James Gunn Weighs In On Whether Zombies Or Vampires Are More Dangerous

People love pitting bad guys against each other. Who would win in a fight, Jason Voorhees or Freddy Krueger? That question was debated so heavily that an actual movie was made to settle the dispute, although the film, Freddy vs. Jason, didn't actually settle anything so much as it fanned the flames further. But it made $116 million at the box office and generated a number of comic book pseudo-sequels precisely because people get invested in their favorite monsters and debating which ones are the best.

These debate can range from specifics like Freddy vs. Jason to more general debates. People have argued over who would win in a fight between pirates and ninjas for years. And there's another debate that is cropping back up recently due to a conversation involving one of the most popular filmmakers today, director James Gunn. The head-to-head comparison is between two of the most famous types of undead beings in fiction: vampires and zombies. Who would win in that match-up, the mesmerizing, sometimes sparkly blood drinkers or the shambling, rotting, flesh-devouring undead masses?

In addition to the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and the upcoming The Suicide Squad, James Gunn has some serious horror cred. Gunn wrote and directed alien slug movie Slither; he wrote the Zack-Snyder-directed remake of Dawn of the Dead; and he worked with one of the most famous B-movie horror film companies of all time, Troma Entertainment! So when actor-writer-director John Cabrera got into a debate with Gunn — and someone was smart enough to record it on video — over which is more dangerous between vampires and zombies, Gunn was coming at the conversation from a learned place. "Zombies are only scary because there's tons of them," Gunn said in the recently unearthed clip. Then Gunn compared zombies with a real-life creature — tigers. "A tiger could kill a zombie easily," he said, and added that he'd walked a tiger on a leash. When the conversation was shared on Twitter, Gunn insisted it was true. Cabrera, uncowed, pointed out that a tiger would likely not get by unscathed, thus creating a whole new problem: a tiger zombie.

But Gunn wouldn't hear of it. "If I came to the fair today and they told me a zombie was in the park, I'd go about my day kinda keepin' an eye out for a zombie," he said. "If they told me a vampire was here, I'd be like, 'I'm going home.'"  Gunn also tweeted that he doesn't think a zombie would be able to bite hard enough to break through a tiger's skin. Thomas Cunningham, who originally tweeted the video of the debate asked, "Did I just (re) open up a can of zombie tiger vampire worms?" Gunn's answer is simple: "Vampires are still more dangerous than zombies."