Have you ever contemplated the many shortcomings of zombie films? If the answer is a resounding “No!” then you’re probably doing better than I am. For years I’ve always liked Zombie horror, citing as some of my favourites a diverse collection from the Romero films (in particular Land of the Dead) and other more gore-oriented films to more slapstick horror and comedy, going right through Shaun of the Dead, Fido, and Tokyo Zombie. The hours of enjoyment I’ve gotten from these is quite something. It is an enjoyable genre. That being said, there are a few things that have always bothered me about Zombie films. Obviously not major flaws, but flaws notwithstanding.

1. 1. For a zombie outbreak to occur, you really do need to not be watching what is going on. Zombies are the reanimated dead, as we’re told, and then they are those that are bitten by them. Now I don’t know about most societies, I have never lived in certain areas, but there is really not an abundance of dead people lying about my neighbourhood. Sure, people are dying, but there is still not a great window of them lying there on full display. They are either buried, cremated, in a morgue, in a body bag, or maybe at best in the accident. Now even if you do say that everyone the moment they die become a zombie, no matter if they are bitten, shot, or die of old age, that still does not explain why there is a sudden and instant groundswell of dead people, fully dressed, all ready to go about their business of chasing people down. People at the start of the outbreak were just not paying attention. Morgue door rattling? Don’t open it until you have 12 people with shotguns stood around it, then use one of those long-reach things to go out and open the door. I mean they do stand out a bit, no? Slow-moving, off-coloured folk who seem to be drooling flesh. At some point, someone is not paying any bloody attention to what is going on around them! That’s why most zombie films have to pick up in the middle of the outbreak, when they have found a way to make the earth sleep for a few months as they get to be sufficiently large in size to actually pose a perpetual threat to us. Not because they are quick and agile and really really aggressive, but because we might run out of bullets before they run out of people to throw at us like fodder.

2.Zombies are inherently a flawed design. Not in terms of looks or style or ability to kill. In terms of their sheer M.O. (Modus Operandi to you and I). They need to feast on flesh, but they do not feast on anything but humans, and yet they do not resort to Cannibalism. They are inherently incapable of being a sustained species in this regard. There is a point where you think they would have to turn on themselves, or on cattle in the field. And then they realize how much they like eating cattle in the field, and so they put them all in one place and let them eat and wait till they can eat just enough to keep them replenishing and thus keep themselves sustained. Sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it. Kind of a human thing. I have always struggled with this aspect of Zombie films. There is just an inherent problem with the equation of food to hunter. I mean imagine if every time we killed an animal or harvested a crop it joined us as another hungry mouth to feed and was removed from the food-chain mid-bite, having just been tasted. We’d feel pretty sore about it wouldn’t we. I also don’t know why human flesh is so tasty, but zombie flesh immediately isn’t. That is just perpetually a strange concept.

3. Zombies have to perfect this mathematical dance of balance far too well. If they want to avoid being easy to pick off, they need to be many in number, overwhelming in mass, a big amorphous blob of mock-society trying to snap up the next person to join the ranks of the undead. But in order to do that they need to eat people, but not eat them up entirely. If they were to devour them whole and leave nothing left, then there are no new zombies to replace the ones we somehow managed to headshot into eternity. If, on the other hand, they eat too few they become easy prey to us and our shotguns. If they eat too little, they surely don’t get enough sustenance before their food becomes their mate, thus taking them off the menu. All of these factors would probably take the best group of scientists years to figure out the balance to, and yet zombies have apparently perfected it instantly and though… instinct? Something is awry in the state of Zombieland.

4.On the other end of the spectrum, I’ve always found the humans in zombie films to just seem very amusing, somehow just never quite grasping the danger. In most cases, the Zombies are certainly not fast-moving, and are often stopped by the simplest suggestion of barriers, fences, and walls. You’d think maybe we could develop that concept. Lure them all into a pit, then seal them in. Lure them through a gate, sacrifice one person, and then seal them in. You know, maybe we could inform our fellow man through complex signals like road signs and posters that there are zombies, so maybe roll up your windows and don’t drive through the big metal barrier. In at least a couple movies this concept is certainly flirted with, none moreso than Fido, where they really have erected fences around their pretty towns to keep out the dead. Throw in some flashing signs and perhaps the apocalypse would be avoidable after all. But apparently that is too much for us to handle, as a species that now dominates the earth.

5. And while we’re on the subject of the obvious limitations of man, am I the only one who cannot fathom how we aren’t better at fighting these creatures? I mean clearly some time has elapsed between us being at the forefront of a zombie attack and us being filmed by a director in the middle of this attack. We haven’t picked up any better tips than ’shoot them in the head’ at this stage? We haven’t researched the creatures and perhaps found a way to just spray them with an aerosol can that instantly turns them back to dead, or a noise that blows up their insides, or a ray that just melts them into goo? I mean we actually have weapons like that in modern warfare, it seems. Stuff that just destroys your enemy at no great cost to yourself. I think perhaps the great scientific community that half the time brought us Zombies really needed to spend more on R&D. A survival kit and an array of cool undead-killing machinery is highly in order by this point in time. Or at the very least use bigger machineguns to mow down the violent slow-moving bastards.

All of the above are a few of the little niggles that I’ve come across while watching Zombie horror films. Admittedly that hasn’t stopped me from being a huge fan of the films. And not once have I questioned why it is that some Zombies still seem to adhere to an ideology or a philosophical set of ideals, whilst munching on flesh. That has never crossed my mind, at all…. As I said at the start, if you can watch these films without thinking of these things, power to you. I just can’t stop wondering how the hell they figured out how many to eat, or how they got to be such a pain in our civilizations ass, again and again and again.