They certainly don’t do horror films like they used to. The Hammer horror series of my youth were stereotypical vehicles with typecasted actors (most notably, Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein, Christopher Lee as Dracula). If you went often enough you could spot the recycled sets and the gore was unintentionally comic. Nowadays, it seems, actors enrich their palettes by playing in sophisticated, frequently witty, horror movies with clever scripts and intentionally comic gore. That just about sums up Zombieland (2009), which for reasons I won’t go into we watched this evening. One of the principal protagonists, Columbus, is played by Jesse Eisenberg, whose next film was The Social Network and the star of the film, though supposedly in a support role, is played by Woody Harrelson. The running gag throughout the film (which has a post-apocalyptic scenario not unlike 28 Days Later and Omega Man) is Columbus’s list of thirty-three rules (‘Beware of bathrooms,’ ‘Check the back seat,’ ‘Don’t be a hero,’ ‘When in doubt, know your way out,’ etc). Great fun. I wish they’d had this degree of sophistication back when I were a lad.