Ok, fine! For this holiday, the tradition is to list off your top 10 favorite horror movies and wait for the comments to practically rewrite your list as you go off and get plastered on pumpkin ale.
But that's dumb!
So, I'm not gonna do it!
Well, actually, I'm not gonna do it because I actually haven't seen enough diverse horror movies to make an interesting list. For me, it's basically have 28 Days Later... and Se7en fight it out for number one, and the rest is all random.
Boring!
So, I thought I'd instead shoot off a bunch of films, one from each genre of horror, that could serve you well on this, the day where college coeds can dress up as sluts without anyone saying anything about it, and yes, I did take that line from Mean Girls.
I'm sticking with the zombie thing this week. I mean, Halloween is just around the corner, and, to be honest, zombies are the only horror genre I have any substantial experience in. Besides, I've covered slasher films already. So, I'm going to go out on another date with the undead. No guarantees that I'll make it back.
In the first movie, it's all about the survivors. But since there's no easily recognizable villain, in the next installments a main zombie is introduced. This guy is usually a leader of the walking corpses/infected hosts, of sorts, and is usually a lot smarter than his undead legion. In Day of the Dead, Bub is Rhodes' prized pet, but eventually turns on his master and leads the zombies in a takeover of the underground facility. In Land of the Dead, Big Daddy starts to exhibit signs of intelligence and leads a zombie army in an effort to take down the last remaining human city. In 28 Weeks Later..., Dom gets infected and starts a new outbreak, after which he tails the fleeing survivors, which include his children, eventually cornering them in an abandoned tube station.
Another thing that should be noted about these particular zombies...
THEY! NEVER!! DIE!!! The other undead around them will drop like flies, but these guys exude some sort of power obtained in the grave that makes bullets conveniently miss them. They will also kill a ton, and I mean a ton of humans, including at least one main character.
The Lesson: If you find yourself in the next installment of a popular zombie franchise, watch out for one particular corpse. He is the leader of the undead, displays some form of smarts, and will absolutely not die throughout the entire run of the movie. If you are in a group of survivors, watch out, as this particular zombie will kill at least one of you. You don't have to fear any of the other, normal zombies. Just him. He''s the dangerous one.
Since this is October, and I like to lead by other's examples, this week of According to the Movies will concern horror. Zombie horror, to be exact. This week's lesson focuses on zombie films, more specifically, the end of zombie films.
Let's set up the scenario, why don't we? The remaining survivors have fought off the undead/possessed/infected horde in the finale, losing a few choice characters. They lose the honorable badass who dies giving the others a chance to escape, the asshole who only survived this long so you oculd have someone to hate, and the nice guy, possible love interest, that the movie spent the last two hours making us care about, so that we feel all bad in the end. Don't you love that callous manipulation of our emotions?
Anyway...
Once the remaining survivors have escaped, all is well, right? WRONG!!!! Zombie movies that don't have some cutty dude named Shaun NEVER end on a happy note! The ending of 28 Days Later... (the real one) saw Jim dying from a gunshot wound and Selena and Hannah walking away towards an unknown future. The ending of 28 Weeks Later... sees the Rage virus hopping the English Channel and spreading all throughout Europe. In Dawn of the Dead, the survivors make it to the island, only to find that it hadn't escaped the virus, and are accosted by a horde of the undead as the screen goes black. Night of the Living Dead sees the main character emerge from the house, having lived through the night, only to have a gunman shoot him square in the face. REC./Quarantine sees the main character being dragged away and devoured in the end. Land of the Dead ends with the zombies wisening up and destroying a human stronghold while a few people flee north to Canada.
See the pattern?
The Lesson: Have you survived the end of a zombie movie? Well, good for you! Too bad it ended terribly for you. Abandon all hope! The dead walk the Earth! You're alive! Wonder how long that's gonna last! Just give up!
