New World War Z Still; More on the Film’s Running Zombies and a Possible Trilogy

Steve Barton   |  

Nov 8, 2012

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share on Flipboard
• Share on Reddit
• Share on Pinterest
• Share on WhatsApp
• Share via Email

The full trailer for World War Z is expected to drop in a few hours, and in the meantime we have a new still featuring Brad Pitt along with a few comments from visual effects supervisor John Nelson about the type of zombies we’ll see in the film.

EW provided the still and the following info:

Pitt plays Gerald Lane, a United Nations researcher watching civilization teeter on collapse in the face of a rapacious army of rasping death. How can the relentless hordes be stopped? To answer that question, Lane accepts a mission that pulls him away from his wife (Mireille Enos) and family and sends him on a global search for the plague’s dark origins — and, yes, that fact-finding odyssey just might take three PG-13 films to complete, if World War Z gets a lively response at the box office.

After various re-writes and re-shoots, insiders promise the new ending was worth the cost and say the film still has plenty of the inventive spirit of the source material, the 2006 bestseller World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks… But World War Z will also feel the hot Internet wrath of purist fans who are offended that the film’s zombies might be better described as the running dead. That’s because World War Z follows in the fleet footsteps of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake in 2005 with its flouting of the shambling zombie tradition set down by George A. Romero’s genre-sparking films, beginning with Night of the Living Dead in 1968.

Visual effects supervisor John Nelson (Iron Man) said World War Z’s zombies lean more toward sci-fi transformation victims rather than supernatural resurrection subjects. That led to a lot of research into animal behavior, especially for creatures under the amok-time sway of predator appetite or spawning urge. “They are like predatory animals that can’t control themselves,” Nelson said. “I worked with tigers [while shooting Gladiator], and if you watch them when a horse goes by, they go batty, even if they know they can’t reach it. When Zs see humans, they do [the] same thing – they activate. They launch themselves.”

He went on to add: “There are a lot of things in nature we’re mining as references. They move like birds or school of fish, too, in reactive formations, and it’s not because they have a higher level of [shared] thinking or communication – it’s about their nature and the fact that their instinct to infect is so basic, efficient, and overpowering. They will go through anything. If they lose both legs, they will walk on their hands. They lock in, and they’re like salmon going upstream or sperm swimming to be the first to egg.”

Paramount is releasing the Marc Forster-directed adaptation of the Max Brooks zombie infestation novel World War Z on June 21, 2013.

For more visit the official World War Z website, “like” World War Z on Facebook, and follow World War Z on Twitter.

Subscribe to our Newsletter