Thursday, October 29, 2009

the Epic debate to end epic debates - Slow or Fast?

Among the great debates of all time, I decided to tackle one of the more prominent ones; no, not Coke vs. Pepsi, Star Wars vs. Star Trek, or Freddy vs. Jason. No, today, we are talking about slow zombies vs. fast zombies. That’s right, the debate over whether our zombies should be sprinting or slow, methodical monsters rages on here today!


Zombies started out with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. The brain-starved monsters were slow, methodical creatures that were the embodiement of fear, and were representing death, unstoppable, unavoidable, and slowly coming for us all. The fear was balanced between the gruesomeness of brain-eating people and the idea that you will never escape the terror.

After several years of Romero movies that formed a legacy, zombies lost a bit of their dread when they learned to talk, use tools, and all sorts of un-zombie-like behavior. When 2002’s remake of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead came out, it featured a much more aggressive zombie with blood dripping from their lips as they sprinted to viciously tear apart their prey. Many horror fans liked the new, more modern zombies as they showed a new, vicious kind of terror not seen before in zombie movies. Now, you have to try and out run something that looked like it could’ve been a sprinter in a previous life. The downside here is that it loses it’s primal fear of death following you.

For my money, the zombie horde closing in slow, and methodical like is much more terrifying, as there is nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide.

So, which to you prefer, the slow, meandering ones, or the running, sprinting ones?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think the fast ones are more realistic. I remember Michael Myers was a slow killer, but you were always wondering, "how did he get there that quickly?"

I like the fast.
-M