The zombie is where it all ends. Not just this journey through the ABCs of Horror, but something larger as well. The zombie is the most millennial of monsters: the one that scares us not just because of its foul appearance or its nasty behavior, but because when it shows up you know that things are really starting to fall apart at the seams. 

Is there a good zombie movie that isn’t apocalyptic? Well, a couple. Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 classic I Walked with a Zombie, for example, manages to be a Grade A zombie movie despite the fact that there are very few zombies in it and that they wreak little in the way of damage as well. But by and large, a good zombie movie is about more than just zombies: it’s about the end of the world.

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The young. Where would horror movies be without a steady supply of them?

Not that it was always that way. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and any number of other pre-and-early-fifties monsters all got along fine without any teenagers to menace. But these days it’s the rare – and typically more serious – horror film with a victim list that doesn’t include at least one or two sub-twenty-year-olds.

The reasons for this are well known. The advent of the drive-in; the realization among movie-makers that teenagers made up a large part of the horror movie audience; the equally important realization that teenagers like watching other teenagers on the screen…  Taking all those cold hard economic facts into account, it was only a matter of time before cinematic natural selection left horror movie viewers stuck watching a bunch of dumb kids (along with one or two smart ones) getting picked off for an hour and a half.

But in a perfect world, might it perhaps be a little different?

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