canadamus_prime said:
Pogilrup said:
canadamus_prime said:
Since I'm sick to death (no pun intended) of zombies I have no real need to add another one to the collection.
Me too.
Say are there any recently debuted supernatural serial killers, i.e. like Jason or Freddy?
How about squad of skeleton soldiers fighting zombies, werewolves, and vampires?
Or how about we get something completely different like giant man eating... trees.
Well they did do "Day Of The Triffids" actually.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids_(film)
To be honest the entire thing is kind of popular, it's from a book written in the 1950s which saw a sequel in the 2000s called "Night Of The Triffids". It's also spawned two TV series, and a few radio plays.
The basic concept is that a meteor flies over earth and blinds anyone with the misfortune to be outside with their eyes exposed to it. Then giant man-eating plants start making snacks out of everyone. The origin of the plants varies, either being delivered by the comet itself, or a bio-weapon that escapes due to the crisis unleashed by the passing meteor.
It's classic enough where it's referenced in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".
To be honest, as I've said before though I think the problem is less that any particular monster, including Zombies, is overdone, than the simple fact that people keep doing the same things with them over and over again. The bottom line is that movie makers are generally afraid to offend anyone so they choose to stay within safe territory and pretty much just produce minor variations on things that other people have already done and they know won't get too much in the way of actual backlash. In general horror is something that makes people uncomfortable, and not everyone can deal with, or enjoy, being made uncomfortable, even retroactively. This ultimately winds up putting real horror fans at odds with most other people (including, and perhaps especially, horror poseurs).
The last real revolution with horror was actually the so called "torture porn" genere which succeeded in taking people out of their comfort zone. It delighted horror fans, upset horror poseurs (who tried to talk around what it did by claiming it was gross and not scary), and got a lot of criticism from people who were uncomfortable with the entire thing which was the entire point. "Saw" the franchise which launched it went on to see like seven movies (I think it was) but like most things it was the imitators who never really "got it" and just started churning stuff out based on a formula, not wanting to mess with it, or push things to the point of potentially negative attention that might eclipse the big names, and well... the whole thing crashed.
The thing is that Zombie movies almost always wind up retreading the same ground which has already been done perfectly, so all you see are inferior copies of something that was once good. There are a lot of things that can still be done with "Zombies" as a concept and some good movies out there, but the problem is that so few creators want to get past the idea of having a story that is fundamentally about reprehensible people bringing doom upon themselves. You also see people wanting to expand the scope without doing the work needed to make it click. Something like "Walking Dead" will never be more than "okay" for example because it pretty much does the expected with the trappings but doesn't build enough of a world for them to make sense. For example even early on one has to wonder how exactly the military was overrun, the zombies as portrayed in that series couldn't have done it. How do Zombies exactly go about taking out a properly supported tank? (an abandoned/overrun tank being a key prop/scene point early on). Zombie concepts which have been better done are careful to avoid things like this, or to explain them as part of the concept in fairly believable (allowing for it being horror) fashion. A lot of horror creators learned early on that it's much easier to work conceptually with a smaller scale environment, having say an outbreak in a town, or monsters attacking an isolated cabin, rather than say over running the world. Especially seeing as the more over the top you get in terms of what the outbreak is doing globally, the harder it is to justify relatively normal people surviving (or turning things into an action fiasco by deciding Darwinism has already occurred and the only survivors are by definition abnormal buttkickers).
Oh and while I'm rambling, M. Night Shyamalan also did a killer tree movie called "The Happening" which met with much mockery. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happening_(2008_film)
