The Dead Genre

     I'm going to come right out and say it: zombies have become the bane of my horror-fan existence. I know, I know, just last week I was gushing about Cabin in the Woods which heavily features zombies, but that's different. The zombies in that movie were incidental to the larger theme, and that's tolerable. But my work as an editor for a horror magazine has made me cringe everytime I see a story that even hints at the Z-word.
    The problem is that the genre has nowhere to go. A zombie piece (be it movie or book) always follows the same formula: there is an outbreak of some kind that causes a zombie apocalypse, a handful of survivors bunker down somewhere but then realize they have to abandon the place, and most of the survivors are killed in the flight. Sometimes there is military-based salvation at the end, but that detail is unnecessary. Even when a new "angle" is presented (such as injecting black humor a la Shawn of the Dead or Zombieland), the plot is still rigidly the same.
    Of course, it's not just the zombie sub-genre that gets this kind of repetitive treatment in horror. Slasher movies are just as bad. Anybody who was alive enough to remember the 80s and early 90s know Freddy and Jason and Michael Myers, although anymore they are more of a joke than anything. That's because their cliched, formulaic movies became so predictable that it was just sad, and now people watch slasher movies usually on the basis of "so bad it's good." For a brief moment there was a revival with the introduction of the Saw movies, but now torture movies as a sub-genre have become just as trite (the term "torture porn" just illustrates how seriously it's not taken).
    I understand why these works keep getting produced. It's the same reason that record companies still insist on churning out records that are either synth-pop or four-piece rock bands. They think the buying public are afraid of anything new (and, of course, they might be right), so they're just going to keep exhausting every conceivable iteration of the same old stuff.
    Zombies really bug me, though. It might be because that's what's "in" right now, an therefore that's what's being driven into the ground (although Hollywood at least seems to have gotten the point and hasn't produced a zombie movie in a while). But it's also because there's really no other option for what to do with the genre. At least with slashers, you could play with some of the details. It could be completely "realistic," where the slasher is just some psycho with a sharp object, or it could be supernatural like the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. The fact that Saw was able to spawn a sub-genre just shows that there is potential for evolution.
    But what are you going to do differently with zombies? Change what makes them zombies? Well, 28 Days Later gave us "zombies" who are actually plague victims. It's still a zombie movie, though, and follows the formula religiously. You could try having zombies without there being an apocalypse involved, but without the hordes of undead taking over the city, you've just got a slasher movie or creature feature.
    I don't want to just bitch and moan about the current state of the genre, though. Let's be productive, instead. I'm going to challenge myself (and you're welcome to join in) to come up with a way to make zombies interesting again. It may be an exercise in futility, but at least we'll try.