WASHINGTON — I LOVE my monsters, sacred or straight up.

I’m not as fond of zombies as I am of vampires. Vampires are urbane shape-shifters, sophisticated, seductive and nattily dressed.

Unlike vampires, their undead brethren, zombies don’t age well. Their muscle tone is shot. The rotting ghouls just groan and lumber about, except for the most highly evolved, who precede a meal with a succinct request: “Brains!”

But this weekend, zombies were kicking off the summer movie season. So naturally, I was at the first showing of “World War Z,” where Brad Pitt fights an army of crepuscular demons to save the world — and without even having Angie’s help.

One minute Pitt’s character, a former United Nations investigator, is making pancakes for his family, and the next, twitching zombies are dropping out of the sky onto his car. After decades of zombies who lurched like Frankenstein’s monster, Hollywood has finally realized the monsters are scarier if they are fast enough to actually catch someone. The ones in “World War Z” dart about like velociraptors, and they love sinking their teeth into humans, as one soldier puts it, “like fat kids love Twix.”