13 Halloween movies for people who don’t like horror
By Amy Woolsey
Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin, and Woody Harrelson in Zombieland (2009), image courtesy of Columbia Pictures
4. Zombieland (2009)
By themselves, zombies aren’t all that interesting. Originated from Haitian folklore, they’re generally portrayed in modern fiction as mindless corpses, lacking any semblance of personality beyond their craving for mortal flesh. Many movies skate around this obstacle by embracing the monsters’ allegorical potential. Zombieland, Ruben Fleisher’s feature film directorial debut, does so by turning the zombie apocalypse into a backdrop for human drama. Jesse Eisenberg plays Columbus, a college student who “avoided people like zombies before they were zombies” and survives by following an extensive list of rules (e.g. double tap; travel light, both literally and metaphorically). While traveling home, he is joined by Woody Harrelson’s cowboy hat-wearing, Twinkie-loving Tallahassee and a pair of con-artist sisters, Emma Stone’s Wichita and Abigail Breslin’s Little Rock.
In short, it’s a road trip movie, filled with driving montages and leisurely conversations. It’s also a comedy. As you’d expect, writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick mine plenty of laughs from horror and action clichés, but the most effective humor is character-based, as we watch this band of misfits find ways to cope with their situation. All four central actors share an exuberant, good-natured rapport, firing banter back and forth with the ease of old friends; we actually believe that they would become inseparable. Harrelson in particular shines, bizarrely winsome in his manic belligerence. That he makes a character with the motto “nut up or shut up” even remotely tolerable is an achievement at least as impressive as his two Oscar nominations.
Similar movies: Shaun of the Dead (2004), Fright Night (2011)