[HowardC]

Taco Head:

Answering your questions as they are asked:

Most of your questions can simply be answered by saying that zombie movies are rarely about the zombies... unless it's a really bad zombie movie. This is why the world is often over-run and there are few surviviors. The movie is about the interaction of the living characters. The zombies could just as easily be aliens, vampires, killer tomatoes, ect...


Well first off there have been several "zombification" techniques over the years, but the virus is the most popular premise because zombie movies aren't about the fear of the undead they are about the fear of a global pandemic.

In high budget films zombies look like a dead body would if it had enough flesh to still support movement. In low budget films zombies look fake because they can't afford to make them look any better and this is compounded by the fact that, unlike a typical "monster" movie, you'll have several makeup applications to do.

If a zombie was all bone and no flesh then it wouldn't be a zombie now would it?

I think your problem is your are looking at the zombie as a monster type to be exploited when in fact it's real purpose is to kind of be a living natural disaster used as a background character for a survival horror story.

While I do agree that the character could be utilized in different ways, I find that zombies would be infinately less terrifying in smaller groups on a managable scale. There have been films that break this rule though and do it well... REC and Evil Dead come to mind. That's another problem with your reasoning btw. You asked why zombies can't be brought back via the occult. Well they can (like in evil dead) but the problem is unless they are the a-typical zombie people see them not as zombies, but as demons in possessed corpses. Proof of this is the fact that you rarely hear people call the deadites zombies.