The Zombie Infection Simulator
Submitted by jim on Mon, 06/13/2005 - 11:45
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In honor of the forthcoming Romero movie, Kza suggests this link: The Zombie Infection Simulator. He rates it "strangely hypnotic", and I concur.
What amazes me most about zombies is that, more than any other monster, they cause people to wax intelligent. I've heard more clever discussions about zombies than about films that are actually supposed to make you think. Hmmmm...
I think that is because, as far as horror movies go, they are more philosophical than "psychological" as most horror's claim to be... you know "psychological" thrillers, playing with your mind... zombies are just more applicable and philosophical.
Also, I think that other kinds of monsters are defeatable. Werewolf? Silver bullet. Dracula? Stake through the heart. But zombies are deceptively easy to beat. Blow out their brains and they're gone. But their sheer numbers and unrelenting brainless drive to feast on human flesh, and mostly their contagious nature, makes it inevitable that they'll win. As in the simulator, if you don't manage to kill them off when there's only a scant few of them, the statistics say the humans will be overrun.
Of course, that doesn't explain why they capture the imagination so. Your explanation is more to the point, but I'm still unsatisfied. WHY are they more philosophical?
when i said philosophical I just meant that there is more to think about after leaving a zombie movie, there are far more possibilities within them than most horror movies, what would you do in the situation, what type of zombies you would be most afraid of, how things would play out, how things got started, religious vs scientific causes, why they are doing it, what would happen, all that stuff... and i don't even mean within the movies specifically, just discussions of zombie movies, there are so many easily manifested scenarios people can come up with and discussing the possibilities is fascinating to me... also whoever said that the brilliance of it is that there is only one thing you really have to accept as reality for a zombie movie to ooze reality is to believe that for one reason or another the dead could walk the earth, I completely agree, and I think that is why they are so damn frightening to me, because of all the supernatural horrors they seem the least far-fetched, there are no other variables that seem out of touch, except maybe the flesh eating, but to be honest flesh-eating or not zombies would scare the hell out of me... I also think that is the very reason that zombies with superhuman abilities like the ones in the new Dawn of the Dead aren't nearly as effective in my opinion, if they can pounce and sprint like jaguars and growl, then there is a lot more you have to believe than just the dead walking.
Maybe because they are literally us? [Except for the being dead and flesh-chewing, of course :-) ]
I think that zombie-movies are fascinating because they are, by necessity, about us. The dramatic tension comes from how the non-dead characters react to the situation, to the other non-dead characters and to the undead menace. The zombies themselves are boring. None of them remember who they were, there is no character development, there are no interpersonal ("interzombical"?) conflicts and there seems to be no shortage of zombies to go around.
Aside from the non-dead characters who become the undead one zombie is pretty much like another. Even when a character recognizes a former friend who has been converted to a zombie ("zombieism"?) the dramatic tension exists solely in how the non-dead character will react to this development. The undead friend is now single-mindedly bent upon pursuit of the living. In this way zombies are like a cult... a dishevelled. shambling, groaning, flesh-rotting cult. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
The Wolfman and Dracula are individual, singular, independent-minded threats. They feel and express emotions and are able to self-regulate their behavior. Even Frankenstein's Monster and the Mummy (which have the shambling and the flesh-rotting aspects respectively) have a motivation behind their single-minded pursuit of blonde ingénues and the lantern-jawed heroes who have them. Zombies are an unrelenting, implacable hunger. They undead are, oddly enough, the embodiment of the blind will to live. It is through them that we seek to escape death. The fight against zombies is a struggle against death in both the physical and, more importantly, the philosophical sense. What use is immortality if it is devoid of the human spirit?
In zombie movies death is always preferable to becoming a zombie ("zombification"?) The true horror is not the practical menace of the zombies themselves but the danger that we (or our loved ones... or the lantern-jawed hero) will lose their soul even as we continue to live. That truly is a fate worse than death. It is a question that goes to the very foundation of humanity: What does it mean to be truly alive? (When filtered through a zombie lens the question becomes: What does it mean to be truly not undead?) It is this philosophical, psychological and practical problem that is posed by the zombie menace. We all get to watch and reflect upon how humankind, through its Gilligan-like cast of proxies, will face up to this threat.
But it's probably the undeniable allure of putrefied, decomposed flesh...
From now on I'm going to use the adjective "Gilligantic" to refer to representative-type casts. There's the nerd-hero, the crotchety old man with a heart-of-gold, the incompetent rich guy and his wife, the glamorous hot girl, the hot scientist, the unglamorous hot girl, the athletic black guy (wait a minute! how'd he get on the island?) the urban Jewish guy, the country hick, the Italian with a criminal past, the unrecognized hot girl best friend...
Wow, two brilliant posts by 0dysseus! Where do I sign up for the newsletter?
