Doing it Wrighte: Zombies

The walking dead have made entirely too many appearances in popular culture over the years, and through it all the initial creativity involved with the concept seems to have stagnated in recent years. Zombies have a giant variety of interpretations and concepts to work with, but the single most common modern interpretation is the logic-defying plague-spawned swarm of mindless flesh eaters.  Given the shear amount of options that comes in this vaguely defined modern horror concept, a story teller could do a lot of good and interesting things with zombies if they were more willing to step away from the norm. To start with, I'll break the elements of the living impaired up into creation and characteristics for purposes of this article and picture making.

The basic anti-physics of no longer dead creation, seems like a good place to start:

Shorter duration media, such as movies, tends to never explain whether it's zombies are created via magic or super science, and I find this to be a good decision as when you only have a limited amount of time in which to tell a tale, such things can be unimportant details that would eat up too much time; especially if you try using super science since people expect more from anything in that ball park.

Infection style zombies are entirely too common in modern media as the "zombie apocalypse" setting is, for some damn reason, the only thing done with zombies to the point of absolute absurdity, which makes for the same survival story every time.  Construction style zombies, on the other hand, are severely under-represented and a lot of interesting and fresh things can be done with these types of zombies (or so I'm told by their union representatives), including swarm style zombie apocalypse movies if you happen be someone with enough creativity to make it work (for example, if you had all the currently dead everywhere revive at once with the goal of murdering the living, with more actual power per zombie so as to make them into a more tangible threat).

While the appearance of zombies is very distinct, their characteristics is what gives each type of zombie a distinct and original feel, or it would if more people played with these characteristics more.  The standard ones are:

Zombie durability has a lot of room for change in how it works and the standard head shot weakness is actually a bit arbitrary and makes little sense considering that this is usually attached to the mindless abominations which, by definition, shouldn't really need their grey matter.  Adding to or taking away from your standard zombie's durability can help in creating a different type of shambling menace than what is expected by the audience, which is good if you're trying to distinguish your work from others in this genre.

The mental aspects of a zombie are probably the single biggest area of unexplored space in the entire idea and can make for some interesting scenarios by simply tweaking with this aspect of it.  The more intelligence that zombies have, for example, the more they will seem like a legitimately dangerous threat as well as allowing for more character development on the part of the living who now have to cope with fully sapient dead loved ones come back to life to try and kill them.  Zombie instinct is another aspect that can make for some interesting changes in how the plot goes, as zombies that have different motives than the usual eating of human pieces can be very good villains if used with enough creativity and care.

Physical aspects of zombies, on the other hand, aren't all that important for things other than action scenes, and the modern raptor zombie does a fairly good job of being an intimidating and fast paced threat.

Zombies do have room for several other characteristics that can be considered unique to them in the setting, such as the mutated special zombies seen in the "Left 4 Dead" series or perhaps even a rapid regeneration rate, which would at least make for a passable excuse as to why all the zombies aren't missing random chunks of flesh from when they were originally created (or several if they were created by being mobbed by a swarm).

Doing unique and original things with zombies is actually very easy, but too much modern media has been over-saturated with the usual disease spreading mindless flesh eater, which is unfortunate considering how vague and malleable the concept of zombie is in modern culture and how much potential it has to be so much better than that.