ZOMBIELAND: Box Office Smash
It seems as though Zombieland took the funnel cake at this weekend’s box office. I thoroughly enjoyed it, though most of the time it didn’t really matter that the zombies are . . .well . . .zombies. It has a bit of the same feel as Corman’s Death Race 2000. The dialogue is hilarious at times, and the action left me very satisfied. However, do parodies of the zombie subgenre such as this and the multitude of films and books that have recently been released hurt the subgenre as a whole?
I was taught in my lit. and film courses that the parodying of something is the final stage of that trend’s existence. I remember having a film course that used Scream as an example. This particular professor saw it as the end of the horror film for a while until the trend came around again. He was wrong, sort of. It did seem to mark the end of the slasher subgenre as we knew it prior to that.
In Zombieland, Woody Harrelson’s character, et al., become the protagonists as gun-toting ass kickers. But are their characters much different than the rednecks at the end of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead? What does it mean when we have an empathy polarity shift like this? Is the reason for our change in ideals and sympathies something that is implicit in the script and the direction or is it something more, something in the present zeitgeist?
Without going too much into these questions (though I do think they are important questions to ask, otherwise I wouldn’t have brought them up), is Zombieland one of the last vestiges of the zombie subgenre as a serious commentary on the human condition or does it only add to the popularity of the subgenre and make it more likely that more “serious” zombie films will be made? Please comment.
You May Be INterested In
