Don’t use the ‘Z’ Word!

Posted on June 5, 2013 by Clint

Do you recall this exchange from Shaun of the Dead?

Ed: Are there any zombies out there?
Shaun: Don’t say that!
Ed: What?
Shaun: That.
Ed: What?
Shaun: That. The Z word. Don’t say it.
Ed: Why not?
Shaun: Because it’s ridiculous!
Ed: Alright… Are there any out there, though?

The joke for fans of the zombie genre is that there has always seemed to be this unwritten rule that no one ever can refer to the hungry walking dead by the term we the audience are most familiar with. It even inspired a TV Tropes entry on how fiction writers sometimes tie themselves in knots to avoid calling a vampire a vampire, or a zombie a zombie.

Which, y’know, whatever… George Romero himself thought of his creatures as “ghouls”. Plus if your characters immediately scream “Zombie!” when a groaning, walking corpse is grasping for them, you may be forfeiting a certain amount of genre blindness that a lot of zombie fiction needs in order for the narrative to function properly. This comic’s characters are perfectly okay with calling them what they are, but then they’re practical folks like that, and it’s not the usual zombie story. It doesn’t hinge around the chaos and uncertainty of the zombie apocalypse as it happens.

But it’s not unknown for a more mainstream zombie story to use the Z word. Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War is a perfect example of that exception to the rule…

…which is why it’s all the more bizarre that the film adaptation seems to be doing everything in its power to hide away that it involves zombies, like it’s ashamed of its own subject matter. Shortening the title to just World War Z is understandable. Trailers which make no mention of the undead (or even “infected”) in any form, and show split-second, confusing images of what could be just really excited people running about and piling up on each other begin to feel weird. In fact the beginning of the latest trailer I saw, with Brad Pitt and his family stopped in traffic in some big city (and then EXPLOSION!), could have easily been interchangeable with a disaster film like Independence Day or Armageddon.

Speaking of which, check out the poster.

World-War-Z-poster

Very dramatic, but no real clue as to why the city happens to be on fire in several places. Independence Day didn’t hide the alien spaceships. The Day After Tomorrow gleefully showed off the Statue of Liberty being splashed with giant waves. Why is this film afraid of its disaster? Why is it afraid of its own zombies? Anyone who already knows the World War Z property knows it’s about zombies, this is entirely about concealing it from the rest of the moviegoing public.

Think I’m imagining things? Screenrant.com agrees with me, and tells a story of a rather bloated and mismanaged production process, as well: CLICK

The last time I saw a movie ad campaign this afraid of its own subject matter was John Carter, and we all know how well that worked out. But hell, even though there’s some backlash on the zombie genre here and there, with the ongoing success of The Walking Dead both as a comic and a TV show I wasn’t aware that zombies were as much box office poison as Mars was apparently supposed to be. I had my own rant about the handling of John Carter a year ago, and again I’m seeing all the signs of a studio that can’t figure out how to market a property that should have been a much easier sell.

Max Brooks already distanced himself from the adaptation, saying the only similarity between it and his book is the title. But I expected that, especially when I heard Brad Pitt had been cast… the book’s format just doesn’t support a standard star-driven Hollywood picture’s structure. I suppose I even expected that they would discard Brooks’ shamblers in favor of the “fast zombie” option that’s all the Rage (har har) these days.

What I didn’t expect was a production that optioned a film of a book about a zombie apocalypse, and is now in headlong retreat trying to distance that film’s marketing from zombies. Has the Z Word become that much of a dirty word, unmentionable not just for genre reasons but financial ones as well? Or is this another cowardly misfire from Tinseltown that will end up making no one happy?

I know the handling of things so far hasn’t made me any more confident about spending money on a theater ticket. John Carter was still a decently entertaining film despite the fustercluck surrounding its failure, because some of the people involved still seemed to believe.

World War Z? I don’t know. All it seems to be looking to do is try to get as much money as possible on opening weekend, before the word gets out to the masses that the movie has those silly, silly zombies in it.

 

7 thoughts on “Don’t use the ‘Z’ Word!”

  1. James

    I’m guessing that they are trying to distance themselves from the “THOSE AREN’T ZOMBIES!” people.

  2. Clint

    Except they’re obviously not worrying about appealing to zombie fans at all, so why would they care about offending a minority of the people they already wrote off?

  3. Connie

    I loved the book. I loved the socio-political aspects of it. How governments went out of their way to ‘keep people calm’ instead of finding ways to deal with the threat (Except Israel, which surprises no-one). How people thought it would all be over by Christmas, and how people were forced to rethink everything they knew in order to survive.

    Now we have a generic shambler zombie movie which, from what I was told, completely eliminates the incubation period which allowed the disease to spread so widely without being noticed at first.

    I’m only going to buy the soundtrack because they somehow got Muse to do it, but I won’t be spending 12 bucks to see this.

  4. Clint

    I’m not even sure it’ll be kind enough to be a generic zombie movie, it’s looking like “As the world falls into chaos, one man races against time to save humanity… but mostly his family, although they’ll be conveniently out of the way except for concerned looks and phone calls.” The exact same plot we’ve seen in all the disaster movies of the last 20 years.

    I guess it works or they wouldn’t keep reusing the formula. But I’m done paying 12 bucks to see it. Also, apparently the verdict is that now even the fast zombies of 28 Days Later or the DotD remake aren’t scary enough, now they have to act like army ants on PCP.

  5. SteelRaven

    When I first saw the trailer, I liked the whole ‘total chaos’ feel in the opening. Though they had the right idea about ‘the great panic.’ Then I saw the CGI tsunami of what-I-was-supposed-to-be-zombies and said ‘what the hell!?” Think the movie would have a chance if they went the 28 Days Later/ Rec direction of fast zombies as long as they used people in make up but the god damn CG mob just looks stupid in the trailers. The CGI ‘night seekers’ (as in not vampires, right) in I Am Legend had the same problem, too much CG= fake and not scary. Who knows, if Will Smith’s I Am Legend ended up being a successes despite making two bad endings and under-minding the who point of the original novel, maybe WWZ will end up doing good… ether way, it’s a slap to the face of those who read the book and to the zombie genre as a whole.

  6. Clint

    I think by mentioning the CGI issue you nail one of the problems which will become apparent in the film itself, which may be why they’re so reluctant to show off the zombies in the trailers beyond split-second glimpses. I don’t think they used a lick of CGI in the DotD remake, for example, even in those scenes where they pan over a mall parking lot just packed shoulder to shoulder with undead. I could be wrong on that, but if there was any CGI it wasn’t noticeable like it was in I Am Legend.

    I Am Legend did well because Will Smith, full stop (although in the wake of After Earth I think his star has finally fallen). The saddest thing was they originally filmed an ending much closer to the book’s, but it didn’t do well in the test screenings so we got what we saw in the theater. Apparently the entire third act of World War Z was also rewritten and refilmed after test screenings.

    They’re aiming to do moderately well in America and then try to recoup the rest in the International market, where explosions and broad themes play out to the biggest profit potential… and Lindelof’s involved, so whatever else, don’t go in expecting much in the way of coherent thoughts.

  7. Darg

    I may – *may* – Redbox this when it comes to DVD, but considering the dual facts that Brooks himself disapproves of the entire thing and Lindelof “fixed” the last turd… sorry, third of the movie, I may give it a complete pass.
    Shame, too, as I was super-excited when I first heard about this project; I had just finished reading both the Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z when it was announced. Now, though? Meh.

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