PRO: THEY ARE VERSATILE!
Like the movies themselves, zombies can be fitted to suit a filmmakers needs better than any other movie monster. You want them to be brainless, shambling ghouls? Fine. You want them to be Olympic sprinters with a bloodlust? That works, too. Does an electrical storm make them crawl out of crypts? Do alien slugs crawl into people’s brains? Or does a monkey virus infect an entire city? Pick your poison, and zombies can pull it off.
CON: THEY DON’T BELONG EVERYWHERE!
Versatility can easily become ubiquity – and zombies are now being shoehorned into places they just shouldn’t be. You can’t escape them in the Spielbergian sci-fi thriller Super 8 because – lo and behold – the precocious filmmaker kids are making a zombie movie! You can’t avoid them in Disney’s ode to coin-op video games Wreck-It Ralph because there they are again, despite being more of a console trope than classic arcade. The quickest way to wear out your welcome is to overstep your genre. Speaking of video games …
