This past Friday, I spend a couple of precious hours of free time playing a surprisingly fun game, “Left for Dead”, a first-person shooter that plops you in the middle of a scary-ass struggle for survival in a world overrun by zombies. Tons of fun. But I have one big problem with the concept of the game, and with the more recent entrants into the zombie film sub-genre. And I’m going to brandish the clout of Simon Pegg, co-writer and star of top shelf zombie movie *Shaun of the Dead*, to add legitimacy (and perhaps some plagerisim) to my cry: ZOMBIES DON’T RUN!!!
Pegg’s written an article for the [Guardian](http://www.guardian.co.uk) on this very topic. In it he lays out the two chief reasons why fast zombies have cheapened and diluted the power of a really scary monster concept:
Argument 1: Fast zombies aren’t believable
>I know it is absurd to debate the rules of a reality that does not exist, but this genuinely irks me. You cannot kill a vampire with an MDF stake; werewolves can’t fly; zombies do not run. It’s a misconception, a bastardisation that diminishes a classic movie monster. The best phantasmagoria uses reality to render the inconceivable conceivable. The speedy zombie seems implausible to me, even within the fantastic realm it inhabits. A biological agent, I’ll buy. Some sort of super-virus? Sure, why not. But death? Death is a disability, not a superpower. It’s hard to run with a cold, let alone the most debilitating malady of them all.
Argument 2: The slow, relentless zombie makes for a more sophisticated and multi-layered fear
>More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.
Fast zombies make for more exciting video games and can give an audience a startle, but they don’t have the same power to frighten us that the slow zombie and his shuffling, moaning glory.
### Links
[The Dead and the Quick - Simon Pegg](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/04/television-simon-pegg-dead-set)
[Simon Pegg - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Pegg)
As much as I’ve enjoyed the recent movies and games capitalizing on the fast zombie, I definitely agree. I find the original, slow but relentless, Night of the Living Dead zombies to be more creepy, gross, and unsettling kind of scary. The recent trend is following the general change in our society: faster, more immediate “gratification” (or shock, in this case).
I completely agree. I just recently purchased Diary of the Dead (the latest from Romero) and I’m looking forward to it…but I will be curious to see whether George sticks to his original formula of slow zombies. By the way, for what platform do you have the game? I’ve been looking into getting it.
I don’t actually own it. I played it at a friend’s house on the 360.
Mostly agree, though with the suggestion that is hinted at in Simon’s (yes we are on a first name basis)article. Biological zombie is a different thing, “28 days” was a zombie movie not because it had traditional zombies (they did starve to death after all) but because of the structure of the movie and leaving the question of who the “bad guy” is up in the air.
Hmm, the established paradigm of the slow-be zombie is ingrained in much of zombie fiction. I too resisted the fast zombie… until I met them in L4D. The L4D zombies are BOTH slow and fast. Often, they’re found in small groups milling about. Sometimes sad, sometimes angrily hunting, sometimes just poking at a wall as if it was something they used to do. Sometimes they don’t attack!
Then suddenly they go NUTS and in a kind of cool/kind of scary/kind of funny to watch way – they punch you and get in your face… unless they’re the super-infected. Those guys are well-created new types of zombie monsters. Each has its own scary style, sound, look, and behavior.
When all the above are combined, you have interactive zombie fiction bliss. It breaks the old mold, but that’s totally fine in my book!
If you’re on the fence – wait a few months until L4D goes on the cheap shelf, then give em a shot! Literally!