So You Want To/Write a Zombie Apocalypse: Difference between revisions

Possibly the largest challenge is dealing with the fact that a traditional Romero-style zombie is not much of a threat to a healthy human. They're slow and dumb. Since the key to any horror movie is peril, you need to find some way to either advantage the zombies or disadvantage the humans. You can: [[Dawn of the Dead 2004 (Film)|Make the zombies faster]], [[Resident Evil|have the zombies mutate into more dangerous forms]], [[Land of the Dead (Film)|have the zombies learn]], [[The Horde|add a lot more zombies]], [[Resident Evil 1|trap the zombies and humans together in tight quarters]], [[Game -Breaking Injury|injure one or more of the protagonists so they can't simply escape]], [[The Load|introduce a character that the protagonists must defend]], [[Not a Zombie|establish that the characters don't understand the rules (initially)]], or introduce dissent in the ranks of the survivors, either by introducing [[Day of the Dead|a power struggle among them]] or [[Dead Rising|plain old psychological breakdowns.]] There are any number of ways to increase the danger. However, the biggest and most common pitfall of the genre is to balance the scales by [[Idiot Plot|making the survivors dumb]]. Since part of the appeal of the genre is the "What if this happened to you?" effect, making the characters act foolishly breaks the immersion of the audience.