Slate’s Tim Cavanaugh comes out firmly in favor of a fundamentalist approach to zombies in his review of IFC’s Dead Set and AMC’s The Walking Dead..
I couldn’t agree more.
Cavanaugh argues that zombie films have shuffled away from some of their core values, including, most importantly, that “zombies need to chow down on raw human flesh.”
And the more gruesome the munchies, the better.
Quoting Cavanaugh:
“I realize that few will concur in my opinion that recent films such as Zombieland, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead were not bloody enough. But none of these movies featured what Romero calls “the banquet,” the scene wherein flesh-eating zombies, having won control of the battlefield, eat with relish the inner organs of the living. True zombiephiles won’t be satisfied with a few fingers or a severed lower leg. We want ribcages ripped apart, strings of intestines devoured by hungry freaks, characters we have gotten to know over the course of the movie being quartered into steaming pieces by the hunched, hungry hordes.”
Bring it.