"How Sprinters Ruined the Zombie Genre"

Gibberish is My Native Tongue blog writes:

 When the film 28 Days Later hit the screen in 2002, it signaled a huge shift in the zombie genre. Prior to 28 Days Later, zombies were slow and shambling. If I had to compare them to something from nature, I’d say they were glacial. Once 28 Days Later came out with its sprinting non-zombie zombies, everything changed. Zombies were now fast and agile. They could climb and could run, seemingly forever. Zombies were now more of a pissed off horde of fire ants, running at full tilt forever without taking a breath. The remake of Dawn of the Dead in 2004 cemented the idea of the sprinter zombie.

Shamblers allow the human characters an opportunity to prepare, and time for introspection. Survival seems possible, but not probable. The glimmer of survival, of being able to defeat, escape or evade a slow moving mass of death, gave characters a reason to live. Suicidal characters do make their way into a shambler’s narrative, but only by weaker characters or those assured certain death.

Sprinting zombies, if explored logically, would never allow for the humans to do anything more than scream “HOLY SHIT WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!” Sprinter zombies deprive the human characters of a realistic chance for success, and accelerate the action to such a pace that it does not allow for the study of the human condition. Romero’s zombie films and the Walking Dead comic book are good because the slow speed of the zombies allow for narrative pacing. Sprinters, if done properly, would not. There would never be a chance for an introspection of how people can be brave or cowardly, generous or selfish, because a tidal wave of runners would smash any hope for survival.

. . . If the trailer is any indication, the World War Z movie is about how amazing Brad Pitt’s character is, and how he’s one of the “only ones” with the specialized training to combat what’s going on. Who else is going to fight a horde of pissed off fire ants? A superhero-like character. The sprinter zombies present such an overwhelming foe that the protagonists have to be even more incredible.

And that is the opposite of what the zombie genre has always been.

Zombie fiction has been more about human interaction, or humans as the true monsters. Someone’s kid gets bitten, and the parents refuse to do the right thing. The kid turns and kills a lot of people. Or someone wants to leave a shelter, or stay too long, or makes a decision to split the group, and the decision kills a lot of people. The human characters are just as responsible for their deaths as the zombies. The shambler is just a foil.

When the zombie is a sprinter, it becomes the menace. The humans become purely the defender. It’s hard for me to imagine the slow, grinding drama of survivors running low on supplies when a giant stream of sprinters stack on top of each other up a sheer wall: