AMC zombie series from Frank 'Majestic' Darabont - The Walking Dead

yeah, but apparently they came out around the same time...

the dawn of the dead remake was on tv before this, and the end is both soooo corny (lol slow-motion shot of the clip falling out of a handgun) and so influential on L4D (that last shot of the four survivors getting on the board after escaping hoards of running zombies). still has a great opening though.

it really is underrated. pales in comparison to the original, obv, but works pretty well as an action romp on its own. and yeah, that opening is A+

important to say it's an action picture though. fast moving zombies take away the horror imo*. it's most effective moments of dread involved large groups of zombies shuffling around.

*exception for me is the shot in Dead Set where the zombie sprints onto screen and goes to town on that Big Brother Employee on the console while that Mika song plays.

the last last shot in the remake is cool

you mean the part after the credits?

ya

I don't think it's so much that it's "zombies on TV" that's cool, more that it's a serious attempt at serialized, straight-up horror on a network known for quality television - I'm not sure there's any precedent for that?

im not sure why that's a big deal?

...because new forms of TV don't spring up very often? I mean I guess there's (the similarly high-rated) True Blood but that appears to pretty much entirely camp.

btw if you think The Walking Dead is lackluster, wait till horror TV gets the Fox/NBC/ABC treatment.

there was that cbs show starring alex o'loughlin as a vampire...who is also a private detective!

well there have been a couple of horror/procedural "hybrids" I guess, but that's not really the same thing.

there was that cbs show starring alex o'loughlin as a vampire...who is also a private detective!

That show was straight up hilarious though, albeit unintentionally.

what about that supernatural show? watched it a couple times and it seemed like hot crap, but it's pretty much straight-up horror television.

supernatural's more like a broody dude version of Buffy.

what about buffy/angel?

OR THE GHOST WHISPERER YALL

Supernatural's horror, but it's tempered with melodrama and comedy. Same with Buffy. There's a place for that, but I think of it differently to what Walking Dead represents.

Walking Dead excites me because it's straight drama/horror, like what you would see in a movie. That's what my excitement is all about. Zombies! On TV! That aren't making witty comebacks, they're just being zombies. (Not that I don't love Buffy, or Angel, or a little bit of Supernatural every now and again).

next week 'the walking dead' introduces a witty british zombie named 'percy'

last network straight horror i remember was that "fear itself" thing which was one of the shittiest things foisted on the public in recent memory

how quickly we forget "Happy Town"

oh hahahaha wow yeah that happened didnt it

also: "Harper's Island"

actually werent harpers island and fear itself concurrent?

Yeah, I think they were.

I only saw the commercials so as far as I'm concerned, IT NEVER HAPPENED

read the Wikipedia article for "Harper's Island", it is lolworthy

oh hahaha and thank go "fear itself" did choose to tackle the Wendigo, which i am sure was done with great skill and aplomb. and with further imdb research it was directed by the last winter dude, so he seems to be a little wendigo obsessed. to prove this, he also did the 2001 film "Wendigo".

masters of horror was some bullshit too imo

for the most part

Masters of Bore-or, am i rite?

actually looking through the fear itself director list is like a whos who of directors no one should hire, its kind of amazing

xpost yeah i hated like 90% of the masters of horror stuff, was only really down w/fair-haired child

i sort of enjoyed the flagrantly cruddy badness of masters of horror. like tales from the crypt episodes. shame how little the sensibilities of the various directors come through though (miike aside, yikes).

I tried watching Haven for a while but that was kind of a snooze. And not really very horror. More boring supernatural.

The first ep of Masters of Horror, the Coscarelli joint was pretty cool I remember. I heard some okay things about Carpenter's two, "Cigarette Burns" and "Pro Life" but I honestly couldn't get my head around watching it because modern day Carpenter is just never a good thing. I love him, but I hate him, ya know? And he and women, especially now that he's old and crabby...yeesh.

Oh and the Joe Dante political satire was basically a giant facepalm.

The zombies make excellent noises in this. I found it all incredibly gripping, even though I didn't like the comic much.

What's the consensus in this shockingly long thread? Tried to skim it and got bogged down in a sexism argument.

yay @ zombies! vs
eyeroll @ "zombies"

is pretty much how it boils down

Well at the beginning of the pilot my default position was the latter, but by the end it was the former. Well done The Walking Dead.

That's what I'm sayin!

There was more pathos for the zombies than in your average thing, that could be an interesting tack to take.

nothing new here I thought. The leads seem as lifeless and wooden as the zombies themselves. will be skipping...

I'll mark you down for eyeroll @ "zombies"

Finally saw this. Wasn't bad. I was, however, struck by the graphic violence vs. the relatively chaste language. Guess AMC has different inscrutable standards than FX. And yeah, lots of weird woman hating in this ep, though there are plenty of strong women to come.

MASSIVE xxxxxposts and this is a major

MAJOR POTENTIAL SPOILER avert your eyes if needed but:

if when zombies sense people their impulse is to head over and eat them and tear them apart until there's nothing left, where do new zombies come from?
― candid gamera (s1ocki), Tuesday, November 2, 2010 12:39 PM (2 days ago)

well, this doesn't address your "tear them apart until there's nothing left" but in the comic, one of the major zombie rules that has NOT yet shown up in the show but almost certainly WILL (because some big plot points circle around it) is that if ANYBODY in this new world dies (whether it's from a zombie bite or not), they eventually come back to life as a zombie.

Which is part of what makes the title cutesy: the walking dead doesn't really refer so much to the zombies as it does to those who will ultimately BE zombies in the not-too-distant future, which is to say our protagonists do u c

That's pretty cool!

one of the major zombie rules that has NOT yet shown up in the show but almost certainly WILL (because some big plot points circle around it) is that if ANYBODY in this new world dies (whether it's from a zombie bite or not), they eventually come back to life as a zombie.

good call, imo, cuz even in romero-verse, the initial zombie plague consists of dead risen from graveyards and the like. not bite victims, but just any old sort of dead people that happen to have been exposed to moon mist. i mean, if it were bite transmitted only, it'd be fairly easy to control, at least outside the initial outbreak area.

it also makes the story much more open ended, because the potential is there (and some of the comics storylines outline and point to) a world in which people get it together enough to form communities and procreate and have multiple post-zombie generations and it just becomes part of life that there are always going to be these predators as part of the new landscape.

In other words, there's not a world war z style reclamation so much as we learn to live an uneasy existence with our own dead

^ downside of this is that zombies become boring, like the flu. o shit there is zombies in the alley. get the kids inside and call the squad.

yah, but the upside is that before long zombies are like narcotrafickers in Breaking Bad (or alcohol in Mad Men? I dunno, there are no good metaphors here) and we just get into the human relationships and people fucking each other up. That's why complaints about acting/writing are relevant because by the time this gets to season three, zombies are gonna be much less of a major immediate problem and more like a constant natural disaster that letting your guard down around will get you killed over

human drama on TV is never an upside