“Slow & Shambling or Fast & Furious?”
About four years ago I started writing Viral Bound. I had an idea that I thought was original enough to have a chance in the already flooded zombie market. I knew it had to be different, yet I still had to keep the classic zombie feel. Not an easy task since new zombie stories get published everyday.
I read as many books as I could get my hands on over the years on the genre, and watched many of the zombie movies. Unlike others who credit the movie “The Nights of The Living Dead” as their start in the zombie genre, I just recently watched that film about 9 months ago. But there were others and the ones I thought were the most realistic were the slow moving zoms.
In 2011, I played a zombie in the film “Zombie Apocalypse, Redemption.” I mainly did it for the experience. I thought it would help me on my book, acting with others as zombies. I even went to zombie school to train on how zombies moved, walked and yes, even ran. Little did I know that the zombies in this film were going to be the fast and furious kind and it didn’t help much at all, except make me dislike the fast zombies that much more. Even though I enjoyed being part of the film, and I like the film, to me it didn’t feel much like zombies, but rather some mad dog virus, that makes you mean, angry and act like rabid animals.
To me, the only thing that makes sense is slow, shambling, zombies. They are decaying after all. They have died, and the only function that remains when they reanimate is the basics, just enough to get them around and feed. Their brains are dead and their animal instincts to survive, and feed is all that’s left. It takes brain-power after all to run, to think, to maneuver around obstacles and keep balance at high speeds. Brains that they don’t have.
That is why I chose the slower zoms for my book “Viral Bound.” It just makes more sense to me. Maybe the faster ones should be called Super Zombies with incredible strengths. Hmmm
Happy Reading
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