Combat
Brigadier General
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2005
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This new show on AMC is getting good reviews even from the NY Times. Starts Halloween night. Typically the critics love to rip the horror films and shows - so all the more remarkable:
“The Walking Dead” is based on Robert Kirkman’s popular graphic novels. And the television adaptation is surprisingly scary and remarkably good, a show that visually echoes the stylized comic-book aesthetic of the original and combines elegant suspense with gratifyingly crude and gruesome slasher-film gore.
The zombies in “The Walking Dead” are true to the genre, and so is its hero, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), a Southern sheriff’s deputy and a man of few words and many firearms. Yet amid all the carnage and oozing close-ups of cannibalism, “The Walking Dead” does make room for several complicated relationships and at least one love triangle.
Romance is not forbidden in zombie circles of course. Long before the fad of Jane Austen mash-ups like “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” the 1943 classic “I Walked With a Zombie” drew its story line from Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.”
But vampire stories mostly focus on the relationship between the undead and the living, usually with lots of overwrought dialogue, erotic subtext and decadently lush scenery. Zombies don’t as a rule socialize with their prey. It’s the group dynamic among survivors that provides the drama. Conflicts matter more than courtship, and the characters spend most of their time barricaded behind bolted doors and boarded windows. There is little occasion for conversation, let alone changing into evening attire.
“The Walking Dead” follows in the tradition of the 1968 cult film by George A. Romero, “Night of the Living Dead,” which is to say that “The Walking Dead” is a straight tale of horror, not a tongue-in-cheek takeoff like the 2009 movie “Zombieland” or “Dead Set,” a British series that began on IFC this week, about contestants on a “Big Brother”-like show who are the last to learn that zombies are destroying the world.
“The Walking Dead” is based on Robert Kirkman’s popular graphic novels. And the television adaptation is surprisingly scary and remarkably good, a show that visually echoes the stylized comic-book aesthetic of the original and combines elegant suspense with gratifyingly crude and gruesome slasher-film gore.
The zombies in “The Walking Dead” are true to the genre, and so is its hero, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), a Southern sheriff’s deputy and a man of few words and many firearms. Yet amid all the carnage and oozing close-ups of cannibalism, “The Walking Dead” does make room for several complicated relationships and at least one love triangle.
Romance is not forbidden in zombie circles of course. Long before the fad of Jane Austen mash-ups like “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” the 1943 classic “I Walked With a Zombie” drew its story line from Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.”
But vampire stories mostly focus on the relationship between the undead and the living, usually with lots of overwrought dialogue, erotic subtext and decadently lush scenery. Zombies don’t as a rule socialize with their prey. It’s the group dynamic among survivors that provides the drama. Conflicts matter more than courtship, and the characters spend most of their time barricaded behind bolted doors and boarded windows. There is little occasion for conversation, let alone changing into evening attire.
“The Walking Dead” follows in the tradition of the 1968 cult film by George A. Romero, “Night of the Living Dead,” which is to say that “The Walking Dead” is a straight tale of horror, not a tongue-in-cheek takeoff like the 2009 movie “Zombieland” or “Dead Set,” a British series that began on IFC this week, about contestants on a “Big Brother”-like show who are the last to learn that zombies are destroying the world.
