I like horror movies and horror comics and horror fiction. Don't get me wrong, they scare the crap out of me, and I don't like being scared. But I like knowing that the scary stuff is out there to terrify me poopless.
When I was around eight or nine years old, I would wake up every night and walk through the house with a flashlight checking for Frankenstein's monster because I thought that just dreaming about him would make him come find me. And years later, I remember how creeped out I got when I read Theodore Sturgeon's "It," with that final line that read, "And Babe screams at night and has grown very thin."
So I just saw Diary of the Dead, and I liked it. I just don't get how people allow themselves to get bit so easily in zombie movies. And how it takes so long for everyone to figure out that they should shoot for the head. I prefer the slow zombie theory used in the Dead series; this allows one to fantasize about surviving the zombie holocaust. Fast zombies are just a horror wet-dream, creating a new problem just to piss-off the purists.
But then the virus or whatever created the zombies could still exist so that all future dead would still rise up. So the interesting part of either fantasy would be the group of people who survived and how they need to deal with their future dead.
That's what's fun about horror stories; not the creature, but how the humans deal with the threat. It's fun to think of crazy new monsters that kill everyone, hell, I do it every day. But zombies are cool because they are both the known and the unknown; they're people that we recognize, friends and family, but they're not the same. So we are torn by that recognition and the new threat. And that creates the emotional turmoil to drive the plot.
And we try to remember to aim for the head.
