You know, I've never considered zombies particularly scary. I've seen a bunch of the movies, and..no scares, really. Jump-in-your-seat shocks, occasionally, Horror, certainly. I mean, rot and entrails and all are *gross*. But scary they're not. Not to me. I tend to reserve that category for the unstoppable, reason-free murderous ghosts of Japanese horror movies, or the twisted, outre things that shamble in the streets of Silent Hill. By contrast, zombie apocalypse movies generally give me the same feeling I get from other similar apocalyptic scenarios. Something about being one of the last few survivors of a bygone age, eking out a living from the empty remnants of the old civilization really appeals to me. In something like Dawn of the Dead, the zombies are certainly a threat, but ultimately they're manageable. You can predict how they'll react, and they're slow. And that makes them more of a pest than anything else.
Then I read The Rising by Brian Keene. His version of the zombie apocalypse leaves me shuddering and having vague nightmares. I can't imagine living in that world, certainly not surviving for any length of time. There's no real escape. The zombies are intelligent, lay traps, use weapons, drive cars. Worse still, the malign entities that inhabit the corpses can do the same with any animal of size much larger than an insect. Much is made of attacks by flocks of zombie birds, of ambushes by zombie deer, of cows dying in childbirth and devouring the farmwife assisting in the birth. Unlike traditional zombie movies, there is no finding someplace as far from human habitation as possible and hermitting it out. I don't think things are going to end well for the plucky band of survivors that made it through the first book. But we'll see.
Then I read The Rising by Brian Keene. His version of the zombie apocalypse leaves me shuddering and having vague nightmares. I can't imagine living in that world, certainly not surviving for any length of time. There's no real escape. The zombies are intelligent, lay traps, use weapons, drive cars. Worse still, the malign entities that inhabit the corpses can do the same with any animal of size much larger than an insect. Much is made of attacks by flocks of zombie birds, of ambushes by zombie deer, of cows dying in childbirth and devouring the farmwife assisting in the birth. Unlike traditional zombie movies, there is no finding someplace as far from human habitation as possible and hermitting it out. I don't think things are going to end well for the plucky band of survivors that made it through the first book. But we'll see.