Zack Snyder on Why Zombies Are So Fun

When news broke that Zack Snyder was tackling another zombie movie, my heart leaped. I think directors who come off big franchises need palate cleansers that take them back to what they love about directing so they can access their roots. 

For Zack Snyder, he has the opportunity to take all his blockbuster lessons and apply them to the genre that helped him break in from music videos.

One of the biggest lessons he learned was how to handle massive streams of extras. For Army of the Dead, Snyder was really the general of this army. So how do you handle all these people behaving like zombies? Some schooling is required. 

Zack Snyder and his wife and producing partner, Deborah Snyder, recently spoke to the Boston Herald about the 200 extras involved in the film.

Deborah Snyder said, “For the hordes of zombies we had Zombie School, where the stunt team, who already knew how to move like a zombie, would teach 200 extras. They didn’t have the training that the stunt people did, so we had to train them how to move and act like a zombie.”

Zack Snyder elaborated on why it's so fun to make zombie movies. “The fun of the zombie genre is that the audience is ahead of you," he said. “Like, you could ask a lot of people, ‘How do you kill zombies?’ ‘Shoot ’em in the head.’ ‘What if you get bit by a zombie, do you become a zombie?’ ‘Absolutely.’”

Snyder went on to say, “People know. So that’s the fun of it... In a lot of ways, it’s like making a Western or something like that. There are certain things and those are the rules you have to do. You have to deconstruct and subvert expectations. Right when you think it’s one way, you’ve got to take them that way.”

Are you excited to see these schooled zombies take on Vegas with Snyder's insane visual stylings? 

Let us know in the comments.