The zombie genre evolves depending on changing dynamics in
politics, social issues and popular culture and often highlights or challenges
established norms and social ideals.
Our film
highlights the idea of passive learning in schools and how it changes students
into mindless ‘zombies’ (if you will) with no free thought of their own.
In the genre theorist Rick Altman’s 1999 piece ‘A
Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre’ he states that in the new
millennium, films of the zombie genre have taken on new Semantic and Syntactic
forms. Semantics being the study of meaning and Syntax the study of various
signs which appear in a system and the possible arrangement of those signs.
Contemporary zombie films have evolved from the B-movies uninterested in a deeper narrative and wider meaning to films centred on social and political conflict and exploring the human condition. This questioning of what makes us human is popular amongst film makers as zombies are humans who have been forced into their most primitive state and stripped of all emotion. Though even this idea of emotionless zombies has been challenged in such films as ‘Day of the Dead’ (1985) and ‘Warm Bodies’ (2013).
This is a clear example of how this genre
is constantly evolving and changing.
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