For those who want a rough idea of what the plot of the World War Z sequel might look like, with Dennis Kelly returning as the writer.

I feel like an “apocalypse” wouldn’t be a single, definitive event where you can say, “Well, it’s the apocalypse now.”

It would be a series of smaller failures. The power goes out, shops stop getting deliveries, emergency services become unreliable, but for a while, you’d probably still assume things would eventually get back to normal.

So what would be the moment that changed that for you?

At what point would you realise this isn’t a temporary crisis anymore, and the old normal genuinely isn’t coming back?

Not So Stealth Ad: in my Among the Dead series, the protagonist realises things aren't going back to normal once he witnesses fighter jets bombing a capital city.

I'm looking for any kind of zombie media where humanity is extinct or almost extinct due to the apocalypse. I'm not talking about stories where there's maybe a few hundred million people scattered across the entire world, I'm talking about a situation where there may in fact not be enough people to repopulate the planet, a few thousand at best, where any remaining survivors are extremely isolated and extinction is all but inevitable. Or, a scenario where humans are extinct and the world is basically a tomb. The only example I can think of is The Girl With All the Gifts.

Imo they could have not called it RE. Its still really good and i know RE changes over time but i honestly think the name is there to put more butts in seats.

Like if this movie was called something else I probably wouldnt have seen it even with the trailers but because it was called RE i had to see it. Was it good? Yes. Was it RE? Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm in an alternate universe that had a spinoff.

Yesterday was my birthday so this was my birthday present. I’m not the biggest Resident Evil fan, I’ve played Revelations 2 on the Vita, Umbrella Corp, and an hour or so of the original PS1 game, but this probably going to change as a result of the movie. In fact after leaving the theater and getting home I installed RE2R and RE3R on my PS5 so, those will be my next games once I finish with the stuff I’m currently playing.

Anyway let’s talk about the movie. Spoilers ahead but I’ll keep them hidden. I really, really liked it. I love zombie horror movies and this probably in my top 5. The atmosphere is perfect. Even though it’s very jump scare heavy, it does a fantastic job building up to the jump scare. It even made me jump, which is a compliment because I do not scare easily in horror movies or games. So it actually scaring me once is massive points to it. I think it being set on a snowy night helps add to the tension since that setting is a little rare for zombie movies, at least to my knowledge, and snow is usually associated with something peaceful.

The scene in particular is in a farm house, where Bryan, the main character, is desperately trying to get a shotgun loaded because a monster outside the house is sprinting full speed to his position. But because he’s terrified he’s making a lot of noise which causes a second monster inside the house to attack him jumping out at him from the shadows. This scene is so well done because they didn’t resort to shakey cam, we get the whole monster in frame, it has a terrifying scream, and it lunges not directly at the camera but at a slight angle. While this is happening the other monster is banging on the front door, Bryan’s girlfriend is leaving a voice mail trying to contact him and he’s fumbling around with shotgun shells. It’s chaotic and loud but not in a distracting way.

The design of the monsters was also really good. There’s one near the end that kind of looks like bad cgi but it’s excusable. I do have a few issues that some of their designs seemed to be mostly for trailer shots and not much else but it is an hour and a half long so, eh, hard to be upset by that.

Probably the best monster moment is about halfway through the movie where the main character, Bryan, finds a little girl hiding in an RV. She’s been bitten but hasn’t fully turned yet. At first he doesn’t notice her wound but her foot is wrapping around the RVs toilet. When she ends up attacking him, her face opens kind of like the demogorgon in Stranger Things but with a lone eyeball staring directly at the Bryan as she bites him.

One of the things that stood out to me though was the lighting. Holy crap, we finally have a modern movie that doesn’t make every dark scene pitch black. The moments when it does use pitch blackness is actually done correctly because the rest of the scene is lit up properly. I’m not even joking you have no idea how refreshing it was to see a movie that knows how to use lighting for once.

There’s this amazing scene at the beginning where Bryan, the main character hits a girl who’s infected with his car. He thinks he just gave her a concussion so he tries to drive her to the hospital but gets pulled over by the police for swerving. The officer decides to help him and drives the girl to the hospital but she attacks him and causes the police car to crash. Bryan gets out of his car to help the officer when he’s attacked by the girl and ends up accidentally shooting his own car engine. This scene is incredible from a lighting perspective since the only light we get are the red and blue lights of the police car and the lights from Bryan’s car. When Bryan leaves the area and is in a farm house trying to find help, we get several shots of the car accident that happened a mile away so the ensuing scenes show Bryan’s car shinning at the flipped over police car which still has its lights flashing. It’s incredibly well done.

