{"id":852479,"date":"2026-09-18T20:08:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T20:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/852479\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T20:08:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T20:08:09","slug":"our-sympathy-for-the-zombie-has-run-dry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/852479\/","title":{"rendered":"Our sympathy for the zombie has run dry"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the first major zombie movie<\/a> to come out in 2026, a kind (if slightly kooky) doctor sees the humanity inside of a hulking, virus-infected man who has the strength to pull out somebody\u2019s spine with his bare hands. The doctor tries to understand this so-called monster in order to save\u2014even befriend\u2014him, and he\u2019s ultimately successful. Meanwhile, in the most recent zombie movie<\/a> of the year, a scared little girl in the process of transforming into something horrible begs for help before her face splits open, revealing a single bloody eyeball and a ravenous maw of teeth. The protagonist instantly blasts her to bits with a shotgun; it\u2019s one of the funniest moments in the film.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To say that 28 Year Later: The Bone Temple and Resident Evil represent two different approaches to zombies is an understatement. There are similarities, of course. Both are gnarly movies with gore, shocking scares, and most importantly swarms of people who have been transformed into flesh-eaters by a viral outbreak. (Their zombies are, technically, not undead, though they\u2019re certainly zombies by any reasonable definition.) Zombies are one of the most versatile movie monsters; they can represent an intolerance of an \u201cother,\u201d prey on fears of infection, be a dark reflection of humanity\u2019s own impulses, or they can just be a bunch of spooky bad guys that protagonists can mow down without feeling too bad about it, video-game-style.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no surprise that Resident Evil, an adaptation that captures the experience of playing games like this better than basically any other before it, would depict zombies in this more mindless way. From the moment when the first victim of the t-Virus enters the movie, when she walks in front of Austin Abrams\u2019 car, Resident Evil\u2018s zombies are treated like props. She\u2019s scary, but she and the other zombies are played for laughs as much (if not more) than they are for horror. Before Bryan, Abrams\u2019 unfortunate medical courier, realizes the true nature of the woman he\u2019s hit, he\u2019s exasperated by her. In her stunned state she reaches over towards Bryan to his annoyance and the audience\u2019s uneasy chuckles. When a cop pulls Bryan over, they both treat her like a burden. As the t-Virus spreads, Resident Evil continues to deliberately ignore the humanity of the infected. They\u2019re no longer individuals\u2014literally, in the case of one multi-limbed monstrosity that fuses itself together with other zombies.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing inherently wrong with this approach to zombies. As a disposable villain, zombies are great. They\u2019re a ready-made, near-endless supply of targets; you don\u2019t have to worry about the ethics of ending a life if the shambling creature you\u2019re headshotting is already dead, right? Resident Evil is part of a rich tradition of this sort of zombie, as the original games helped revive the genre when it was struggling in the \u201990s, and there are plenty of examples of gross-out walking dead flicks from the previous decade that weren\u2019t exactly empathetic. Resident Evil isn\u2019t even the only zombie movie of 2026 that villainizes the undead. Colony<\/a>, from Train To Busan director Yeon Sang-ho, explicitly does away with any understanding that its zombies are (or were) individuals. Instead, they share a hivemind. By the time the man who unleashed the virus takes control of the horde, they\u2019re further reduced, to just being a weapon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Contrast this with The Bone Temple, Nia DaCosta\u2019s brutal, beautiful follow-up to Danny Boyle\u2019s 28 Years Later. It\u2019s the latest in the long line descended from Boyle\u2019s 28 Days Later, which came out the same year as Paul W. S. Anderson\u2019s first Resident Evil movie. Even in 2002, 28 Days Later had a lot more to say with its undead than the loose, action-packed game adaptation did, but The Bone Temple takes it to another level. While plenty of zombie movies have jumped on the notion that it\u2019s the living who are the real monsters, The Bone Temple does the humanizing work of actually showing how that might reasonably happen with Jack O\u2019Connell\u2019s Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He\u2019s a skin-flaying psychopath, yet The Bone Temple still manages to take audiences on a journey where they understand and even pity him. Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) certainly tries as best he can to hear the broken little boy inside Sir Jimmy. He also sees through the crazed eyes of the nearly unstoppable \u201calpha\u201d he\u2019s taken to calling Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry). Kelson takes reasonable precautions with Samson, but he doesn\u2019t view him as a monster to be killed; he\u2019s just another human being. In fact, every skull making up his Bone Temple once belonged to a person. When Kelson starts getting high on opiates with Samson, dancing with the extremely stoned, extremely nude alpha, it\u2019s the start of something profound. He was able to save Samson from a terrible fate; being a zombie seems as bad, if not worse, than being eaten by one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\ufeff\ufeff\ufeff<\/p>\n

Kelson saw the nobility and humanity that Samson fundamentally possessed even though he was a zombie. But is that what audiences want to see from their zombies? The Bone Temple bombed at the box office, making just $25 million domestic and putting the promised third 28 Years movie in serious doubt. Sure, The Bone Temple came out in January, just a year after the previous one, and audiences might have been fatigued\u2014or not even realized that The Bone Temple was a new movie rather than a re-release. It also probably didn\u2019t help that, despite having a deliriously entertaining set piece where Fiennes dresses like the devil and lip-syncs to Iron Maiden<\/a>, The Bone Temple is not especially fun. It\u2019s grueling and graphic; the violence not gratuitous titillation. Resident Evil, which turns a bisected body getting tugged along by intestines into a great gag, is a blast\u2014and is predicted<\/a> to make $80 million during its opening weekend. Again, there are other factors to consider when comparing undead apples to zombified oranges: Resident Evil is based on video game IP and Cregger is a hot horror director coming off of the massive success of Weapons.<\/p>\n

Resident Evil almost plays like a theme park ride, and just as guests aren\u2019t invited to consider the humanity of the animatronics on Pirates Of The Caribbean, they\u2019re not asked to think about the t-Virus victims. It\u2019s not asking any big questions about the worth of a human life, nor is it really asking the audience to think at all. Despite all the other mitigating factors, when it comes to zombies, it seems clear that this is what audiences want more than The Bone Temple\u2019s thoughtful empathy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s tempting to read too deeply into the troubling implications of that audience preference, but it shouldn\u2019t be especially surprising that the popcorn movie that\u2019s fun to see with an audience might draw a bigger crowd. But the failure of The Bone Temple, compared with Resident Evil\u2018s success, does take on an extra weight\u2014even a bitter irony\u2014because of another zombie movie that came out in September. Black Zombie, Maya Annik Bedward\u2019s revelatory documentary<\/a>, goes back to the Haitian roots of zombie folklore, exploring how the entire genre is based on a racist distortion of enslaved Africans\u2019 metaphor for their terrible situation. Zombies have always had a human origin. The Bone Temple, at least, remembers this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the first major zombie movie to come out in 2026, a kind (if slightly kooky) doctor sees…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":852480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-852479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=852479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/852480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=852479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=852479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=852479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}