No doubt it’s because it featured a Golem terrorising the
bad guys, and I like Golems every bit as much as I dislike zombies. The thing
is, you see, Golems and zombies have a lot in common, but there’s one major
difference and it’s critical: the walk.
I’ve watched a few zombie films in my time. In fact, I do
believe that the first horror film I ever saw at the cinema when I was doing the
underage viewing thing (I did a lot of underage things when I was young enough
to do so) was a Hammer film called… erm… something or other.
But it didn’t take me long to theorise that when the
director called auditions for the crowd scenes, he did so with the express
intention of picking the very worst actors so he could say: ‘Right, you’re now
marching menacingly towards the prospective victims and I want you to do the
silliest walk you can possibly imagine.’ And so they did, and every director of
a zombie film since has followed the same ludicrous template, and generations
of dumbass filmgoers have grown up thinking that silly walks are the epitome of
cinematic horror (which makes me wonder whether zombies were deliberately
designed to hold a mirror up to dumbass filmgoers. Clever, eh?)
But golems are different. They’re made of clay and silly
walks don’t really sit well with things made of clay. They don’t have body
parts either, so the studio saves money by not needing make up artists to make
it look like they’re falling off. Clever, eh?
Shaun of the Dead
is an exception, of course, because the whole thing is deliberately silly.
No comments:
Post a Comment