Halloween Countdown
-Monster Mash-
no.4: Tarman - Return of the Living Dead

If monsters are the backbone of horror, then zombies are probably the very spinal cord itself. They're quintessential to the genre. Overused? Sure, but everyone loves a zombie and it's so easy to make use of them. This is why I love the zombies from Return of the Living Dead. They're over-the-top, intense and outright ghoulish and shambling above all of them is the iconic 'Tarman'.

Tarman may very well be my favorite zombie ever, well maybe save for Bub in Day of the Dead, but for purely different reasons. Tarman provides me with everything I want from a zombie while still being wholly unique in how he looks. He lunges right at you and you can't forget him and just like all the other zombies from Return of the Living Dead, the fact that he's intelligent makes him all the more terrifying. Honestly, there's times where I have to wonder how exactly this movie is labeled as a comedy with zombies this intense, but I digress.

As I've said many times over, it's the simple things in life sometimes and zombies to me are pure, simple pleasure. There are what they are and you know what they're gonna do. They're as base a monster as you can get, but everything needs a bottom rung. After all, where would Mario be without Goombas, am I right?