Horror: Zombie - What is it?

Zombie Horror - What is it?

What is Zombie Horror?

From research, a zombie horror is introduced through many ways, creating the undead circumstance of bodies brainlessly trying to eat live people and the living tries to survive. This is portrayed many years through media, through key tv series like The Walking Dead and even through comedies like Shaun of The Dead. Zombies can be portrayed as horror because they bring out blood and gore when they eat people, for example, Shaun of The Dead, they rip open someone’s stomach to then eating the organs inside the person. This is made through make-up and ends up looking realistic. Horrors are also portrayed as sub-normal, things that would not typically happen in real life, to bring one extreme to another. People tend to get a thrill out of this and some people hate horror films, so the audience are scared either way. 

What productions is there involving zombies?

       

The Walking Dead - This is a zombie thriller. It’s not a horror, granted, however I find that the zombie aspect of this TV series is essential to learn, as this includes good use of death by damage to the brain and the characteristics of the undead. These are called walkers in this case. I feel like the producers of this series took zombies into a different approach, as the tendencies of the zombies are that they die from a hit to the head, and that otherwise they’re alive. These zombies are questioned as still being alive and still having the personalities inside, some characters question the existence of the zombies and if they’re still actually the same person before they turned into brainless cannibals. I feel like the aspect of making them human like and that killing them creates guilt on the character, it makes it more realistic as people wouldn’t kill a zombie and think nothing of it, feelings will come into play with it. I feel this gives good stigma towards a storyline and this did work really well for the script and production of The Walking Dead. 

Shaun of The Dead - This is a comedy. I am revising all different zombie interpretations, and I feel that they took this more lightly, as they didn’t really think of the actual coincidences like The Walking Dead did, however they found this more to be a joke, as it was intended to be a comedy. If this extract we’re going to be making ends up being a zombie horror, then it will have to include tense creations about feeling, to elapse the production of how we interpret zombies.

Overall I find depending on what type of film I want to shoot, I need to consider what kind of portrayal we need the zombies to give, whether that be a human whom life was taken away or a zombie which people believe still has hints of the personality that they once had. 

We’ve got to take into consideration several different versions of zombies, their characteristics along the lines of how they are portrayed, some examples include:

• Having a zombie that is really dumb and has no interpretation on life, lives for food of humans and other animals.
• Clever uses on zombies or the undead, where they create traps to get the living, like in I Am Legend where they create a trap in the central of New York and Will Smith gets hung up. 
• The interpretations of if they remember the living and the relationships they had
• What they look like, do they look deformed? Do they just have blood coming down from their face or do they have deformities like lost body parts?

Overall the characterisation of the zombies are inflicted depending on the type of movie that you’re trying to create. If it is created from the beginning then like in The Walking Dead, then I expect the emotional sight of the characters to be different. However several years from the first infected then it will definitely be different as the death of a zombie won’t be inflicted on the character as much as it would their first kill.