The zombie should not work as a monster. It is slow. It is stupid. It cannot plan, negotiate, or adapt. It has no menace beyond mass and hunger, no psychology to speak of, no capacity for the cruelty that makes a truly frightening antagonist. And yet the zombie film has outlasted nearly every other horror subgenre, mutated across decades of cinema, and shown a cultural staying power that more sophisticated monsters — vampires, werewolves, the various children of Frankenstein — have largely failed to match.