The most glaring opposition for horror fans will be the PG-13 rating – a stigma when talking about quality horror movies. Us horror fans want our genre films gore heavy, disgusting, frightening, over-the-top, and balls to the wall. We don’t want to hear a horror movie is playing nice in order to draw in big audiences. With that said though, I’ve found a few PG-13 horror movies worth a damn like Mama, Drag Me To Hell, The Ring, Gremlins, and Insidious, but do you see which genre isn’t represented by those movies? Zombies. You can’t just crank up the speed on your zombies and replace the horror that comes from a ginormous herd of the undead tearing through a town, ripping flesh from bone with their decayed teeth. Zombies are terrifying because they look grotesque, can only be stopped by a bullet to the head, and can transform you just by a simple bite, all while being generally useless. Those who underestimate zombies typically die first in cinema.
Forster’s World War Z looks to be employing the “infected” variation of zombies, which is more like a rabies virus that turns people into sick beings instead of reanimated corpses. Think 28 Days Later or something along those lines. But then think back to Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later – those films were still f#cking brutal. Both films used these fast zombies to only heighten the gore and carnage, making their zombie villains something to seriously fear. World War Z on the other hand is already making me scratch my head, partly because the PG-13 rating means gore will be pretty non-existent in the way us horror fans are used to, and partly because there’s a scene in the trailer which shows a fast moving zombie blur running right by a cowering innocent person. Um, zombies don’t do that. They don’t pass up a free snack like that. I’ll be honest, I’m already nervous about the explanation that will be thrown our way.
Oi vey, OK, but what about all these reshoots and ending changes? Surely they must have a good reasoning for such? Apparently the original ending was so abrupt and nonsensical it had to be changed for the betterment of World War Z, so it must have been a real travesty, right? Maybe Pitt’s character gives Earth the finger and destroys the cure? Maybe he gets in a chopper and flies to Antarctica, again dooming the human race? I mean, you can’t get more abrupt and awful than that.