Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/19/trailer-for-a-new-zombie-serie.html
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make brutal decisions to contend with zombies
Oh boy, a new film formula. Just can’t wait for this one…
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Seems boring and formulaic . The kind of show that might have done well on cable, when old people, who couldn’t be bothered to change the channel made up the audience.
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Its a prequel to Z Nation. So its bound to be far more goofy than grim.
Z-Nation is what The Walking Dead would be if the writers had a funny bone.
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“a mother torn from her daughter”
“a small group of American refugees”
“hostile new world”
It’s a story ripped from today’s headlines.
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Because Z Nation in all its cheesy glory was created by The Asylum, the same folks who brought us Sharknado. Tongue is very firmly in cheek.
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I’m 100% certain the protagonists will need to find a way past a wall at some point.
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I saw the headline, momentarily got Warren Ellis’ “Black Summer” and “Black Gas” confused and was afraid it was an adaptation of his semi-zombie story. I’m glad it isn’t, because that was deeply unpleasant.
I mean, it’s kind of Romero’s original zombie movie formula - it’s all about how awful people are to each other. Maybe with an emphasis on a particular element. I think this has made me realize that I’m all zombied out. I hit peak zombie a while back.
Honestly, I’m not sure how you do a zombie story, especially a series and bring something new to it. The zombie genre has been done (no pun intended) to death. It was narrowly defined at the beginning, and there have been some interesting offshoots (various British series, e.g. “In The Flesh” in particular), but those veins have been pretty well mined at this point, too.
That preview was so divorced from the tone of Z Nation, I was sure you were kidding. Apparently not - it’s even being made by the same people. Except they’ve explicitly said it’s before the apocalypse got “weird” and was “just scary.” So I’m guessing it’s not going to be goofy at all, just a standard zombie narrative.
I guess that’s why zombies narratives still have legs… People being nasty to each other is always relevant, and the culture is getting more apocalyptic these days.
I’ve felt it wasn’t a coincidence that zombies took off in the pop culture just after 9/11. Apocalyptic fears, the idea that previously innocuous neighbors might suddenly turn on you…
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I have issues with some of this…
Being chased by running, violent zombies, you take refuge in a…
diner with huge plate glass windows all around, that for some reason don’t break under zombie-rage smashing.
And inside this diner, someone chooses to arm themselves by picking up…
a butter knife, instead of any of the countless sharp knives or other dangerous objects in any diner kitchen.
I do not have high hopes for this endeavor.
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Trailers aren’t always accurate. The trailer for Season 1 of Z Nation is all explosions and jump scares without much of the tone of the actual show.
Fingers crossed that Black Summer has more humour than the trailer.
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Well I love it. I’ll watch zombies all night long.
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Sure, the zombie genre has been done to death, but not always done well. Walking Dead was the first zombie serial, but it kind of sucked/sucks (dunno if it’s still on).
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I’m really guessing not, because they’ve been pretty insistent that this isn’t going to be funny:
At the 2018 San Diego Comic-Con, Schaefer noted that “Black Summer is before the apocalypse got weird and was just scary.” He said that the drama series is not intended to be the funny version of The Walking Dead that Z Nation is, but would instead be more of an “old-school” take on zombie lore. This was echoed by producer Jodi Binstock, who stated that the series is “not tongue-in-cheek, it’s very very serious: it’s as if the zombie apocalypse really happened in 2018 and explores what that would be for all of us.”
That always bothers me in zombie movies - they rarely break windows. Drunk people accidentally break windows all the time, zombies (shown with the strength to tear people apart and no concern about injuring themselves) would go right through windows without even noticing. But zombie movies come from a tradition of doing really cheap movies, often in real-world locations, where breaking windows wasn’t an option.
Zombies are now culturally on par with monsters from folklore like vampires or werewolves, but unlike all of them, there’s no traditional lore that informed how they appear in movies; instead, zombie lore was created from what we saw being depicted on movie screens. So we’ve got this fascinating collection of zombie conventions that came purely out of the films being cheap. (And another set of conventions that came out of them being cheap, poorly thought through movies that didn’t sweat the details because they were intended to be metaphors anyways.)
That also struck me. Some (apparently unintentional) humor there.
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The one thing that really bothers me about animated-corpse zombies is the flagrant disregard of thermodynamics. Just what the heck is powering their limbs? Why do they not eventually fall apart? Either go full magic/other-dimensional marionettes, or let them suffer entropy and energy source limits like everything else. Stop it with the viruses bringing the dead to life already.
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There still is hope for a zombie series that simply pretends the zombie apocalypse
could actually happen and creates the most realistic picture of a world with zombies.
Both TWD and Z-Nation while setting totally different moods (TWD is based on a comic book to be fair), where to much focused on creating a “strange” world with strange characters, rather than a realistic one with “everyday people having to adapt”.
But if there will be a single scene, where a rattling, moaning, limping, half rotten zombie manages to sneak up upon a pair of American survivors having an intimate conversation in an otherwise quiet forest and if those same former US citizens will then only have a broken scythe blade and a rusty rake to defend themselves from the attack instead of one of the around 393 Million guns in America as of now, I will try to get some Russian troll army to shut down Netflix.
Even if I have to spend my whole pocket money on it.
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There still is hope for a zombie series that simply pretends the zombie apocalypse
could actually happen and creates the most realistic picture of a world with zombies.
Both TWD and Z-Nation while setting totally different moods (TWD is based on a comic book to be fair), where to much focused on creating a “strange” world with strange characters, rather than a realistic one with “everyday people having to adapt”.
But if there will be a single scene, where a rattling, moaning, limping, half rotten zombie manages to sneak up upon a pair of American survivors having an intimate conversation in an otherwise quiet forest and if those same former US citizens will then only have a broken scythe blade and a rusty rake to defend themselves from the attack instead of one of the around 393 Million guns in America as of now, I will try to get some Russian troll army to shut down Netflix.
Even if I have to spend my whole pocket money on it.
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Since its run is over now, I suggest Z-Nation. It takes the genre and adds giggles and a lot of batshit crazy to the mix. Because zombies and black humor are two great tastes that taste great together.
The book World War Z (but definitely not the movie) aimed for that sort of thing and also broke the genre mold by positing a world which hasn’t collapsed entirely, but sought novel solutions collectively to the situation.
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