Not much seems to be available about this movie yet, but it definitely seems to be a unique take on the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’:

Here’s the trailer for an indie film being shot in Athens, GA. They are making a zombie film where the zombies have no real interest in the living unless they are provoked. While they will still tear into you apparently if you are bothering them, if you aren’t they could care less about what the living are doing. There isn’t a lot of information quite yet on how the plague spreads if the undead are indifferent to humanity or if it’s just something that now happens to anyone who dies but time will tell as we find out more information about the film.

And here’s the trailer:

Essentially, the dead rise from the grave (the trailer seems to indicate all dead people) as Zombie-like creatures, who are utterly disinterested in the activities of the Living. If you fight them, they fight back, and in the early days of the ‘Apocalypse’ people do just that, nearly leading to the end of the world… until someone notices that the Zombies will only retaliate, they never initiate hostilities. They’re Pacifist Zombies.

Huh. That implies both intelligence and reasonableness at least. On the other hand, the trailer shows.. Undead people standing around, expressionless, almost motionless, staring off into space. ‘Indifferent’ as BuyZombie puts it, a very apt description.

Can you even have a pacifist automaton? Are these Zombies oblivious to the world around them, or perhaps TOO immersed in it?

The latter idea comes to me from a number of sources. “Death & Suffrage” by Dale Bailey, the story that was extremely loosely adapted into the ‘Homecoming’ episode of Masters of Horror, deals with Zombies who, upon coming back, have very little interest in the affairs of day to day Living people because they find the world so beautiful that they slip into almost autistic trances at simple objects. (We discussed this previously on the ZRC blog here)

Likewise, a science fiction series I read years ago called ‘The Risen Empire’ featured post-mortem individuals who had been given a form of ‘immortality’ and found the concerns of people who had not yet died trivial or hard to understand, in part because their senses had been altered somewhat profoundly by the process. They were intelligent but solemn and had their own artistic and aesthetic senses that were incomprehensible to those who had yet to die and be converted. In particular, they could appreciate *extremely* subtle differences in the hue of black and greyish colors, which led them to create large works of art that to the uninitiated looked like a black canvas.

So there’s some precedent to the idea of Zombies/the Undead coming back as peaceful observers of the contemporary world, or with still human but significantly altered senses of the world around them. A ‘rich inner life’ one might call it. It’s not necessarily Anti-Zombie at all.

We’ll be keeping an ear out for more information on ‘A Plague So Pleasant’ as it becomes available. Intriguing, so far, even if the ‘plague’ part of the title is a tiny bit worrisome (though ‘pleasant’ helps offset it; Zombies are pleasant, aren’t they?)

Tags: Books, Movies, Television, Youtube Mischief

This entry was posted by John Sears on Saturday, May 28th, 2011 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.