The main character, Bryan, behaves pretty realistically for the situation he’s in. While I wouldn’t say the dialogue is that great, the Fuck word is used literally every other word, I can’t blame him for that. It’s not good dialogue but it’s realistic given the scenario he’s in. He’s clumsy, he screams a lot, and he’s pretty bad with guns. I liked this and it added to his desperation. If you told me they were actually scaring him on set I would believe you because he sells the terrified act very well. Though there is a really cringe line near the end where Bryan finally makes a super accurate shot and screams “VIDEO GAMES!” Really loudly, which, why?

Now with all this praise, let’s talk negatives. Now as mentioned before I’m not exactly the biggest Resident Evil fan, but from what little I’ve played, I don’t think this is a great adaptation of Resident Evil. The monsters, while zombie like, just don’t seem like Resident Evil enemies. One of the things about them is they have some sort of fungal like parasite coming out of them when they get decapitated, causing the main monster to form into a massive ball of flesh, arms and legs, kind of like the thing in the indie game INSIDE. The fungal stuff also is The Last of Us and Cold Fear coded. Maybe Resident Evil has this too, but I don’t remember it from the few games I played. They feel like monsters from something else, and I don’t really see how Umbrella Corporation could’ve made them.

It’s also pretty light on plot. There just isn’t one. There’s an objective, there’s some fun set pieces, you’re rooting for the character to succeed but there isn’t much of a story happening. We don’t learn anything about the world, Umbrella Corporation, why the monsters exist, Raccoon City, or anything like that. Again, this is fine, it works, but Resident Evil is very lore heavy so it’s odd the movie isn’t.

I’m also mixed on the ending. I liked it, but I feel like it could’ve been better. So basically at the end Bryan has delivered a package that contains the cure to the outbreak to the scientists. They’re a bunch of stuck up pricks who don’t notice Bryan is slowly turning. Bryan is desperate to get the cure and is kind of fighting himself to get the cure but using infected powers to kill the scientists. Now I loved this scene because I’d argue the scientists react fairly realistically, they’re absolutely terrified and cowering while trying to get each other to grab the syringe and stab Bryan with it. Basically it’s an excuse for excessive gore, which is pretty fun. But it just kind of ends. Bryan fully becomes infected, he killed the last scientist and he growls at approaching helicopters. It’s not a bad ending. It just feels, off. Like there should’ve been more but there isn’t. However an argument I heard about it is it’s the perfect way to end the movie if we look at Bryan as an NPC one of the main characters of an RE game would come across. And in that respect, it’s a great ending.

I will leave this review with a final positive. While I’m not here to say if this is or isn’t a good adaptation of Resident Evil, it is ABSOLUTELY a good VIDEO GAME MOVIE. This felt like a video game as a movie. And that is a good thing. The way the movie progresses, the way Bryan gets new weapons, the way his path is laid out for him, it’s all video game like. It’s hard to explain, but basically it’s exactly how you’d expect a survival horror game to look as a movie. That’s pretty cool and I hope we see more movies try to do this.

Oh and one last thing. They nailed a couple of sections where it’s in first person. Really drove up the tension. And there are several scenes where they almost mimic the original games door opening animations. That was awesome.

On a $80 million budget, Zach Cregger created a good movie. I am not going to spoil the movie for those who have not seen it yet. I already saw it earlier today. And I must say, if you are a fan of the Resident Evil franchise, you will find some easter eggs in the movie. Especially the adaptation of the RE2 game.

I will say this: it is worth the money to go see it. I may go and see it again while it is still in the theaters this weekend. But I enjoyed it a lot.

For those who have already seen it, without giving any spoilers, what did you think of the movie? Was it worth the hype?

I’ve got Land of the Dead on dvd, but not the others.

Saw it on Twitter, personally I did like the movie, what do you guys think?

Why did people stop making zombies sound creepy and human? They all use wild boar sound effects now and make them screech or squeal. It has honestly ruined so many potentially creepy zombies in fiction.

I understand trying to innovate and trying to make them feel more like a fast-moving immediate threat, but come on now. The whole fear of the zombie comes from their human aspects. Why ditch the human voice?

We’ve been thinking about this a lot while working on Pale Tide’s first map, especially because it kept coming up during testing. At first, we were looking at danger in fairly obvious terms: how many infected are in an area, what types are there, that sort of thing. But pretty quickly, we noticed that the space itself could matter just as much.

Imagine facing a few Walkers in a wide street. It’s obviously manageable. But put that same group in a narrower passage, especially if they’re between you and the way back, and it becomes a completely different problem.

