Dead Next Door Broke Headshot Rule

Dear Zombie Master,

You listed The Dead Next Door as a classic that helped set the rules for zombies in film, but in the first 10 minutes of this one a zombie gets a bullet right between the eyes and then has his head chopped off, yet continued to move.

The head kept biting and looking around while the headless corpse kept clawing the air. The human characters even talked about the zombie and stated that it was alive, so it wasn't just post-mortem muscle spasms. I think that this is a deal breaker.

Only Resident Evil and Dead Alive were allowed to break the rule that a shot to the head takes down a zombie. Dead Alive because the zombies were definitely not ordinary (they could reproduce for one thing), and Resident Evil because those zombies are special bio-weapons, which places them in the exception category of "They were engineered to be...", in this case, much harder to kill.

Would love it if you could get back to me on this.

Kerkes

Kerkes,

Yes I did mention The Dead Next Door as a classic of the 80's having been released in 1988. I also listed Return of the Living Dead having been filmed in 1985 and actually started the use of "rules-breaking" zombies as a satirical approach to the zombie genre. The 80's also introduced the many different ways of becoming a zombie with demon possession, alien slug, etc. It was a decade of experimentation.

If you recall, I also pointed out that it was a time of rule-making and that some were accepted and some were not. Though the O'Bannon zombies have left a permanent impression (Brraaaiiiinnnnssssss) it is hard to find a talking zombie in today's catalog of zombie films. Both Resident Evil and Braindead followed this line of experimentation in the way that zombies are created, but also followed the core rules. The Dead Next Door just tries to follow the O'Bannon line and personally, after his work on Alien (1979), Dead & Buried (1981), Heavy Metal (1981), and Lifeforce (1985) I would probably have tried to emulate him as well.

Good hunting and aim high,

The Zombie Master