The Gore Connoisseurs

By now we’ve all seen so many zombie films it’s hard for new releases not to seem like more of the same. Yet the flesh-eating corpses have evolved a lot since they first terrorised cinemagoers - to the point where a lot of the time they aren’t even dead anymore . From voodoo curses to toxic gases and demonic possession, there have been countless different takes on our favourite putrefying cannibals, with tones ranging wildly from cheerful splatterfests to sombre meditations on the end of days. Zombies may have lost some of their bite through overfamiliarity, yet new innovations in recent years threaten to freshen up the rotting reanimated corpse of the subgenre. Early zombies Zombies in early horror films were a far cry from their modern counterparts. Here, they are associated with voodoo magic and are generally under a witch doctor’s control without their later cannibalistic tendencies. The action often takes places in Haiti or the Caribbean, making use of - some would say app...

This month’s Pet Sematary remake is deeply flawed. The unselfconscious genre clichés and unnecessary ableist subplot don’t do it any favours, and it pales in comparison to Jordan Peele’s Us . Yet the things that Pet Sematary does get right really hit the spot. Here’s how the movie illustrated the reasons for my horror nerdery. Brutal gore Substandard horror films pile on the gore with more is more abandon. Pet Sematary is all the better for being more sparing with its blood and guts. The violence feels unexpected and some nasty flesh wounds are milked by intelligent camerawork. The pièce de résistance comes early in the movie when Louis’s sleepy suburban medical practice is turned upside down by the arrival of Victor, a dying young man mowed down by a speeding truck. The exposed bone and bloodshot eyes make sure these scenes are uncomfortable to watch. They set up the idea that our bodies are fragile and death can arrive at lightning speed. While our mor...

This year zombie films are having a renaissance. So far we've had Cargo ,   The Cured and Netflix original Ravenous . What do all these films have in common? Well, it turns out an awful lot actually. Zombies have been a cultural obsession since George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). The subgenre has taken a few left turns since that unbearably tense undead seige on a rickety house. Now zombie flicks tend to be large-scale gorefests which mercilesslessly pluck the heartstrings as our beloved protagonists become flesh-eating maniacs. Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later   zombies were famously super fast. They unnervingly caught on: we'd almost certainly be screwed in a life-or-death sprint with the zombies from Charlie Brooker's Dead Set (2008)   or Amazon Prime's sleeper hit Train to Busan   (2016) . Now TV series  The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead ensure our favourite lumbering corpses remain a mainstay in popular culture. If you th...