BSA 204 W10 : Thoughts on Some Zombie Movies

I was thinking yesterday and the day before a lot about zombies and zombie movies, and whether or not there is a new way to do them that could be interesting. There has been such an over-saturation of the genre that sometimes when I have ideas leaning towards the undead walking the Earth then I actively change it to avoid that specific genre.

A recent example was the trucker idea from this week, I wondered if the resident evil segment has been extended if it would have made for an interesting story to see the zombie apocalypse through the eyes of a truck driver. Don't think this specific example has been done before but it just felt all too familiar and I changed it to something more supernatural.

There are so many perspectives to take in a zombie apocalypse that it seems like there should be infinite content to mine, and yet there's been so much done with this that it feels old. Now to make a zombie movie seem interesting you really have to do something that hasn't been exploited before, like Zack Snyder's upcoming Army of the Dead which is a heist during a zombie apocalypse which is genius.



I am into contained thrillers at the moment so I watched the Canadian zombie movie Pontypool (2008) which is set entirely in a radio station which reports on the unfolding apocalypse.

I thought the movie was alright, it had a very good lead performance and tried some new things with the genre, but most of its success lies in the first half of the film, where little snippets of what's going on prove to be much scarier than when the zombies actually pop on screen. Weird considering that is something I found myself waiting to happen the whole time.

I liked how it felt like the movie Network but taking place in a zombie apocalypse, a cool idea to take a successful Oscar type movie set-up and throw it into this genre. I also love the idea of zombies mimicking sounds, it was a bit overdone here with the logic behind the infection, but its thematically appropriate to the setting which is doing much more than most zombie movies.



I thought about zombie movies in general and had a small thought about World War Z which I feel isn't a very good movie, but it did try something interesting in that it feels like a combination of many different zombie films in one. You have the large sale disaster but also the smaller thriller sections.



This upcoming movie also does something different with the genre, simply by changing the director and ultimately completely altering the style. It's by Jim Jarmusch, known for his talk-heavy indie comedies. The film also re-introduces the idea of zombies being able to remember things from their prior life and they gravitate towards these things.

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So I had an idea for a zombie movie after getting some inspiration from these multiple sources.

The idea is that a doctor successfully brings someone back to life after repairing their body and mind, but the individual is still tethered to the after life and the gateway he has opened allows other souls to travel through and take up residence in their old bodies. Bodies which have unfortunately not seen the same level of repair and have started to decay especially in the brains.

Idea is that a scientist is experimenting with bringing back the dead in a government facility - potentially on the corpses of convicts which the government allows testing on (maybe its the most heinous of criminals, those who would have been on death row were it legal).

When he manages to bring someone to life, the person immediately starts making weird noises and talking to people who are not there - they theorize and discuss this with him, trying to diagnose what went wrong. It's revealed that he has been in some kind of purgatory and that he is now occupying both that space and his newly resuscitated body.

Other bodies start re-animating, but in a very zombie-like fashion. There are also a lot of others in this afterlife - those recently deceased, and those whose bodies are in the same vicinity of the main subject are now using the same gateway to take control of their old bodies. Problem with their bodies are that they haven't seen the same maintenance, the decay doesn't allow them to be as articulate as the main subject.

I also want them to grow smarter when they consume brains.

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Scene 1: We are introduced to the facility and a new body of a seriously fucked up criminal is delivered to the base.

Scene 2: Character Introductions and establishment of what they are trying to achieve.

Scene 3: The scientist succeeds in his experiment, the body comes alive again, short celebration followed immediately by the realization that something is not quite right (kinda like Hollow Man).

Scene 4: Trying to figure out what's wrong, theorizing.

Scene 5: Interview with the reborn man, they get closer to understanding what happened, spliced in with other bodies starting to re-animate.

Scene 6: People start dying, the revived individual reveals there others breaking through.

Scene 7: Observing the other deceased, theorizing about what's happening to them, realize one in particular is growing more intelligent.

I want the zombies to have some personality because they are resuscitated criminals, all of which have traits and crimes that they are guilty of. Some of these can be established and act in the way they did when they were alive.

It might have to be really crazy and be set on the moon to keep the whole thing contained in case something goes horribly wrong (which it does).