I love the positive re-enforcement also provided by Warren St. John when he writes
but I confess that there are larger issues at hand ...check out the nifty piece, Market for Zombies? It's Undead (Aaahhh!) in this Sunday's NYTimes.This is utterly off-topic, but since you resurrected this article just now, I thought I'd share. This past weekend I was hiking in Wales, and we stopped at a pub in Brecon on Saturday evening. They had a cask-pulled bitter on tap called "Brains", so I had the joy of periodically having people ask me what I was having (when they went up to get the next round), and I got to reply, "Braaaaiiiinnns!" Made my weekend.
Right here. :-)
just to comment on the movie, it's the one i look most forward to probably since I started actually going out to the movies 3 or 4 years ago... At first with the short 'rock and roll' trailers with growling and shit I was a bit skeptical, but from more extensive looks at the film it seems to have the 3 things I love most about Romero's films, the eerily empty streets, the out of nowhere jump out of your seat jolts(being the master he seems to be the only one who can really pull them off without looking stupid, and i only hope the trailers haven't given away all of them already), and of course the zombie philosophy, with night it was confinement vs. versatility, dawn i haven't seen, day it was progress vs. safety, I just can't wait, this really is like the movie event of the century for me... the only equivelent I can think of is if Leone came back from the dead to make a spaghetti western, I mean it's the master of a long-ago great genre back to show the kiddies how great these films can be.
I also find it funny, and i believe i remember romero commenting on this, that he is only being given the money to make a zombie movie because a de-romero-ized remake of one of his zombie masterpieces made a shit load of money... aah, the wonderful ridiculousness of hollywood.
Very cool. I especially like it one whole quadrant is almost all green (and slow moving) and the other three quadrants are vibrating with pink. Then you see one lone green start to walk down an alley. :-)
that is fantastic! I enjoy when there is only 1 or 2 zombies at the begining and when there are only a few humans left at the end... how they made this I don't know, but it's amazing how they can capture that zombie feel.
Has anyone seen the humans win? The first 3 or 4 times I tried it, I thought it kept freezing up on me.. then I realized it was just stopping because the humans won. Every time after that, though, the zombies won. Seems like if the humans don't take care of the zombies within about 5 seconds, then they're doomed. And it's heartbreaking (is that the right word to use regarding a bunch of glowing dots?) because the doom takes about 5 minutes to play out. In other words, very much like a zombie movie in miniature.
The humans have never even come close to winning each time I've reset the game. Often they will find temporary sanctuary in an isolated redoubt and, for a while, they'll quickly whomp the individual zombie infiltrators one by one. Eventually, inevitably, one of the glowing devils will last long enough for the zombie-mania to spread throughout the compound. It is then a simple matter for the green menace to sweep through the helpless human population. This, as always, proves the truth of Zombie Lesson #1, Panic will always get you killed.
My favourite feature is when a single zombie first makes it into a large zombie-free area and is killed quite quickly. ("Killed"?) You can see the waves of zombie-inspired panic wash back and forth over the area even in the complete absence of the undead. This insures that when the zombies finally come (and they will come) the humans are helpless even as they run around at top speed. Zombie Lesson #2, Ignore panicky idiots... they will always get you killed.
I enjoyed slowing the action down, picking a pink dot and rooting for it. Zombie Lesson #3, the first person that you love will, before it's all over, become a zombie. Sentiment will always get you killed.
I find it very amusing when a lone zombie will move into and through a zombie-free zone to wreak havoc in the rear of the human defensive positions. Zombie Lesson #4, Losing containment will always get you killed.
...ahhh zombies. Is there anything they can't teach us?
:-) Great stuff. It's amazing, for such a simple app, how it models pretty much every zombie movie ever made (well, I don't think the "there's only one zombie and it gets killed so the screen freezes" movie has been made yet, but I'm a patient fellow).
Oh, I'm sure Dr. Uwe Boll is on it.
Forget the simple zombie simulator applets! The good doctor has already made a movie based on the undead in a video game.
I have no idea how they did it but somehow, someway, they keep making the movie title graphic more and more mamillaphallic.
Boobies!
Oh, and only 34 hours, 1 hour and 32 minutes until release? Good doctor, you tease.
Y'know, one of these days, out of morbid curiousity, I'm going to have to see one of his movies.
Supposedly Alone in the Dark is hilarious, and from some of the things I've read about it, it's probably true. But House of the Dead... understand that I saw it in the theater, I paid money, so the end result was that I couldn't bring myself to watch any movie for the next 48 hours -- the very idea of cinema seemed offensive. That's how bad it hurt.
haha... house of the dead was horrendous... they actually used the in-game video game footage as a transition, even before any zombies were present or they were even on the island... I really could not believe it!