The Zombie Genre. An unapologetically bloated genre that, much like its namesake, refuses to die. While in recent years the hype train for Western zombie movies has been non-existent, South Korean zombie cinema has exploded onto the scene with the extreme velocity of one of East Asia’s high-speed rail networks and successfully revived the failing subgenre.
So let’s talk about the starting point for all of this. While it’s generally acknowledged that The Last Man on Earth (1964) was a precursor to the subgenre and its elements, it is no secret that George Romero (The Godfather of Zombies) perfected these elements and cemented zombie cinema as an essential subgenre among horror cinema. However, Romero’s slow moving zombies have since been eclipsed by the fast moving undead first introduced by Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and woven into Romero’s legacy by Zack Snyder in 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake. While Boyle’s “infected” served the narrative by reinforcing the antagonist's villainous rhetoric and the greater moral questions that the plot proposed, Snyder’s interpretation took a far more simplistic approach. Yet, in an almost Darwinian set of circumstances, Snyder’s new form of zombies, derived from Boyle’s, have dominated pop-culture for the better half of a decade, with The Walking Dead being one of the few hold outs of Romero’s legacy.
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