ZOMBIES are a value stock. They are wordless and oozing and brain dead, but they’re an ever-expanding market with no glass ceiling. Zombies are a target-rich environment, literally and figuratively. The more you fill them with bullets, the more interesting they become. Roughly 5.3 million people watched the first episode of “The Walking Dead” on AMC, a stunning 83 percent more than the 2.9 million who watched the Season 4 premiere of “Mad Men.” This means there are at least 2.4 million cable-ready Americans who might prefer watching Christina Hendricks if she were an animated corpse.
Statistically and aesthetically that dissonance seems perverse. But it probably shouldn’t. Mainstream interest in zombies has steadily risen over the past 40 years. Zombies are a commodity that has advanced slowly and without major evolution, much like the staggering creatures George Romero popularized in the 1968 film “Night of the Living Dead.” What makes that measured amplification curious is the inherent limitations of the zombie itself: You can’t add much depth to a creature who can’t talk, doesn’t think and whose only motive is the consumption of flesh. You can’t humanize a zombie, unless you make it less zombie-esque. There are slow zombies, and there are fast zombies— that’s pretty much the spectrum of zombie diversity. It’s not that zombies are changing to fit the world’s condition; it’s that the condition of the world seems more like a zombie offensive. Something about zombies is becoming more intriguing to us. And I think I know what that something is.
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A LOT has happened since the screenwriter Steve Kloves began working on his adaptation of the very first Harry Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” in the late 1990s.
The three central characters — Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) — have grown up on screen, enduring the twin horrors of Voldemort and adolescence before our very eyes. The stories have become progressively darker and more complicated. And Mr. Kloves has immersed himself so deeply in the world of Harry Potter that by the time J. K. Rowling’s seventh and final volume, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” came out in 2007, he said, he knew the characters almost as thoroughly as she did herself.
Adapting the stories for film has been a delicate process all along, as faithfulness to books adored by millions has always had to be balanced with the conventions (and length) of Hollywood blockbusters. (Mr. Kloves is the screenwriter for all but one of the movies, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.”) But “Deathly Hallows” was perhaps the most difficult of all. More than 700 pages long and crammed with quick-moving plot developments leading to an apocalyptic finale, the book ultimately proved too dense to make into a single film. So it has been split into two.
Part 1, to be released on Friday, covers the first half of the novel, a kind of prolonged road trip in which Harry, Ron and Hermione become nomads in hiding, sorting out their feelings for one another while eluding capture and searching for magical objects that must be destroyed before Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) can die. Part 2, which builds to a final battle between good and evil inside the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, ...