Ken Foree is a zombie expert.

Ken Foree, star of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, is a zombie expert due to his years of experience with the genre.  He has expressed a preference for slow zombies in a video over at i09.com, and I definitely agree with him.  he points out that with slow zombies, you get a stronger sense that this shambling flesh-gnawing horror was once a person, and you get a sense of who they were and maybe how they met their undeath.

What he leaves unsaid is another characteristic of slow zombies – their greater capacity to induce a sense of helplessness.  A morbidly obese asthmatic can outrun them, a child who’s played enough video games can dispatch them with ease,  but they keep on coming.  The Zen of Zombie, my favorite book on the subject of zombies, points out that slow zombies lull fleeing humans into a false sense of security and makes them careless.  a survivor watching one zombie’s slow-as-molasses shamblling approach from the south may completely overlook the other zombies approaching from other directions and be caught off-guard, for instance.

In my mind, this also makes the slow zombie a symbol of hope and a lesson in perseverance.  They may only be as strong and fast as a sickly senior citizen and be completely devoid of intelligence beyond a reflexive grab-and-pull-towards-mouth movement, but they still decimate the populations of cities and bring down even experienced zombie-hunters through a combination of persistence (nothing short of a headshot stops them) and teamwork.*

* – you never get just one zombie.  in the billion-to-one chance someone IS dealing with a Patient Zero, they certainly aren’t expecting a zombie and aren’t prepared to deal with one, unless it is the even-more-unlikely situation of myself or one of the good people over at We Hate Zombies encountering Patient Zero.  should anyone else encounter this zombie originator, they will become a zombie themselves, and the infection will spread, and I will either A) get the zombie army I’ve always wanted and hold Las Vegas for ransom or B) dispatch the Zeds and get back to whatever I was originally doing.

Tags: ken foree, zombies