Over at the not-safe-for-work Suicide Girls, George Romero is interviewed about his upcoming DVD, Diary of the Dead. Reading through the interview, this passage in particular caught my attention. Romero gets asked how he feels about the high-speed, super-strong zombies that populate recent movies like 28 Days Later and the re-make of Romero’s own Dawn of the Dead.

Oh boy, I don’t believe they can do it. I mean, the stuff I said in the film is exactly [what I think.] I think their ankles would snap. It doesn’t make sense to me. I used to get asked, after the Return of the Living Dead movies, “Well, how come your guys aren’t coming up out of graves?” Because no individual zombie has the strength to dig through all that mahogany, man. So there’s a little set of rules there, anyway, that keeps it, at least in my mind, somewhat reasonable.

I like zombie movies, but aside from Shaun of the Dead and Romero’s own Land of the Dead, I find I have very little use for modern zombie films. The reason for this can be summed up in two words: Fast zombies.

Of course, Romero has a good logical reason for why zombies shouldn’t be fast or particularly strong. They’re dead. Dead people shouldn’t really be faster or stronger than they were when they were alive. As for me, I have a storytelling reason for why I don’t like it. Fast zombies lose the very element that makes zombies uniquely scary among other movie monsters.

A super-fast, super-strong zombie has nothing to distinguish it from a vampire or a werewolf or any number of creatures put on film by Hollywood over the years. They’re all beings who can outrun you, outfight you, and who want to feast on your flesh (or, in the case of a vampire, blood).

A slow, shambling zombie, however, is uniquely scary because of what it means if it actually catches you. If one of the new breed of movie zombies – fast, strong, and eerily intelligent – grabs hold of you, it’s not a big deal. They’re faster than you. They’re stronger than you. For some reason, they’re just better than you. Being caught by a slow zombie, however, means one of two things. Either you have been caught in a situation in which defeat is inevitable or – more likely – you seriously screwed up.

In other words, when a slow zombie chows down on your brain, there are no real excuses. There’s a better than even chance that it’s your own fault.