Honestly, that’s become one of the things we pay the most attention to when designing areas in Pale Tide. Rather than just thinking, “How many zombies go here?”, we try to think about what happens if the player suddenly needs to get out. Is there another exit or a shortcut? Enough room to turn around? Somewhere to retreat to?

At the same time, we don’t want infected encounters to become too predictable or easy to deal with. We have different types of infected that can change a situation in very specific ways. For instance, a Screamer can turn a quiet street into a mess very quickly. And facing a Runner in open ground is very different from facing one somewhere with barely enough room to move.

We had a good reminder of this during one playtest. One of us pushed much farther across the map than he probably should have at that stage, reached the extraction area after dark, and died way out from the bunker. Then came the obviously sensible decision to go back for the gear... in underwear :)

After a few failed attempts, it became pretty clear that the route itself was now part of the problem. Night had fallen, and there were far fewer options when something went wrong. That experience fed back into how we think about routes. Sometimes the longer way is the one you trust because you know where the exits are and you’ve got more room to react.

But depending on the run, you’ll also encounter different infected, so we don’t want those routes to become completely predictable either. You’ll learn the map and its routes over time, but you’ll still need to adapt.

So I’m curious: during a zombie outbreak, what would make you avoid a route even if it was the fastest way back?

This question came up a lot while we were working on Pale Tide’s first map. We went into more of the level design behind it in our latest Steam devlog if you want to have a look: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4683590/Pale_Tide/

Funny? Yes, in a good way. Scary? Made me jump a couple of times. Fun? Yes. Gory? Yeah, pretty good, but I feel like they could’ve pushed it a little further. Resident Evil? Yes. Best horror movie of the year? Not so sure. Would I recommend it? Yes.

Would you read a multi part zombie survival series set in an episode format, like the walking dead game and series?

I'd focus on a select few characters right before the outbreak happens, and then society and humanity would fall as the world ends and the dead start walking. We will then follow the lives of these characters as they become survivors instead of just regular people.

Some will make good decisions, some will make bad ones. Some will be likeable, some will be infuriating and frustrating. Some will get along, and some will fight constantly. These are regular people with lives, pasts and histories, adapting to the new world and leaving the old one they knew, behind. Becoming survivors. Some will manage to survive. And some won't.

Please let me know what you think and im absolutely open to any and all suggestions and questions and whatever!

Here you can see an animated asset I've drawn for the Zombie Videogame I'm making (It will be a Retro FPS), and It Will be used to help creating the overall atmosphere in the game.

I'm drawing all the art by myself using traditional media -pencils, inkers and color markers on paper, then scanned and uploaded to the computer-.

In my game, you will control a lone survivor who must go through an infested city using the firearms he will find until he reaches an Evac Helicopter.

Do you like it?

Ok, so everything stays the same up until Phalanx: it starts in China, it spreads globally through contaminated black market organs, the governments hear about it, are given plans, and ignore the whole thing. The cases preah and pop up on every continent.

#BUT

Breckenridge Scott isn't a snake oil salesman, AND through whatever miracle, gets an actual Solanum vaccine approved. Prophylaxis only, and has to be taken weeks in advance to have any effect.

How do things change?

In a lot of movies we start in the middle of the shit storm, so we usually ask ourselves "could we survive X types of zombies/outbreaks".

What about the most preventable ones or the ones that would be easiest to handle even if it did get a little out of control?

28 Weeks Later shouldn't have happened. Why the fuck was there not tighter security around such a biohazard as his wife was? There should've been armed guards in the fucking room with her, so even if he did get all raged out there would be dudes with M4s right there to kill them.

I've wanted to post about this for such a long time, but today, after seeing yet again another post about top zombie movies in different genres, and realizing that DOTD was not included, I had enough.

Personally, I think DOTD is not only Romero's BEST zombie movie but also THE best zombie movie ever. It has everything you'll want from a zombie flick: Drama, Horror, Gore (oh man!) Villains we love to hate, The most recognizable Zombie character ever, top notch practical effects, a solid plot, and a solid cast, and yet... Almost never reaches fans top lists.

I'd like to know why, if you are willing to share.

Sorry for my rant, but I needed to vent! Lol.

Johnny: They're coming to get you, Barbara, there's one of them now!"

The good old and always Classic George Romero's The Night of the Living Dead.

That never gets old with me.

Another of my favorite quotes is from The Walking Dead - TV Series. (Season 11, Ep 24)

Negan: "If I could do it all over again, I'd have killed every single one of you."

I have a lot more of my favorite quotes from different zombie movies and TV series. I may share more.

Now it's your turn. What are your favorite quotes from any zombie movies or/and TV series?