If you want to illustrate the difference between the French and Americans, just compare zombie movies. In They Came Back, the zombies are not rotting, dirty or mindless, hungry monsters. The reaction of the living is a bureaucratic, scientific & therapeutic approach which seeks to reintegrate the risen back into society to resume their former lives. It soon becomes obvious that this movie is not a horror movie, but a meditation on loss and how people use different mechanisms to live in the past & deal with/control death and the unreachable & separate nature of those that we love as they transition into another state of being.