography

What makes a zombie horror what it is?

A zombie horror is made of two things, a stigma and story behind it and the zombies trying to make life more difficult by doing so. The generic conventions of the zombie horrors involve blood and gore, which makes the audience really interested in viewing the production. Also another generic convention is the stigma behind it as zombies usually tend to be related to the end of the world, people loose their hopes thinking that their destiny has ended like this. This brings emotions into the storyline which creates a bigger and better stigma. 

The Walking Dead has a huge storyline, as many stem off each other, creating multiple main characters rather than one, this is good because as this is a TV Series, it introduces a bigger interest in each storyline, and this allows a good cliff hanger at the end to be used because then people want to watch more to see what happens to the person/people.

I Am Legend, this is good also because this is about a man and his dog that goes through the apocalypse time as they try and sort out the cure to why zombies are what they are. This is also good because they don’t figure out the cure in the end, and the dog also dies. This is really touching towards the audience because of the fact that they are able link emotions to the character, it makes it feel better, as if they’re inside the actual film. 

Iconography of Zombie Horror, what does it look like?

Zombie horror has an iconography of being gory and gruesome, mainly face being bloody and gory, some include aspects like being in a hospital gown. The zombie aspect is shown as being dead emotionally, walking in a very broken pace and slowly. Usually they turn from the dead through getting out of a coffin or through getting bitten. They are killed through getting stabbed in the brain or shot in the heart. In the newer films though they tend to be shot through the head because it stops them from moving through immobilising them. 

It’s tend to be useful to make sure that the zombie looks like they’ve been through everything with torn flesh and clothing, it makes the realism more-so than it would just having white face paint. The mise-en-scene element here is really important to use so that we get the implication that they’ve been through a lot of pain yet they’re still alive, to show the resilience that the characters would typically have.

Dressing up the clothing shouldn’t be too difficult, however the make-up can be used several ways, I have looked online and taken some tutorials which explain in depth of how they work and how you could build your face to look like a zombie double.

Using liquid latex and gelatine to create the scar and blood works really well, however it can come out with a messy outcome if you aren’t careful with what you’re doing. I looked on WikiHow and I got this link: http://www.wikihow.com/Apply-Zombie-Makeup

 This does look really good. However it will be a lot of costing if we’re going to create multiple different zombies, this will include the contact lenses which change the eye colour.