Saw it last night. Now I very much want to go read the original novel, because I'd always heard it referred to (in the spec fic literary circles I used to dabble in) as one of the classic vampire stories of all time, yet in the movie the monsters are very much depicted as more "28 Days/Weeks Later" style zombies.
I was saying last night that I wonder if in fact the infected humans in the book are portrayed the same way they are in the movie--lightning-fast, hyperviolent, blood-thirsty creatures--that they never used to be called "zombies" in discussions of the book because that conception of a zombie, as opposed to slow lumbering creatures that just maybe wanted to eat your brain, is quite a modern one.
I'm sorry. That's probably a really boring discussion to anyone who's not really interested in the horror genre. So, anyway! Fun, scary, and surprisingly touching movie, and Will Smith as usual rocks. We also thought the ending was less "Hollywood" than we were expecting for a big holiday blockbuster.
xoxo
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Okay, so now that I wrote that, I went to Amazon to read reviews of the book, and the creatures are absolutely *called* vampires in it and the plot sound very different. So the Will Smith version is absolutely just cribbed from 28 Days Later. :-)
You know, I think it probably takes a better filmmaker to make a slow lumbering monster scary, as opposed to a lightning-fast, hyperviolent one. And a slow lumbering creature's a lot easier to depict on a low budget, like Night of the Living Dead.
But perhaps today's hyperfast video game addicted horror film going youth just can't be scared by a slow lumbering horror? Certainly if something jumps at you fast out of the dark, it's scary before you even see what the hell it is.
I do think it would be interesting (and I bet it's already been done) to see which archetypes get to be the standard one for certain in-human creatures, and why. For example, the Max Schreck vampire in Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu (and the visually similar one in Herzog's 1979 sound remake) are creepy and scary as all hell just looking at them, but that isn't the version that became everyone's Dracula (except for Shadow of the Vampire, the 2000 comedy/horror about the making of Nosferatu).
And all aliens nowadays look like the ones in Close Encounters of the Third Kind which frankly I'm bored with. If I'm going to be anally probed, I want it to be by some hot alien babe, not some bald weirdo with a triangular face and huge eyes.
didn't you see "omega man" as a kid? that was based on the book too. (back before we knew charlton heston was a wing-nut.) i had nightmares for years from those zombies.
I'm extremely sure I must have, because if there's a Charlton Heston movie from the 50s or 60s that I didn't see on TV, I would be very surprised. But I sadly have no memory of it at all.
Asked my bro about this (he's far more into horror movies than I am) and he agrees that the fast moving attack zombies all stem from 28 Days Later.
And H. said that The Omega Man is quite funny, so you should see it (I'm sure I never have).
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