I found this article on Zombies I thought you guys might like...
The Quick And The Undead
Today's Zombies Are Faster Than Ever - But Fresh Flesh Is Still Their Favorite Munchie
May 11, 2007
By GREG MORAGO, Courant Staff Writer
You have to wonder why anyone would find the lumbering bag of rags from old mummy movies scary. After all, you could easily outrun any black-and-white-movie mummy. By the time it shuffles its way out of the secret tomb, you could be back in your hotel eating dates.
Zombie enthusiasts would argue that a mummy is not a zombie (technically, a zombie is a reanimated human corpse). But what really gets a zombie purist's blood flowing is a debate about zombie speed. According to Peter Dendle, author of "The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia," the majority of zombie Web chats is devoted to slow-moving vs. fast-moving zombies.
Which is a better, more convincing zombie - the plodding corpses of "Night of the Living Dead" or the rage-filled speed demons of "28 Weeks Later"? The latter movie, opening today, furthers the argument for the fast-moving zombie, which seems to be replacing the conventional (slower) movie zombies.
Since when did zombies come up to speed? Dendle actually has done a lot of thinking about this. In a paper he presented last fall at the Monsters and Monstrous conference at Oxford University, Dendle argued that today's tech-savvy young people actually prefer slower zombies because the slow ghouls represented something predictable in a chaotic world. "This is a generation that grew up with the unpredictable violence of Columbine and 9/11," said Dendle, associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, Mont Alto. "A zombie's violence is predictable. Its world is simple. It just wants to eat human flesh."
And yet, in this fast-moving world, a fast-moving zombie has become inevitable. "Zombies have become faster. The faster ones are becoming the norm," he said. "Personally, the slower the zombie, the more maddening, relentless and claustrophobic the movie can be. Yes, you can outrun them, but at some point you have to stop. They don't. You run out of ammo or gas, but they don't run out of anything."
Like an Energizer Bunny, they keep going. And so does the zombie mythology. Not limited to film, zombies also figure in last year's novel "World War Z" by Max Brooks, which has been optioned for a movie from Brad Pitt's production company, due in 2008. The paperback version of Stephen King's "Cell," an homage to zombie films, comes out in June.
So how did the undead go from slugs to sprinters? See the timeline, beginning at right, of zombie speed.
