I’ll go first. Mine is the instant knockout drug. Like Dexter’s intramuscular injection that causes someone to immediately lose consciousness. Or in the movie Split where there’s the aerosol spray in your face that makes you instantly unconscious. Or pretty much any time someone uses chloroform.
Interesting that you like the tropes. I like the fact that there’s some variation depending on your preference.
I like zombies that are infected and not reanimated. They’re fast but die from normal damage. 28 Days Later is one of my favorites and it’s a major point of emphasis.
The Walking Dead on the other hand is hard to take seriously sometimes because of the contrivances from slow moving zombies, and the fact that 10 year old zombies are still around bothers me. Although the idea of having a normal running society, but the dead reanimate is a very interesting concept that I would love to see explored.
Zombies in the George Romero tradition are basically just animated through magic. Otherwise it would be a World War Z (book) situation where the zombies would eventually just decompose entirely.
I can get behind fast zombies that are infected, I’m with you there. But I can’t suspend disbelief if a rotting corpse out of the ground can run like Usain bolt. Side note I would like to see monster stories that follow traditional folklore that isn’t well known. Werewolves can revert to human through their true love and vampires can’t be seen in mirrors only because silver was used to make mirrors but not anymore so we should be able to see vampire reflections in some mirrors. I think that would be cool if made plot relevant
Van Helsing did the mirror thing which was cool. I think Dracula Dead and Loving It did too.
Side thought. I loved in From Dusk Til Dawn when they’re trying to think of all the folklore that they could remember. Like whether silver was supposed to hurt vampires too or just werewolves.
Another side thought, I love when they know about the monsters like in Shaun of the Dead. It always bothers me when it’s an alternate universe that’s never heard of Zombies before.
The Walking Dead (tv series at least) is a great example of inconsistency undermining the overall rules for their world. Instead of the danger of the dead overrunning everything from outside, the danger of the recently deceased causing an outbreak in any sizeable community was a far more interesting threat in that setting. But they only did that for a little bit and went back to the overwhelming masses of dead and ‘people are the real monsters’ over and over.