Conventions of Setting in Zombie Horror

The setting in the zombie horror is always placed in a environment that is placed in an isolated area such as the countryside, a farm or a forest. Sometimes however such as in 28 Days Later, the setting is placed in a large city that is known on a large scale by many people but being portrayed as a barren land, in a mess, completely run down and abandoned. The mess of rubbish can suggest that something terrible must have happened because no one has cleaned it up, so then it is a question of what exactly has happened for the place to get in such a state. These two differences are both rather powerful in their own ways and can portray two very different impressions.

Being in an environment that is isolated and away from big towns or cities, can in fact make the audience have a sense of there is no escape form what is happening even in places that are out of the way, which then creates fear in their minds as zombies will be everywhere that they go.
 If set in a largely populated and popular place such as London like 28 Days Later is; the setting can create a different sense of fear in comparison to somewhere isolated. This difference would be a sense of fear of something of such catastrophic proportions more than likely happening in your very own neighbourhood. The closer to home, the more scared you should be of a sudden zombie apocalypse happening at your front doorstep.
Closed in environments that are surrounded by zombies and there is no possible escape from are often also very favourable in zombie horror as once again it puts viewers into panic mode as soon there's nowhere to run to. A example of such would be this scene from Dawn of the Dead (2004) where there is clearly no getting out of there so easily.


Going back to isolated area's as they seem to be a more fitting and a reasonable convention for us to work with for our own horror opening I decided to see what effect a forest gives and how it creates such a overwhelming sense of discomfort. For this I decided to turn away from film for a while and turn to TV shows as The Walking Dead seems to have rather a lot of examples of zombie horror in some kind of forest.

The anticipation that can be displayed as well as that can be conveyed over to the audience that is given from such a setting is actually rather frightening. This puts characters in such such a large space which is actually masked by foliage which then can disguise something that is rather dangerous. For example there are several times throughout The Walking Dead series that characters are in a forest and randomly get attacked by zombies of which they did not recognise to be present before hand. This can terrify a viewer and make them feel vulnerable as they never know when the zombies are coming.

 I found that this tactic can be rather effective, especially if we was to use first person camera angles as we plan to for our opening as the viewer would have a personal connection to the situation that is happening which will feel as if they are the ones running through the forest, being chased and randomly running into zombies. I would say the viability of us being able to use a forest or a wood setting would be more likely than using a run down building as we would need permission for that, also we can't really travel to a large city and clear everyone out just to film something.