As last week’s piece by C Bush reminded us, people are interested in zombies, especially relative differences in their speed. In this, I’m no exception, but while other readers responded in comments with the speed of . . . well, a fast zombie, I’ve been slowly lurching my way toward today’s post.

What do we make, asked E Hayot, about the transition from the old-fashioned zombies who lumbered with vague menace in Night of the Living Dead to the streaking creatures of 28 Days Later? My thoughts since have run more toward the “zombie=medium” line than the “zombie=capital,” though, as last week’s discussion notes, those lines surely intersect.

Rather than the transitions from photography to film and video, however, I’ve been thinking about the shifting, I’m not sure if “fading” is quite right, influence of stage drama on film. In particular I think that another piece of the zombie puzzle might be put in place by thinking about the imagined spaces in which it might make sense for zombies to move slowly or quickly.

What got me thinking about this was the idea that Night of the Living Dead would work pretty well as a play. (I’ve since come to find out that a playwright Lori Allen Ohm thought so, too.) There’s a pretty limited set, after all, lots of dialogue – but importantly you could also imagine staging those slow zombies. Generally it’s their presence that matters more than anything else, and their slow speed might even make the tense run to the pickup truck feasible as well; even when there is a chase scene of sorts, it is, in the end, more gestural than kinesthetic or spatial.

This is the space of most TV, as well. The particular dimensions of the coffee shop in Friends don’t exactly matter beyond their declaration of a certain kind of social space, where certain people might gather for certain kinds of social activity. The fact that the layout of the Simpons’ house gets manipulated to suit storylines testifies to the fact that the important thing is the domestic house-ness of the house rather than the experience of moving through space.

This is, I think, a fairly different kind of space for performance than, say The Matrix offers. Recall the opening sequence in which Trinity fights off the cops and then the agents, pausing to calculate her leap out one window through another, rolling onto her back to re-orient her guns back toward her pursuers. Or the famous sequence in which Neo dodges the bullets shot at him. In most cases, the narrative event “Neo dodges some bullets” would have mattered in terms of plot; here it’s a matter of space, reflecting on the usually meaningless gap between the firing of a gun at the hero and the narrative result. Here, those bullets weren’t just fired “at” Neo – they traced a very specific path through space. And the thrill (who asked you, ferrets?) of Trinity’s escape comes not only from the fact of it, but the particularity of her just-past-the-possible mastery of the imagined space of the film.

In such a space, zombies would pretty damn well have to be fast or there’d be nothing going on. If Neo went into slow-motion bullet-time against the zombies in Night of the Living Dead, the only danger is that he’d fall asleep waiting for the zombies to get to him. (Leaving open, I suppose, the prospect of a Tortoise & Hare story of hubris, but a real drag on the action sequences.)

My contribution to the zombie debate, then, is to suggest that part of what’s happening is the transition away from the precursor medium of stage drama toward an emphasis – in certain kinds of film – on a less figurative use of space made possible by a variety of visual technologies. Night of the Living Dead could work as a play in part because the zombies being vaguely “out there” or “chasing” a character is enough. For some of the reasons I’ve sketched out above, it’s a bit hard to imagine The Matrix: The Musical, and not just because the title’s so awkward. On the other hand, this is to confuse adaptation across media with the contrast I was meaning to suggest between them. So, like a good cover song, maybe there’s something there that’s waiting to be revealed. Maybe, just maybe . . .