What always bugged me about zombie movies is that no one seems to figure out a way to take advantage of it beyond total anarchy.
I would expect enterprising individuals to see zombies as a potential tool. Like maybe figure out what makes them tick (they never seem to possess intelligent thought) and leverage them for a labour force or army. What are they fuelled by? Can they be taught to perform complex tasks through reward / punishment?
Seems like the next logical distopian step to take, and brings up all sorts of complicated mechanics, economics, and morality questions.
It's not really the point of a zombie movie, or any movie or story containing magical, free-energy beings/things/spells/doodads for that matter. It's just an accidental consequence of the magic/fantasy.
For zombies the point (and the plot) should always revolve around the existential dread of relentless, never-ending hordes of beings who want to eat your brains.
It's like the old story about the very best thing superman could do is simply turn a crank powering the world's energy. All that flying around saving people is actually a massive, inefficient, effectively people-killing, waste of time.
Try writing many series of comics about that though!
I'm really not sure what zombie movies you're referring to, but any zombie movie that goes far enough time-wise after the zombies rise, pretty much always comes to a point where people start using zombies. Movies usually don't because it's hard to fit the long game into 120 minutes, but any series of books or TV show I've come across does exactly that.
I think it's pretty reasonable that early on in a zombie apocalypse, "enterprising individuals" would be just trying to figure out how to stay alive.
Zombies also seem to just keep moving without any energy input. Figure out how to keep them moving where you want them and you have a generator that runs as long as the zombie is solid enough to move it. If you're dealing with Walking Dead rules where everyone turns after death, and it's a renewing resource.
The Alien series, while not being precisely zombies, have as a major subplot the desire to weaponise something that eats humans. And this inevitably turns on those who think they can control the aliens.
the early zombie movies covered this too. It was a major plot point of the research of living with the virus (and training them) via intelligence vs eliminating it via brute strength
I would expect enterprising individuals to see zombies as a potential tool. Like maybe figure out what makes them tick (they never seem to possess intelligent thought) and leverage them for a labour force or army. What are they fuelled by? Can they be taught to perform complex tasks through reward / punishment?
Seems like the next logical distopian step to take, and brings up all sorts of complicated mechanics, economics, and morality questions.