Although 2013’s Brad Pitt vehicle World War Z was the most expensive horror movie ever made, the zombie action thriller wasn’t particularly scary. Big budgets can be a blessing and a curse for horror movies. On the one hand, bigger budgets theoretically mean more money for special effects. This means that the monsters and the murders can be more inventive and realistic, which is generally seen as a good thing. After all, nothing sinks a good horror movie quite like hilariously unconvincing, cheap special effects. However, there is another side to this equation that makes high-budget horror high risk.

Since even great box office bombs that kill horror franchises since, ironically, they are too big and expensive to feel like real horror movies.

World War Z Had A Budget Of Around $190 Million

The 2013 Zombie Movie Was Extremely Expensive For A “Horror”

Although 2013’s World War Z wasn’t a box office failure, the apocalyptic zombie horror was notably un-scary. An adaptation of the 2006 novel of the same name, World War Z tells the story of Brad Pitt’s Gerry Lane, a UN investigator tackling a worldwide zombie apocalypse. With a budget of approximately $190 million (which was rumored to have grown even higher), World War Z earned $540 million upon release. Despite this, the movie never received a sequel or spawned a franchise. This is at least in part because, for all of its budget, World War Z wasn’t remotely scary.

World War Z’s globe-hopping zombie story had some moments of moderate tension and some minimal gore, but the movie was more concerned with large-scale action set-pieces than generating genuine scares. Pitt’s hero is never in true peril throughout its draggy runtime, while World War Z’s family-friendly PG-13 rating means the movie rarely gets gruesome. Compared to the boundary-pushing small-screen series The Walking Dead, World War Z felt more like an international thriller than a zombie horror. This wasn’t helped by a surprisingly optimistic ending which, alongside the lack of serious scares, made World War Z feel disappointingly anodyne.

World War Z Wasn’t Even That Scary Compared To Other Zombie Movies

World War Z’s Military Action Couldn’t Compare To 28 Days Later Or Romero’s Movies

World War Z has the misfortune to arrive after a string of truly scary zombie movies, which made its shortcomings as a horror movie more obvious. World War Z might have been a serviceable survival thriller, but director Danny Boyle’s seminal smash hit 28 Days Later had offered viewers an era-defining zombie movie only a decade earlier. Even World War Z’s better extended cut never came near matching the intensity of 28 Days Later or its sequel 28 Weeks Later, and this issue was compounded by their plot similarities.

Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake provided a far scarier, grislier, and bleaker zombie apocalypse in 2004.

Both the 28 Days Later movies and World War Z focused on military responses to zombie outbreaks, but only the former franchise could turn this material into something terrifying. To make matters worse for World War Z, Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake provided a far scarier, grislier, and bleaker zombie apocalypse in 2004. Like World War Z, Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead gave viewers a look at the frenetic outbreak of a zombie apocalypse. However, this earlier zombie horror was immeasurably more effective, much like 28 Days Later.

World War Z Is More Of An Action Movie Than An Horror One

World War Z’s Horror Elements Were Consistently Downplayed

Although David Fincher’s canceled World War Z 2 might have fixed this issue, the biggest problem with the zombie thriller was primarily one of tone. World War Z was more of an action movie than a horror movie, even though its monsters were zombies. Much like Zombieland grafted a sweet rom-com storyline onto the shambling corpse of the zombie horror sub-genre, World War Z added zombies to a jet-setting military thriller. The problem was that this approach made Pitt’s hero too safe.

Viewers couldn’t convince themselves that Pitt’s well-equipped, highly trained former UN advisor was in any real danger throughout World War Z’s story. This would be fine in an ordinary action thriller, where the protagonist’s quick-thinking heroism is the movie’s main appeal. However, World War Z was ostensibly a horror movie. The adaptation fell short since, despite its giant body count, there was never a sense of real danger in its action movie plot. As such, World War Z’s failure to put Brad Pitt’s lead character in danger resulted in a horror movie that was very costly, but hardly scary.