Are you team vampire or team zombie? It's easy to see why vampires have a pop-culture edge. They clean up better for photo shoots. They embody sex — all that sharing of fluids — not decay. They are refined, orderly, even courtly. Zombies tend to be poor conversationalists.
But when it comes to bringing actual horror, it's no contest. A vampire will nibble your neck, but zombies will take down your entire civilization. (Ever pragmatic, bloodsuckers prefer to keep their food supply sustainable.) The zombie apocalypse is the premise and setting of AMC's new series The Walking Dead (Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.; premieres Halloween night). And judging by the first two episodes of its six-episode debut season, the scariest part of the series is not what the animated corpses do but what the surviving humans are driven to do.
Adapted from graphic novels by Robert Kirkman, with author-sanctioned liberties, and produced by Frank Darabont (director of The Shawshank Redemption), Walking Dead centers on Southern sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), who has the good fortune to be shot nearly fatally before a viral outbreak that turns most of humanity into ambulatory meat.
Rick awakens from a coma (à la 28 Days Later) in an abandoned hospital. He staggers out into the depopulated world, searching for the wife and son he hopes are still alive, and learns about the outbreak bit by bit. Survivors are rumored to have massed under military protection in Atlanta. The virus, transmitted by zombie bites and scratches, kills you and then wakes you up; the flesh-eating revenants can't speak and are physically and mentally slow, though they retain vague memories of their lives. (They can be killed only by shots to the head, because you don't mess with tradition.)
The 90-minute pilot, directed by dara-bont, paints a thoroughly convincing postapocalyptic world, both visually and emotionally. Yes, it delivers astonishing scenes of devastation, but its more affecting — and more horrifying — concerns are human.
How do you hold on to your morals, your laws, your faith, when no one is around to compel you to? Does the calamity drive the few remaining humans to band together or revert to barbarism? And how does it feel when the "walkers" on your street — whom you must put down or be killed yourself — are your friends and family? A subplot in the pilot, in which Rick befriends a widower and son holed up in their house alone, recalls Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic novel The Road.
The more intriguing aspect of the series is the survivors and whether they can maintain a society worth surviving in. Which makes zombies an ideal metaphor, as Godzilla was in the nuclear age, for our nightmares du jour: pandemics; decentralized terrorism; the collapse of social, financial and ecological systems. Zombies are viruses, really — leaderless networks, organized on no other principle than destruction, multiplying exponentially until they burn themselves out, taking us with them. If The Walking Dead can build on its promise and run with these ideas, along with unflinching gross-out thrills, it can tell a doomsday story with all the things zombies crave: brains, guts and heart.
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